In a critically important industry, brands must balance innovation and sector expertise to offer an exemplary customer experience (CX).
Life sciences is a sector unlike any other, where brands must not only have a deep understanding of the customer, but also advocate for products and solutions at the cutting edge of health innovation, which can have profound impact on patients’ lives. Consequently, brands must demonstrate a deep sense of responsibility across the whole customer journey.
In the last of five featured sectors in this year’s CX50 list, here we reveal the names of 10 CX professionals who stand out from their peers as leaders in this field. Compiled by Marketing Week in partnership with Cognizant and Adobe, the list celebrates those who are excelling at CX in all its forms across a wide variety of UK industries and the public sector.
As Rohit Alimchandani, Cognizant’s Head of Life Sciences for the UK and Ireland, explains: "CX is a key differentiator in the life sciences industry, where products and services are heavily regulated. To deliver value to customers and stakeholders, life sciences companies need to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) and other emerging technologies to create personalised, seamless and engaging experiences across the entire customer journey. This impressive list of winners displays the seriousness and importance life sciences organisations are applying in the CX space."
To understand the challenges facing the life sciences sector in more detail, below we’ve also interviewed one of the new CX50 members, George Murgatroyd, Vice President of Digital Technologies at healthcare technology company Medtronic.
Hugo | Breda | Managing Director, UK and Ireland | Johnson & Johnson MedTech |
Anthony | Cockburn | Global Digital Consumer Experience Director | Haleon |
Chris | Hudson | Director of Access and Innovation | Roche Diagnostics |
Mark | Leftwich | Managing Director, UK and Ireland | Philips Healthcare |
Conor | McKechnie | VP Marketing and Strategy | Cytiva |
Brad | McLean | Global Head of Acute Care | AstraZeneca |
Petra | Molan | Chief Commercial Officer | Mundipharma |
George | Murgatroyd | General Manager, Digital Technologies Business Unit | Medtronic |
Ghada | Trotabas | Managing Director, Great Britain and Ireland | Siemens Healthineers |
Silvina | Vilas | Global Marketing Director | Sanofi |
Simple yet sophisticated
Medtronic, like many of its competitors, is trying to push the boundaries for people’s treatment experiences across a wide range of health conditions. Specifically, the company helps surgeons and their teams use the latest technology to create the best possible patient outcomes. Despite the complexity of the many illnesses these clinicians treat, the tools themselves must be exquisitely simple to operate.
For Murgatroyd, CX in healthcare begins with product design. Quite simply, if the product itself doesn’t deliver beyond expectations, anything else is pointless.
“Surgeons have high expectations. They’re doing life-changing jobs. Ironically, most of the software and digital tools they have to use have not been designed for them. Ease of use, seamlessness and as near to zero-effort user experience as possible are critical if we’re going to bring technology that surgeons will embrace.”
Of course, while the surgeon is the product’s core user, within healthcare providers there are layers of stakeholders to consider before getting a product in their hands.
“Hospitals buy our technology but the surgeons are ultimately the advocates,” Murgatroyd says. “It can mean getting technology in can take a bit longer because we need to work with the surgeons to build that advocacy. But it’s far more likely to succeed than something that’s forced upon frontline workers that doesn’t have their support.”
Balancing automation and privacy
Ease of use aside, surgeons and nurses are not born with an innate knowledge of how to use new technologies and need guidance on how to get the best from products. “The customer success team takes the technology to the end users and train them — usually in a few hours — to make sure it’s understood,” Murgatroyd says.
He adds that Medtronic has an advisory board of around 15 surgeons who are involved in the design process. “We need that voice of the user, supporting our product roadmap, looking at features and opportunities.” The technology can’t afford to stand still so this is an ongoing process with continuous upgrades and releases “every couple of weeks”, he notes.
“It’s one of the areas where we put in a lot of work — communication, letting customers and surgeons know about the features that are available. It’s an iterative, living system.”
Furthermore, data and AI are clearly hot-button issues today — especially when it comes to sensitive areas such as health. So, as part of product design, Murgatroyd says health tech brands must tread a fine line between delivering great user experiences with advanced technology and making sure privacy protections are iron-clad.
“Our software allows surgeons to review their case footage, sometimes within seconds. It has AI running in real time to redact or pixelate sensitive images from that footage,” he explains. “Automation and protection of information are at the heart of the product and that helps. If you develop products that make surgeons’ lives easier, make patient information safer and devoid of risk, hospitals tend to like that. The burden is on us to build products that meet their criteria.”
Experience and inspiration
Similarly, a high degree of medical expertise is needed at every stage of the customer journey. So, naturally for any brand in the health sector, the wider organisation must be populated with very experienced personnel. However, there is also significant value in knowledge brought in from other fields.
“We have teams from backgrounds that understand the domain — medics and scrub nurses, for example. But we have team members from consumer backgrounds too. Our head of user experience is from a gaming background and used to work for Sony. Merging together consumer-grade and medical-grade expertise is critical. One plus one equals three,” Murgatroyd says.
Employee experience is just as important as CX — indeed, the two go hand in hand. And even if ‘brand purpose’ is too often a woolly phrase, for Murgatroyd, purpose in the life sciences sector is a “profound” factor in making people feel inspired by their work. Customers can only benefit as a result.
“We’re very lucky here in London, and globally, to have a team of super-diverse talent. One of our team members got a BAFTA for doing CGI on movies,” he says. “But they now get to work on supporting surgeons and patient care. We hear from surgeons, R&D engineers and the end customer about the impact our products are having and that’s really meaningful. Surgeons do one of the most life-changing jobs in the world.”
Methodology
The Marketing Week CX50, in partnership with Cognizant and Adobe, is the pre-eminent annual list of the UK’s top 50 CX professionals, now in its sixth year. For 2024, we have taken a new sector-driven approach to compiling the CX50 list, in an effort to better represent the diverse range of customer experiences and priorities present across the economy — particularly increasing its coverage of B2B organisations and the public sector compared to previous years. The CX50 2024 is divided into the following five sectors, each featuring 10 professionals:
- Retail, consumer goods, travel and hospitality
- Financial services
- Public sector
- Manufacturing, logistics, energy and utilities
- Life sciences
Our criteria and methodology for determining the CX50’s members remain the same as in previous years. In order to create a pool of candidates, we combine nominations from Marketing Week and Cognizant’s professional networks with independent measures of brands that perform highly on CX. To select the final list, we then assess individuals’ achievements in the past year and over the course of their careers against the three criteria of impact, innovation and influence.
The CX50 members possess an eclectic set of skills and responsibilities, all crucial in the effort to deliver exceptional customer experience, so while we have not split the CX50 2024 into the five categories we have used previously, these nevertheless remain relevant as descriptions of who the CX50 are and what they embody, namely: organisational leaders, brand guardians, technologists, disruptors/challengers, and growth drivers.
Discover more on CX50 here.
