Feature
The Gist
- Pfizer ties CX to field service excellence. Wayne Simmons highlights how Pfizer connects customer and employee experience through frontline sales rep interactions with healthcare professionals.
- Customer excellence meets commercial strategy. Pfizer restructured its CX efforts under the chief marketing officer, aligning marketing, sales and CX under one unified customer lifecycle approach.
- New metrics, real insights. Pfizer is building bespoke metrics for field rep experience, aiming to improve HCP sentiment and outcomes with real-time, AI-driven insights.
LAS VEGAS — Even in a $63.6 billion, 81,000-employee biopharmaceutical company, customer experience often comes down to a 1-on-1 interaction.
And in Wayne Simmons' world, that 1-on-1 interaction features field service representatives and healthcare professionals (HCPs). That’s where everything matters — and where employee experience meets customer experience in a profound way.
Simmons, CCXP, is global customer excellence lead in the chief marketing office at Pfizer, the New York City-based global biopharmaceutical company distributing medicine and vaccines to healthcare providers across the globe, including a prominent role in the distribution of a COVID-19 vaccine.
Simmons’ focus: ensuring the ultimate experience for those healthcare professionals, which include doctors and nurse practitioners. Pfizer customer experience leaders gain insights here through real-world tales from the very field service representatives who lead those crucial 1-to-1 conversations and experiences.
Table of Contents
- Why Employee Experience Matters for Customer Experience
- Customer Experience Meets Sales and Marketing
- Customer Journey Mapping – Through Employees
- It’s a Data World for CX Professionals
Why Employee Experience Matters for Customer Experience
Customer experience starts from the inside-out: Build a customer experience story and strategy through the lens of those field service representatives in sales having face-to-face interactions with healthcare customers.
“We’re looking at taking the idea of the customer experience driven by employee experience,” Simmons told CMSWire at the Wynn Resort at the Medallia Experience conference this week. “But not looking at it from an HR perspective, but more of their day-to-day job. How are we enabling the field reps to better deliver value to HCPs, measuring their experience and then trying to correlate that to our sentiment for HCPs.”
We know employee experience matters when building out customer experiences. And, no, not because of the old adage of "good EX means good CX."
Practitioners tell us why: Many CX leaders observe a positive correction between employee experience and customer experience, according to the CMSWire State of Digital Customer Experience 2025 report. When employees are engaged through consistently positive touchpoints with their employer in their daily work and there is a healthy organizational culture, this can ripple through to what customers experience, particularly in sectors where there is high-touch with customers, according to CMSWire researchers. Additionally, the composition of the digital workplace and the relative digital employee experience will strongly impact service delivery to customers.
#PfizerProud of a strong year of execution and performance. @Pfizer’s 2024 Annual Review shows how we met or beat our goals for each of our clear strategic priorities, setting the stage for even greater progress this year - including toward our goal of 8 cancer breakthroughs by… pic.twitter.com/tpzxwqt2os
— Albert Bourla (@AlbertBourla) March 13, 2025
Customer Experience Meets Sales and Marketing
For Simmons and Pfizer, a Medallia customer, that begins with the foundation of the actual customer experience organization.
When Simmons arrived at Pfizer two years ago, he served as global customer experience management lead. He was in the “core customer experience space,” or, as he also calls it, Chapter 1: putting in the conventional transactional surveys, working on Net Promoter Score, etc.
However, that role evolved: it made sense to marry those CX functions into the chief marketing officer’s world and rename the function “customer excellence.”
“It’s customer experience for the commercial world,” Simmons said. “How do we enable our marketing functions and our sales rep functions with thousands of sales reps around the world? How do we enable them with customer feedback and customer sentiment and help them help physicians? That's our game now.”
CX, Marketing, Sales Under One Roof: All About Customer Lifecycle
Simmons said it all centers on the customer lifecycle. In his view, that includes acquisition, retention and expansion. Traditionally, marketing and sales focus on acquisition, customer experience handles retention and expansion often falls to other areas. What they’re trying to do is connect all of these phases to create a more unified, end-to-end experience.
