ServiceNow from Boehringer Ingelheim: One-stop service, providing first-class service and customer experience

Sebastian Spicker: How has digitization in the Covid-19 era helped you so far?

Andreas Henrich: I never like to work from home. Personal interaction with colleagues is very important. But after working outside the office for more than five months, I have to say that everything is going well.

Spikes: If you look at it from a larger perspective, the pharmaceutical industry is undergoing a very dramatic digital transformation, isn’t it?

Henrich: For decades, there have been standardized processes in the field of human pharmaceuticals. We have developed the medicine and provided it to general practitioners, hospitals and wholesalers through our sales staff. The attending physician then decides which drugs to prescribe.

In recent years, digitization has made drug-related services more important. Instead, patients receive information about diseases and treatments. The topic of prevention is becoming more and more important to us. In terms of animal health, the situation is slightly different. We have been here to keep close contact with the end customer.

Spikes: Let us briefly discuss the topic of market penetration. So far, you have mainly targeted professional audiences. Compared with the final consumer market, this is not only very different in terms of the number of users. User behavior and knowledge levels are also significantly different.

Henrich: Our main target groups are doctors, hospitals and wholesalers. These groups are usually under the direct supervision of field service personnel. The biggest change is that we will increasingly respond to end customers through digital services. We are talking about a completely different order of magnitude.

Spikes: When Boehringer Ingelheim (Boehringer Ingelheim) is facing the end customer, you will suddenly compete with all other app providers, which showcase their services in the usual app store with flexible, up-to-date designs and are generally very friendly.

Henrich: For us it means: We must provide an intuitive platform on which patients can find their own way. The user guide must correspond to what you will also find in other applications that you use in your daily life. ServiceNow enables us to have a unified and powerful interface. We met this requirement by creating a one-stop shop in this way.

Spikes: The mechanism behind such a one-stop service is equally useful for external and internal customers. What I mean is not to find your own products, but to consider the many internal actions and necessities that appear in daily work.

Henrich: If we only consider internal customers when making investment decisions, there is little reason to change the existing system. We provide more than 2,000 products in various service areas, achieving a high degree of automation. But this solution is not scalable. With our new internal self-service portal, we have been able to connect more support organizations. The new portal is also easier to use.

Spikes: You may not have thought that you would receive so many inquiries internally to continue to expand the functionality provided by the portal?

Henrich: After the platform was launched internally, it actually received much more inquiries than expected. Many departments also want to put their subject here. It soon became clear that we cannot display all this information in the short term. Here, working with ServiceNow’s Inspire team to develop a roadmap helps to clarify priorities and value management, which is very helpful.

Spikes: This is the goal of our internal consulting department. Your job is to build actual business cases based on the technical possibilities provided by our platform. After all, CIOs cannot postpone questions about the actual added value of platform decisions indefinitely into the future.

Henrich: Obviously, such a decision cannot be rewarded just by replacing the existing system. No, the decision is a bet on the future, and considering that additional features will soon play a decisive role. From the beginning, we discussed the possibility of using this platform to provide new services to end customers. At that time we didn’t even have a corresponding product. Now that we have it, we are glad we can use the platform.

Flashing: Such a decision will always be a marathon, not a sprint.

Henrich: As a professional IT staff, we must pay attention to costs, and we must compare ourselves with others in benchmark tests. With the development of digitalization, there are now other factors that make pure cost analysis more difficult. On the one hand, new business models can be realized through appropriate technologies. On the other hand, the development of digital products is fast. Therefore, it is important for us that we must make conscious decisions to determine the subject of investment, and we must be very flexible in these areas.

Spikes: This is one of the main advantages that ServiceNow brings. Our solution is based on a powerful platform that inherently contains features such as smart chatbots or natural language recognition-all of these features are available in a code-free environment, greatly simplifying the creation of your own applications . In addition, we have provided many ready-made functions with our partners, which customers can use easily.

Henrich: ServiceNow has changed a lot for us. We programmed most of the previous system internally. Today, our out-of-the-box rate has exceeded 80%, and services can be expanded. In addition, with the help of ServiceNow, we have a partner around us, and we can coordinate strategic needs with this partner to influence the further development of the platform.

Spikes: Therefore, I look forward to further cooperation and good new features and solutions.

At the “Working Now” digital conference on October 6, you will also get more exciting insights about the transformation of the pharmaceutical and medical industries. Be there and benefit from best practices and demonstrations from our partners and ServiceNow experts.

Click here to register.