Rick Denton (00:19)
Hey there, CX Passport listeners. Today we get to meet Sylvie Haldipour. Sylvie's path into customer experience started in advertising, where she learned how to connect that brand promise that we talk about a lot with real human need. From there, she grew fascinated with data, not just collecting it, but figuring out what really matters in the data. That curiosity pulled her towards customer experience and eventually into pharma with companies like GSK and Merck.

Along the way, she's taken the challenge of looking at patients, providers, and payers all as customers, each with their own journeys.

You know, pharma isn't always the first place people think about when it comes to customer experience. Yet Sylvie has been right in the middle of showing what's possible when you bring CX thinking into healthcare. Sylvie, welcome to CX Passport.

Silvi Haldipur (01:12)
Thank you, Rick. It's great to be here.

Rick Denton (01:14)
it's going to be a treat today. I mean that this is an industry that I, I, we may have dabbled in once or twice out of 200 episodes. And that's because we just don't really think about it. It's not a gut feel that you think pharma and customer experience. How did this happen for you? What pulled you into that world? And then why is CX so important in healthcare?

Silvi Haldipur (01:37)
So I'm going to begin with a little bit of ⁓ a moment that kind of really catapulted me into pharma ⁓ or CX into pharma. ⁓ So I was four months pregnant and my mother was living with me and she got the flu and one morning I found her unconscious in her bedroom. Yes.

We rushed her to the hospital and the doctors actually delivered the devastating news that my mother had caught sepsis. So she fought for her life for like an entire year before she actually passed.

So we spent a year at the hospital. And what we really started to learn quickly was that key information would always fall through the cracks. The right hand never talked to the left hand. And without that connectivity, essentially what would happen is things would just not work well for my mom. And we would see things get worse. And then you could take

take everything she was experiencing in the hospital and you add all the paperwork, the insurance, and you start realizing that it's really difficult. ⁓ know, even we, I think once we had a patient navigator meet with us, but it was only once. Yeah. And so we were drowning, like as a family from the emotional toll of it all.

Rick Denton (03:00)
Mm-hmm.

After all that time? Good gravy.

Yeah.

Silvi Haldipur (03:17)
but also from the complexity of everything that was taking place, especially from, my father was born and raised in India. Obviously he became a citizen here, but for him, this was all new. And it was hard for him to really understand the healthcare system here. ⁓ And so you take all of that and it started to make me realize that,

I started my career, as you mentioned, in pharmaceutical advertising and I'm watching healthcare unfold with a family member. And I'm realizing, wait, I have an opportunity here. If I think about it, we don't need another ad. We don't need emails, we don't need banners. In that moment, what we needed was support.

Rick Denton (04:04)
Ha ha.

Silvi Haldipur (04:11)
We needed help. And as I watched the physicians, the physicians are well-intended, but each one is specialized and they're just doing what they're asked to do and deliver, but they're not even connected. So they need support. So I started to think about it and I said, if I was to continue my career in pharma, what can I actually do that's going to be truly meaningful? And that's what led me to customer experience. That's when I realized I am an opportunity.

Rick Denton (04:21)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (04:41)
You know, it's not the entire health system. It's one side which brings life saving medication to individuals. But I have an opportunity to try to make things that are very complex simple.

Rick Denton (04:48)
Right.

The fact that you experienced that and we even kind of galast, you were four months pregnant when this was discovered. So you're not only dealing with your own pregnancy, you're dealing with your mom's health and all of the complexity that goes into the healthcare system in the U S and it's, it's a, well, nevermind. I don't make this an explicit show. So it's a, it's a mess. And to be able to pivot that into this world. And I like how you, you commented on, you talked about there was the physicians.

Silvi Haldipur (05:14)
Hahaha

Rick Denton (05:24)
they wished they had better clarity. The patients wish they had better clarity. And then beyond the physicians, the staff, the operations, all of that woven together. It feels like as you've moved into customer experience and you said you're focused on the pharma side, but that pharma element hits a lot of those pieces. How are you, I guess, developing this unique understanding of an experience, what a patient needs, what a provider needs.

And then the payers themselves, the insurance companies, right? They have unique experiences, but these are woven together. How are you staying unique and woven together as you think of experience for those three?

Silvi Haldipur (06:05)
So ⁓ it all comes down to really digging in and understanding the data. So what I've done was, ⁓ and in every engagement at GSK to Merck, has been to really dig in and understand what, as an organization, what kind of data do we have? And then what kind of data do we still need? And so what we've been doing is,

Rick Denton (06:12)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (06:33)
realizing a lot of the data that we have happens to be, you know, engagement data or, um, you know, clinical data, but it doesn't really get into the day in the life of a patient or the day in the life of a provider or the day in the life of a payer. I mean, the story that I just shared with you, for someone to really understand the day to day of what we went through as a family.

