In my last post Unifying IntegriChain’s Services & Support: Data Management, I covered our ongoing efforts for data management as we work to unify – similar to our unified ICyte Market Access Platform – IntegriChain’s customer-critical operations. This post will focus on two other key areas for unifying our operations:

• How IntegriChain is improving Customer Support through smarter handshakes across our organization
• How we’re augmenting the value you get out of working with us

 

Customer Support Through Smarter Handshakes

Back in 2016, when we looked at the landscape of siloed access platforms, data providers, and service providers, we asked our customers what their biggest frustrations were in functions like gross-to-net and government pricing. What we heard back was that the biggest problems were communication and mutual understanding between fragmented teams and vendors. Since then, we’ve built a company that has many of those same functional areas under one roof, not just from an application technology standpoint but also as a managed services organization that acts as an extension of our customers’ operations. Now, we recognize this pain directly. The teams that once couldn’t communicate effectively within our customers’ organizations are now departments at IntegriChain! A top priority is to fully open these channels within IntegriChain, critical to delivering on the value promise of a unified technology and service platform.

Our first step in customer support unification is to create what we’re calling smarter handshakes between our delivery teams. For example, our Channel data team needs to thoroughly understand how the data sets they manage and enrich are used in gross-to-net accrual management. Our Gross-to-Net team needs to be industry-leading in its understanding of the channel data sets and how best to use them in monthly and quarterly financial processes. The same is true with our Contracts & Pricing teams that process trade rebates or commercial rebates, using channel and patient data in the adjudication process. Depending on what happens with the handling of co-pay accumulators in government pricing, similar cross-department dependencies may emerge there as well.

Smarter handshakes are also about improving visibility and communication. We’re challenging the status quo on how teams communicate the status of their data to other teams that depend on that data. Government Pricing and Gross-to-Net are “apex consumers” of data from other sources. The outputs from rebate adjudication, chargeback processing, DSA adjudication, and data aggregation are government pricing and GTN inputs. A non-IntegriChain-customer manufacturer works with at least four different vendors across those areas. Those teams and vendors all attempt to communicate data status, but too often they don’t provide the right status information so that a dependent team knows what work can proceed and what work is truly gated. IntegriChain has the perfect opportunity to master this, with all of our teams under one roof and data in one platform.

Creating smarter handshakes and solving for how our teams communicate to one another about data status are directly related to a third focus in our enhancement of customer support: readiness for a hybrid SaaS and Managed Service future. More and more of our customers are asking for flexible models where they use some of our ICyte Applications in a SaaS model, but rely on our Managed Services teams in an outsourced model for specific parts of their operations. 2021 was a breakthrough year for IntegriChain in the SaaS space, with a number of successful go-lives at increasingly complex organizations. These use cases allow us to learn from supporting our Managed Services internal users and communication between our internal teams and to bring that into how we support SaaS users.

 

Customer Value Realization: Focus on Alignment 

When our customers launch an implementation of IntegriChain’s services, they’re often doing so because their organizations and/or their product portfolios are going through significant changes. Some are launching new product archetypes that require contract strategies and channel designs that are new for the manufacturer’s in-house team. Some are commercializing a drug for the first time, building out a commercialization engine from scratch. Some are spinning off divisions or selling parts of their portfolio. 

Our customers regularly tell us that they selected IntegriChain because they believe we will help them navigate change as a partner and not just a service provider. We’re taking that feedback to heart, and identifying tactical steps we can take to better help our customers manage change and realize (or exceed) the value they’re expecting from ICyte and IntegriChain’s services.

We’re re-examining how we approach program management for our most complex customer relationships. At IntegriChain, our most complex relationships are not always our largest customers, as measured by IntegriChain fees or manufacturer revenue. Our most complex customers fall into two categories: customers who have invested in multiple solutions, from our Contracts and Pricing and Gross-to-Net managed services to our Channel and Patient data aggregation services; and customers with multi-dimensional contracting strategies that have moved their entire contracts and pricing function to IntegriChain’s managed services. In both cases, customers need central points of communication at IntegriChain who can provide timely status updates and speed up triage of incoming customer issues. Over the next two months, we’ll be communicating new tools and staffing options for centralized program management.

We’re also growing our investment in our Customer Success team. This is a new team that we created in 2021 to focus specifically on customer value realization. In their first year, the Customer Success team focused mostly on determining the needs for our unified platform customers, piloting new visibility programs, and gathering feedback about what’s working and what can be improved as they take advantage of one platform for Market Access – all driving our long-term solutions rolling out in 2022. These efforts enable our Customer Success teams to focus on helping our customers as our delivery teams build and execute against clearly defined value creation plans. 

A clear value creation plan should identify the most important use cases that a customer has for our platform and the decisions/actions that customers will take based on our data and operational consulting services. The value creation plan becomes the basis for training plans as well as a touchpoint we refer back to in executive business reviews. Our goal is alignment. Our implementation teams, our production teams, and our counterparts at all levels of our customers’ organizations need to understand how our services are intended to help our customers succeed.

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As I mentioned in part one of this series, over the coming months, our leadership team will be hitting the road to meet with customers of all shapes and sizes. We want to share our vision and our progress for unifying service delivery, but more importantly, we’d like to listen and learn from you: what are the challenges you face today and tomorrow, how can we help you solve those challenges, and how can we better serve you as a customer? 

If you’re interested in talking with us, let your Account Director know.