IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

10.9. Product evaluation – buy or build decision

The company found itself from a strategic and systems perspective clearly ahead of its time – the very concept of 'customer service' for physicians (and pharmacists) in the pharmaceutical industry was a novelty in the late-90s, so it was no surprise that there were no packages on the market.

There were of course customer-service packages with call-centre software, but the processes around which these packages were based did not fit well with the required pharmaceutical processes, for the following reasons:

• A customer service package usually requires upfront customer identification as a prerequisite for continuing the call. When a physician calls up however, she'll usually just mumble her name in passing and then launch straight into her question. Now if you really want to work up a physician's ire – or get her to hang up and prescribe a competitor product – start by asking her for personal details which have nothing to do with her problem, usually a patient sitting in front of her. It's like when you call up a cab company and say 'Hi, I'm currently at location X, and would like a cab to go location Y', and they almost cut you off by saying 'I first need your name', as if they can't ask you that afterwards.

• Once on the line, a physician can ask more than one question, each of which needs to be uniquely identified and tracked for reporting purposes. Just about all customer service packages at that time were based on enquiries or tickets ...