Rick Denton (06:58)
Mm-hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (07:00)
to watch day to day what a physician or a nurse was going through, to see the insurance process firsthand, to start learning about what it's like for the individuals processing that insurance firsthand. Then you start to uncover a depth that really illuminates where the friction lies.

Rick Denton (07:05)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (07:27)
and what is possible to kind of improve the experience for all of those key stakeholders that I just mentioned.

Rick Denton (08:11)
You have touched on something that a lot of folks talk about in the customer experience world and other worlds that there's no way to really understand what your customer's experiencing unless you go out there and kind of live it with them. And in some cases, like a product or hospitality experience or travel, the person can actually choose to go buy that airline ticket or stay in that hotel room. This is different though. You came in with a really unique

and emotionally impactful experience that you're describing. And everybody has had interactions with healthcare, but maybe not to that degree. How are you helping the world in which you work, whichever company you are at at the time, appreciate what you experienced as the patient, what you saw in the providers, what you saw in the payers when they may not have that. They can't elect and many would not choose to elect to have that experience.

How can you bring that to them so that they feel that customer experience?

Silvi Haldipur (09:09)
And in healthcare also, it's very regulated. we're very, you know, we're not allowed to do a lot of things that CPG organizations can do or others, you know, in electronics or hotels. ⁓ But we've found ways to try to immerse ourselves to really understand their world. So first off, I will say hats off to a lot of the pharmaceutical ⁓ team members that I've worked with. You know, they...

dive into a therapeutic area and they've really learned the craft. They spend time with physicians in ad boards or ad meetings and understanding what is happening from a science perspective, but also just to understand physicians generally in terms of what's happening in the overall landscape. What we've done is, what we would do is we found a way to do deep ethnography

Rick Denton (09:49)
Mm-hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (10:08)
through partners and be able to have our partners be able to kind of go and live the experiences and dive and use techniques that is true to customer experience, design thinking to help us like really figure out the emotional whys behind things. So we would use ethnography. We would do field visits, right? We would travel along with a sales rep.

We even had sometimes patients, all, if we were able to clear it, participate with us in co-creations and or work sessions so that they can kind of help us understand things better. ⁓ Or even nurse practitioners, we would have them kind of sit with us in sessions and we would just ask questions or show them what we're planning to do. So.

Rick Denton (10:46)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (11:04)
We found ways to kind of get through it. Now, sometimes it's difficult to really understand what's happening, but we try to get as deep as possible. And then once you get into delivering it in market, whatever it might be that you're trying to do, you start to learn quickly and you start optimizing based on what you're learning.

Rick Denton (11:10)
Bye.

Hmm.

Wow. Okay. That I get that. And you're right. How can someone truly transmit it without having experienced, but what you're describing is, is a way to get it as close as possible. I want to move now into pharma specifically, because when you and I were talking earlier, you, I don't know why this was such an epiphany, but you're right. I always thought of the patient's experience. I've got my prescription. I've got it. And then that's the end of the journey. The reality though,

You pointed out that's almost the beginning of the journey. How did you get the company that you're working at to focus on that part of the journey? And then what kind of changes did you make as a result of that focus?

Silvi Haldipur (12:05)
one of the things that most of the pharmaceutical organizations have, as I talk about things that happen post a physician writing a script, is they often move towards wraparound.

And these, you know, they would call them wrap around programs, which would be services and support that would, they would add to specific programs like patient support programs or, ⁓ what I helped them realize was, it took time to kind of show them the actual frictions that occur within the current systems that we work in. So,

A physician writes a script, the patient has to get something called a prior authorization. Let me show you how complicated that process is and where we play a role and where we have to influence to make that process simpler. and ⁓ oftentimes it's really hard, especially when it isn't your current task to do that level of work.

Rick Denton (12:59)
Hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (13:14)
Like if you're tasked as a marketer just to create the ad, you're like, well, why am going to get involved in that? And so that's when we started to really drive and deliver ⁓ customer experience impact metrics. And we would show them, if you were to solve these particular issues, this is the impact it's going to have on your business. But more importantly, if our mission is to truly

Rick Denton (13:29)
Okay.

