What is Capsugel’s customer service philosophy?
At Capsugel, we engage each customer initiative with an alliance mindset. The spirit behind this approach is that we view ourselves as seamless extensions of our customers’ project teams. Our goal is to collaborate and communicate with our customers throughout the product development cycle. Our business model is flexible, so that we can completely align our objectives with our customers’ objectives: bringing the best possible product to market as quickly as possible, so that our customers can deliver their treatments to patients. We often say that a customer’s compound becomes our compound as we work to bring it to market – and we mean it.
Fundamentally, our alliance mindset is grounded in the core concepts of trust, transparency and collaboration. Our customers place great trust in us to design, develop and manufacture innovative products that meet their product specifications and project timelines. Similarly, we place a fair amount of trust in our customers to provide us with necessary inputs and decisions. By fostering dialogue based on honesty and openness, we are able to successfully and smoothly overcome any unforeseen obstacles in our work. We also use ongoing reviews and data sharing with customer teams as ways to ensure that projects stay on track. This is the approach we use with each of our customers.
As an example, we are currently working with a customer on a product development clinical program. We determined that the demand forecast for the compound was going to greatly exceed expectations for what the customer could deliver. We met with the customer to determine how to manage through it. Should Capsugel expand its internal capacity to support the customer? Should the customer build a redundancy plan in case extra volume was required? We ultimately settled on a plan that enabled a launch that successfully addressed demand for the first few years of the product.
What does Capsugel bring to customer relationships?
We bring to our customer relationships a solutions-driven approach based on our science and engineering expertise.
As a leading provider of innovative dosage forms and solutions, we are continually expanding our offerings to better meet the challenges our customers face in bringing new compounds to market. We offer a broad portfolio of industry-leading technologies and know-how to address bioavailability, modified and targeted release, and other drug delivery challenges.
With each customer engagement, science and engineering leads the conversation. Given our breadth of technologies, we use custom technology selection methodology to quickly identify the most optimal approach to meeting our customers’ target product profiles and commercial objectives, while minimizing the associated time, resources,API requirements and cost. In doing so, we are “technology agnostic” – meaning that we choose the best solution without preference to pursuing a specific technology or finished dosage form presentation. We can also leverage proprietary technologies in helping customers reformulate their existing products to better meet the needs of specific groups of patients.
Our customers benefit from working with one company throughout the entire product lifecycle – a company that knows and cares about their compound and its benefit to patients. Our flexible manufacturing processes allow us to efficiently support small volume products, such as orphan drugs and pediatric applications. How do you engage customers to drive positive outcomes?
Effective client management serves as the foundation of positive customer relationships. At Capsugel, we assign one project manager to work with each new customer right at the outset. The project manager serves as the customer’s champion from the design stage through to late stage clinical and commercial supply. This ensures a single, central point of contact who has extensive knowledge of the customer and their needs at all times.
At the initial stage, the project manager pulls in a product development team to scope the project in detail to fully understand the customer’s technical and commercial objectives. Once the objectives are determined, he or she refines the product development team to ensure that the individuals selected – including chemists, chemical engineers, material scientists, mathematicians, biologists and others – are best suited to work on the specific deliverable and complement the customer team’s capabilities.
Often, we find that an initial project leads to multiple projects spanning across customer functions and business units. As the relationship grows, we are increasingly brought into overall project pipeline discussions with the customer and function as a trusted extension of their teams. With each meeting and opportunity, the project manager brings together the right individuals to execute and deliver value to our customer partners.
What advice do you have for others building their customer service models?
Highlight the importance of being a great listener. Customers today are selecting partners based on those who can best help them define their problem statements, recognize their specific challenges, and then develop innovative, customized solutions to overcome them. In the end, helping clients advance their compounds and meet their commercial objectives is what defines a true partner.