 | Last year’s voluntary market withdrawal of some of our DAYTRANA patches has helped to highlight opportunities for improvement in our customer care |
Shire Corporate Responsibility highlights 2007 During September 2007 Shire announced a voluntary market withdrawal of a limited quantity of DAYTRANA (methylphenidate transdermal system) patches following feedback from caregivers and patients who had experienced difficulty in removing the release liner. Like any similar experience it taught us a lot about what we do well, and where we can do better. Most of the feedback we received was from caregivers and patients, and most of them appreciated our efforts to minimize the impact of the withdrawal. Wholesaler customers also had other, unrelated concerns about how we handled their inquiries. Nonetheless the message we received was loud and clear: Shire Specialty Pharmaceuticals needed to continue to improve its customer care.
This has prompted a thorough re-think, from the strategic (do we have the right model for such a fast-moving business?), to the practical (how many phone numbers do we use, and do they need to be rationalized?).
The speed of Shire’s growth over the last few years had left us with a cluster of different call centers for different parts of the business. They used different IT systems and different approaches to handling calls, and didn’t fully communicate with each other. We had already re-organized the company into more logical business units and the Shire customer care team was already working with Alliance, an expert in the management of call centers, to consolidate the way feedback and complaints are handled for all Shire’s US Specialty Pharmaceutical products. In July 2007 a new Global Medical Affairs call center was established in Quebec, Canada and both this center and the Alliance center in Pennsylvania are now operating at or above industry standards. More changes and improvements are planned for 2008.
The task now is to look at what our various customer groups need from us, and tailor our services so that we deliver a consistently high quality of customer care. In general we need to be more accountable, and more coordinated, and there’s much we can learn from both the Specialty Pharmaceuticals and Human Genetic Therapies businesses. In April 2008 we initiated a new study to gather feedback from internal and external customers, so that we can reassess the structure and systems we employ, and set some minimum standards across the whole business.
As Tom Anderson, Senior Vice President, Global Business Insights & Commercial Operations, says, “The team has made significant progress since August 2007. Our Specialty Pharma call centers are working more effectively, and they’re communicating better with one another. This work is still ongoing, and will be a key project for 2008, but there’s also a much wider cultural question here. We need to ask ourselves what sort of relationship we want with our customers, and even – in some cases – who exactly our ‘customers’ are. The last year has proved that we’ve more work to do on all these fronts, but change is already underway.”
Dealing with DAYTRANA
DAYTRANA is a treatment for ADHD that delivers the drug through a patch placed on the skin, which we market in the US. Although the feedback from patients and physicians was very positive about their satisfaction with the benefits of DAYTRANA, we began receiving feedback from patients and caregivers who were having difficulty removing the release liner from some DAYTRANA patches. We concluded something had to be done.
We convened a cross-functional team of experts from the supply, quality control, legal and regulatory departments, and together they decided that a proactive voluntary market withdrawal was the course of action we should undertake. Shire senior management agreed, and the team then liaised directly with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to manage the withdrawal in the best way for patients, which included ensuring that there was no interruption to their treatment.
As Matt Pauls, General Manager for DAYTRANA, said, “The feedback we received from patients and physicians was extremely positive. I think they recognized that we listened to their input, and that we did something about it. It was a great example of a company coming together to do the right thing, and do it well. In fact, this undertaking was one of the prouder moments of my professional career. But that’s what it’s like to work at Shire.”
CR Report 2007