Silvi Haldipur (13:40)
improve and save patients' lives, this is going to actually help improve and save their lives because we're going to do things such as make the process a bit simpler. They're going to get on the medication. They're going to hopefully stay compliant as the doctor had written the script, and they're going to stay adherent, stay on it for longer. And if we did a really, really good job on the customer experience by setting those expectations early before they...

Rick Denton (13:42)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (14:08)
actually get the script filled, then we're going to see those positive outcomes where patients actually achieve the health outcomes that they were trying for. then it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy. The physician's going to be like, this product is great. My patients are succeeding. What else do you have? ⁓

Rick Denton (14:33)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Silvi Haldipur (14:38)
It's interesting because I think also pharma has a rap of not being trusted, right? Or it's all about financial incentive, but when you think about it, if you're doing what's right for the patient by making things simpler, by helping and supporting the provider and then helping them follow the provider's guidance.

Rick Denton (14:44)
Certainly. Yeah.

Silvi Haldipur (15:08)
and then they succeed, then you're doing right by the patient and for society overall.

Rick Denton (15:19)
Yeah. The, the, when we talk about customer experience metrics, right? You know, in the financial services industry or hospitality, as we talked about, the answer is a lot different than when it comes to, like you said, not just improving lives, but saving lives. Like there's an actual real life changing aspect to what you're describing.

And we may not think of it in the customer experience terms. Typically you've pointed that out though, that if they have a good experience, they're more likely to follow the protocol and be able to actually get the results that you're describing. I think you, we talked about that in the introduction, right? That a lot of your experience and a lot of it probably came out of the advertising world brand promise. We talk about that all the time and customer experience in general. How does that show up in pharma, especially with over the counter products?

Silvi Haldipur (16:10)
⁓ so I had the good fortune of working at GSK for their consumer package goods organization. And, you know, when I started to dive into data and really unearth why people behave the way that they currently behave and what do people actually need, it actually drove to a different types of programs and

Rick Denton (16:15)
Okay.

Silvi Haldipur (16:37)
messaging that we, we would use to kind of connect emotionally with, ⁓ with customers. And I remember very vividly, ⁓ this phenomenal marketing leader came into the room and saw like the work we were doing across the, the consumer packaged goods arena and say, why does this feel right?

Rick Denton (16:43)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (17:02)
why am I finding this better than like the brand campaign work that we're doing right now? And so we sat down, we talked about it, we're like, well, let's really talk about it. So like, if you take allergy as an example, why, you know, is it that they want another Clareden commercial with, you know, poppy fields and people running through fields? I mean, that's tough.

Rick Denton (17:26)
I can answer that question. Yeah.

Silvi Haldipur (17:28)
That's talking about us, right? And what we can do, but what do

Rick Denton (17:30)
Yeah.

Silvi Haldipur (17:32)
they really need? people in the allergy space are fed up. ⁓ They're resigned that this is the best that things can be. And it led to this, you know, phrase, be greater than your allergies. And it helped us create a social media campaign to be greater than your allergies.

And so you can consider that integrated marketing in many, ways. But it was more than that because what we did was we connected everything from the brand campaign to the packaging, to entire retail experience, to the social media campaigns. And then we actually looked at where can we reduce friction, right?

Where can we make things simpler so that if we're delivering this promise of be greater than your allergies and their camp, the brand campaign was six is greater than one. So you can see the connection. Six is greater than one. So we want you to be, that's the product, but we want you to be greater than your allergies. And then we looked at how do we help individuals be greater than their allergies end to end and talk about how do we remove the friction so that individuals can.

Rick Denton (18:29)
Mm-hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (18:48)
live an allergy free

Rick Denton (18:57)
Sylvie, I'm glad that your example involved allergies because right now, maybe even in my voice, I'm doing everything I can to stifle sneezes and tingly noses because I'm right in the thick of that. So I understand that desire to be greater than my allergies. you know, a time that I often get hit with allergies and a lot of folks do because it's different areas is travel and travel has its ups, it's downs, it's, it's challenges.

One of the nice things is when you get to stop down in the first class lounge, which is what we're going to do now, we're going to stop down in the first class lounge here. Have a little fun. What is a dream travel location from your past?

Silvi Haldipur (19:31)
I would say Greece.

Rick Denton (19:33)
yeah, okay.

Silvi Haldipur (19:35)
And I think it really ruined other destinations for me because there was not another magical experience than, you know, the cultural experience of Athens ⁓ to like the liveliness of Mykonos to like the serene nature of Santorini. I would say hands down. ⁓ The smell, the food, everything was great there.

Rick Denton (19:41)
Love it.

Mm-hmm.

