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Astellas Pharma Inc., offers innovative pharmaceuticals throughout the world. Its Medical Information Center in Japan handles over 90,000 domestic contacts annually and builds trust between patients and medical professionals.

“As regulations regarding the provision of medical information become stricter in Japan, it is very important to provide accurate information to patients and healthcare professionals who use our products, as well as to listen to the voice of customers for giving feedback internally,” said Naoko Sato, Vice President, Medical Communications at Astellas Pharma Inc.

Sustaining these high service levels meant replacing an on-premises PBX system with a more reliable and easier-to-scale cloud model that offers advanced omnichannel customer experience capabilities. Other priorities were to support future email and chat, along with speech recognition and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys.

A smooth transition to cloud

After evaluating several contact center solutions, Medical Information Center chose the Genesys Cloud™ platform. Among the deciding factors were fault tolerance as a system based on Amazon Web Services (AWS), integration with CRM tools and an ability to easily meet future demands of the organisation.

“From a system perspective, the first priority was to be cloud-based,” said Hideaki Taniguchi, Associate Manager, R&D Partner Group, Information Systems at Astellas Pharma Inc. “That’s because it’s important to enable business continuity planning and remote agents, and to extend these capabilities in the future.”

With the Genesys Cloud platform, Medical Information Centre designed call flows that matched incoming inquiries to employee skill sets and authority levels. Secondly, the employees could leverage better-quality data to optimise resource planning and schedule staff training periods.

Flexible, digital workstyles

“Genesys Cloud has allowed us to empower more people to work from home,” added Eri Hirayama, Medical Information Centre 1, Medical Communications at Astellas Pharma Inc. “They simply use their PCs to access Genesys Cloud and our CRM system. So, if healthcare professionals make an inquiry in front of a patient, we’re able to connect them immediately to the right specialist with all the correct information about that specific medicine.”

The benefits of remote working extend further. When a severe typhoon hit the Tokyo metropolitan area in September 2019, it paralysed the public transport system and caused widespread destruction. Despite this, Medical Information Centre was able to operate without issues. Giving employees the ability to work from home has secured their safety and achieved work efficiency at the same time — without compromising customer service.

Medical Information Centre will continue to enhance the access to information for patients and healthcare professionals by developing digitalisation initiatives like omnichannel and artificial intelligence. It also plans to take advantage of the expandability of Genesys Cloud to promote the proper use of its pharmaceutical products.

This article was reprinted from the summary of a case study interviewed by Genesys Japan in October 2019.