“We call it going from the funnel to the flywheel,” Simmons said. “Connecting all those functions so there's no gap between how we engage with customers. There's a consistent brand story, whether it's coming from marketing, sales or support, or post-sale, post-prescribed support. So that's the idea behind it, bringing those things together, because it's one customer going through a journey with us, and want to make sure it's a coherent, cohesive engagement across the board.”
Related Article: An Unlikely Alliance: Verizon's CX-Sales Winning Formula
Customer Journey Mapping – Through Employees
Like most CX professionals, customer journey mapping is on Simmons’ mind. Only Pfizer's CX teams support those journeys through employees — those field service representatives having that direct engagement with those healthcare professionals.
Doctor-and-patient journeys often first comes to mind in healthcare, and, as Simmons said, that’s a “critically important journey where therapies are delivered, medicines are delivered and how care is delivered.”
It’s ultimately the very fabric of what Pfizer supports.
However, Simmons recognized the utmost importance of the preceding journey: the field service representatives with those healthcare professionals. And one way they collect data from the field service representatives is through surveys, making it an organic part of their days.
“So we've been doing journey work in that space, to identify barriers in that relationship,” Simmons said. “How can we facilitate a more impactful exchange of information with HCPs to make them smarter, make them more educated about all the things that are happening. That's what they want from us."
Identifying Friction Points for Employees — to Improve Customer Experience
The results of that field service representative journey work? Pfizer’s identified barriers and restriction points in the HCP-to-field-rep interaction. Particularly, in one of its therapeutic areas, it’s identified ”massive things that need to be addressed, some things we own and some things we don’t,” according to Simmons. And they are now working on a bespoke metric for field reps for their experience.
Tell me how we can improve your interactions in the field. Are we collaborating enough between the different functional areas?
“In pharma, it's never one individual,” Simmons said. “It's access, it's medical, it's commercial. It's many different players trying to service that customer, to get them to make sure that the drug is prescribed and available for patients. … I think there are things that are not in our control that we want to better influence. We're discovering those sorts of things. It's a complex ecosystem. It’s not just us and the doctors. It's really payers. In many cases, governments. … So there's no one size fits all, or one sort of problem."
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That metric for field service representatives is the experience integration for which Simmons is most proud — being able to engineer that bespoke metric for that field rep experience.
“It's not HR,” he said. “It's really about their job, and how we as a company enable them, how we measure that and how we improve that over time. And we believe that that's going to also improve the HCP NPS and sentiment as well.”
Related Article: AI and the Customer Journey: Finally Seeing the Forest and the Trees
It’s a Data World for CX Professionals
Like many CX leaders walking around the desert here this week at Medallia Experience, the biggest challenge is making sense of a lot of customer data. It’s no longer about collecting data — it’s about getting actionable insights from that data.
“It’s about getting to your actionable insights,” said Vince LaVecchia, GX portfolio manager for Chubb Insurance. “It’s getting to that other 90%. So you've got the 10% coming from your surveys, and a lot of that's probably even some of the structured data. Then the other 90% is coming from your unstructured data, which is going to be your text analytics. And then, of that 90% how much of that can I actually use? It's a much bigger pool to work from.”
According to Simmons, the top priority in customer experience today is solving what he calls Job No. 1: making sense of the vast amount of data companies have. And artificial intelligence is going to be a game-changer here.
He noted that while platforms like Medallia have helped organizations listen to customers more effectively, the next step is scaling that customer and employee data and turning it into meaningful, actionable insights.
“We have data pouring in, and I think it's getting the data coming through the channels, and it's combining it with the other data sources," Simmons said. “... It’s all in the data lake, but how do we make sense of it? I want to be able to use natural language to interrogate and say, 'OK, tell me the docs that need x in what market.' And I want to be able to have natural language to be doing that, rather than exporting it out into a spreadsheet and try to figure it out. That’s a real leap in value. Omnichannel is not a buzzword, and AI is not a buzzword for us. We need it to make sense of what’s going on.”