Ooh, that's awesome.

Well, long time listeners know

we're going to be talking about food here in a second. I also haven't heard Santorini and tranquility and calmness hand in hand, so I'm glad you got that experience. I have not yet been to Greece. My wife and I look forward to getting there next year. It's kind of on horizon. We'll see. What about you? What is a dream travel location you've not been to yet?

Silvi Haldipur (20:05)
Hahaha.

On my bucket list is Morocco right now.

Rick Denton (20:24)
Ooh, yeah, okay. Is it in the near term?

Silvi Haldipur (20:26)
Yeah.

No, I have young kids and we're like, they might get bored of walking through the markets and the riyadhs and they might not appreciate it as much, in the horizon for sure.

Rick Denton (20:32)
Okay.

new.

⁓ don't worry about it, leave him behind. But we'll figure that part out. I mentioned food. What is a favorite thing of yours to eat?

Silvi Haldipur (20:47)
Hahaha

⁓ It's something called lamb biryani. So good. If you haven't had it, you should definitely find an Indian restaurant that makes it. But it is like really fluffy ⁓ basmati rice that is flavored and seasoned with ⁓ rich lamb curry that isn't curry. It's like kind of baked into the rice dish. Yeah, it's delicious.

Rick Denton (20:55)
Okay, tell me a little more.

Ooh, you're making me hungry. ⁓ It's only 10 o'clock here. I shouldn't be hungry, but I am. And I thankfully live in a part of North Texas, Frisco, that is a strong Indian community. So I may be heading out to lunch to get that What about the other way? What is something you were forced to eat growing up and you hated as a kid?

Silvi Haldipur (21:23)
HAHAHAHA

So something I absolutely detest. So my family grew up on the south of India. So a staple to their diet is something called ⁓ kappa and mean curry, which is a fish curry. ⁓ One thing that shouldn't be placed in curry is fish. It's disgusting. At least, and I shouldn't say that because I think like,

Rick Denton (21:50)
Okay.

this is awesome. I know I look.

Silvi Haldipur (22:07)
My family is going to be so sad that I said that,

Rick Denton (22:11)
Well,

there's a reason why I love all the learning that we do on CX Passport. I gotta tell you, I think that may be my favorite question and I ask it of every guest. I love the reactions. I love seeing the visceral sort of emotion. ⁓ I have this memory of what it was and I did not enjoy it. Sadly, it is time for us to leave the First Class Lounge. What is one travel item not including your phone and not including your passport that you will not leave home with?

Silvi Haldipur (22:35)
I think I've learned this the hard way. In one of my career, like my jobs, I had to travel a lot and it is international travel chargers. Without them, you're like lost. You can't do much.

Rick Denton (22:58)
Sylvie, you are a hundred percent correct. And it's important to pay attention to those voltages because I used to have my converter and then I got power strips and I thought that power strip could handle the non-U.S. voltages. And I was wrong as we nearly burned down a hotel in Germany. Thankfully everything was okay, but it was a touch and go there for a moment. You had mentioned your involvement with data.

And data are just numbers on a page. Who cares? That's not the same as a-ha moments. How are you going from those raw numbers to something that actually changes patient or provider experience?

Silvi Haldipur (23:40)
I think that there is data literacy gaps and what is data versus what is an insight. And so I had the good fortune to work with some phenomenal strategists over the years. And I remember this strategist kind of guiding me and saying, well, Sylvie, data is...

Rick Denton (23:56)
Mm-hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (24:02)
a point in time, it'll tell you this happened. But an insight is when you dig deeper and you ask the questions, why? So he would use this example of a pit bull. A pit bull is a ferocious dog.

Rick Denton (24:05)
Right?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Silvi Haldipur (24:17)
And when you dig in, well, why is the pit bull ferocious? Well, because ⁓ it is trying to protect its owner. Well, why is it trying to protect its owner? Because it's afraid that someone's going to hurt the owner and therefore there's no one to take care of it. Well, why is it like trying to protect its owner so that they can protect the pit bull itself?

Rick Denton (24:36)
Mm-hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (24:44)
And you would dig down and you realize at the root, at the end, the pit bull is just fear, fearful. It's not that they're ferocious and they're aggressive dogs. They are just actually at the core scared.

Rick Denton (24:51)
Hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (25:02)
And so when you start to understand that's the aha, you're starting to realize you want to actually cater and try to solve the fear that the pit bull is having or help the owners help assuage the fear. And then you can kind of shift behavior.

Rick Denton (25:13)
Mm-hmm.

You've given me a little bit of an aha moment there. I did not expect pit bulls to be involved in a discussion around data and pharma and customer experience. And yet that makes so much sense because I have an innate opinion, right? I probably am relying on data to forge my opinions about that breed. And as you explained that, and we can certainly separate the pit bull debate from the insight that you're sharing. And that is,

Hey, going deeper will really get you out of that data point mentality. really like that. CX, let's talk about that. It's newer in pharma than other industries. So since you've been sort of shaping the way it needs to go, what needs to happen now for really to take root and make a lasting impact?

Silvi Haldipur (26:06)
I think when you take a look at what's happening ⁓ in the US, there's a tremendous amount of policy changes and things that are taking place. So for example, promotional advertising isn't going to be the same anymore. ⁓ You see Medicare and Medicaid and the policy is changing around there. And so I think more and more pharmaceutical industry is going to have to look and say, well, how do they connect with

Rick Denton (26:13)
Mm-hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (26:34)
patients and providers and their payers and their customers better. So I think there's a huge shift coming in which customer experience is going to be much more important in the healthcare sphere, especially for pharma. For the shift to really take place, I think it's going to require more pharma companies to lean into hiring customer experience officers. The reason I say this is because

Rick Denton (26:58)
Hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (27:02)
The industry itself, pharma, has worked brilliantly, but in multiple silos, multiple divisions, multiple departments. Us as patients or providers even, they don't know that there's like hundreds of people doing different tasks and that they're not actually integrated in any way, shape, form. But for CX to really take hold, it's gonna require somebody at the C-suite level

who can drive and call the shots to drive that integrated end-to-end experience and help shift from the ways that the organization currently has focused their energy around to a new way of focusing their energy to drive the best experiences for customers. I've started to see and I'm excited to see a number of CXOs come into fruition. So Eli Lilly.

Rick Denton (27:34)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Silvi Haldipur (27:54)
just has, I think, two CXOs, one in the US and one in Europe. ⁓ I just saw Novartis hired a CXO.

Rick Denton (28:03)
OK.

Silvi Haldipur (28:04)
So I think there's a lot of learning still, but definitely we need that CXO to kind of help us get there.

Rick Denton (28:12)
Mm-hmm.

When you're describing that, it makes a lot of sense. a lot of that, you know, with leadership, then changes are taking place. I want to close out by going, if you'll allow us to go back to the story that you told at the beginning, you've now had several years of understanding and growing in the pharma and exposure to the healthcare space.

Silvi Haldipur (28:13)
.

Rick Denton (28:35)
If you could change anything about your experience as you went through the healthcare process, not just what would you change, but how would you change it so that your experience then would be a better one than what you experienced?

Silvi Haldipur (28:54)
I, number one, if more of the physicians are much more connected with one another. I think that if there was hands down one thing that I wish back then, the right hand knew what the left hand was doing and they understood my mother's care more than just studying whatever the past physician wrote on a clipboard. So more coordinated.

Rick Denton (29:01)
Hmm.

Silvi Haldipur (29:24)
conversations and discussions on the path forward and what they need to do, what's best. And then ⁓ I would say.

greater transparency with regards to what's taking place and for the whole family to.

be in the loop and understand every step of the way.

Rick Denton (29:54)
Well, I hope that the efforts that you are providing inside of the pharma space and the efforts that you're describing in many other areas as well, we'll start to bring some of that because as you described transparency and coordination of care, those are great headlines, right? But when you, Sylvie and your family are feeling it, you're not thinking about a headline, you're thinking about your mom and her care. And so I know that that experience hopefully shapes what others are hearing now and will say, all right, we're going to do this.

better going forward. Sylvie, I've appreciated how you started this episode with such raw authenticity and sharing a challenging story from your experience. I appreciate the wisdom that you gave when it came to understanding how customer experience is being applied in pharma and healthcare in general. If folks wanted to get to know a little bit more about you and your approach to customer experience, where should they turn to learn more?

Silvi Haldipur (30:46)
say for them just reach out to me on LinkedIn. It is one of the things I think more and more I want more individuals in the pharma space and the healthcare space to lead. And so if I can share anything to make this happen, know, patients are gonna win. And that's gonna mean everything to me.

Rick Denton (30:49)
All right. I will.

Let's.

That's it. We are ending the episode there, Sylvie, because that's exactly what I think a lot of us want, both as we see others in our life that are specialists that are patients and when we're also patients ourselves. Sylvie, thank you for being on CX Passport.

Silvi Haldipur (31:25)
Thank you for having me.