July 20, 2026 – 7 min read
by Barb Farley, Vice President Client Services
What is a customer engagement model, and why do pharma companies need one? It is a single framework that aligns everyone who touches a physician’s practice, sales, medical, reimbursement, and patient support, on how to prepare for an interaction, what to do in it, and what to pass along afterward. Without one, each function runs its own plan in its own system, and the physician deals with a company that cannot remember its own conversations. This article covers where that breakdown comes from, what a shared model changes day to day, and the order in which to put one in place.
A rep walks into an office to talk about patient identification. The physician’s current patient has been stuck in reimbursement limbo for weeks, and the physician knows it. The rep does not, because the field reimbursement director managing that case works in a different lane, logs into a different system, and reports up a different chain. The doctor listens for about a minute and thinks: “I don’t even want to have this conversation with you until you fix the systems that sit behind you.”
Sound familiar?
For what it’s worth, nothing in the system failed. The rep followed the call plan, the reimbursement director was working the case, and every function did its job inside its own lane. But the doctor experienced a company where it appears that no one talks to each other.
In our work across pharma commercial organizations, this is what fragmented HCP engagement actually looks like: a series of individually competent touchpoints that never connect. The doctor’s side of this is measurable. Korn Ferry found 73% of physician interactions are unsynchronized across medical and commercial teams (Korn Ferry, 2024), and Bain found roughly 40% of a physician’s willingness to advocate for a drug comes down to their experience with the company itself, separate from the product (Bain, 2022). Both Korn Ferry and Bain point at the same fix: engagement has to run as coordinated teams across sales, medical, access, and patient services (Korn Ferry, 2024; Bain, 2025). The company’s overall experience is now a large share of what the doctor is evaluating, and unfortunately, it is the thing nobody “owns”.
To illustrate this phenomenon, let’s count the typical touch points inside a single practice.
Each role does exactly what it was assigned to do, and each one tracks its own piece of the interaction: the visit, the medical information request, the case. It is a team working with a team, except only one side knows it. So the physician downloads a brochure, sends a question to medical, and takes a rep visit, and the rep walks in knowing about none of it, potentially repeating what the office already has and missing the question that was actually asked. From the doctor’s side of the desk, that is three separate interactions wearing one logo.
Most of our clients on the commercial side believe an engagement model is just for sales, but we believe it belongs to every customer-facing role. The engagement model does three things:
That third piece is where fragmentation gets fixed. After the call sounds like this: “I checked in with Dr. Smith today, and one of her patients is having a reimbursement problem.” The reimbursement director hears about it that day, and the next person who walks into that office arrives already knowing. The account moves from reactive to proactive.
The same customer engagement model reads differently depending on who is working it. Think of it like a diamond: each role sees a different face. Sales plans a call around identifying the next patient. The MSL plans the same framework around knowledge gaps in the science. The reimbursement specialist plans it around how that patient gets covered. Different objectives, different moments in the journey, one language in front of the customer.
A customer engagement model is like a diamond: each role sees a different face… Different objectives, different moments in the journey, one language in front of the customer.
One of our clients rolled an engagement framework out to its sales team ahead of a major launch. When the framework was proposed across every role, the MSLs pushed back: “We’re not sales, so we don’t follow a selling model.” Fair enough. So it went out gradually, role by role, and the roles that adopted it found an orchestration they had not had before, because everyone was representing the company the same way in front of the HCP. The MSLs watched that happen and wanted to be included. That is also why we stopped calling it a sales model. Customer engagement model is a more honest name for what it does.
Technology is starting to close some of these customer engagement gaps in real time. A physician asks a rep an off-label question the rep cannot answer. Instead of promising a callback, the rep opens the digital pad, gets the MSL on screen, and the conversation the doctor needed happens instantaneously. That matters more than you might think: doctors are 12.5 times more likely than reps to name faster response times as the place pharma could actually help them (Bain, 2022). But a tool only closes a gap the engagement model has already defined. We can give a commercial team every tool you could think of, and if no one sets the expectation to use them and checks that they are used well, they become another tool that sits in the toolbox and never gets picked up.
Fixing fragmentation runs the same way as everything else in this work: slower up front, faster after. Put one engagement model in front of every customer-facing role, with each role’s objective defined on its own face of the work. Build the after-call communication into the model, so what one role learns reaches the others before the next visit. Set the expectation, and check for evidence that it is happening. Then add the technology, pointed at gaps the model has already named. Underneath all of it sits the question worth asking before every touchpoint: am I here to achieve what I need to achieve, or am I here to give this customer what they need? Customer engagement is orchestrating the moments that matter with your customers. When the doctor experiences one company instead of three, the orchestration is working.
Barb Farley is Vice President of Client Services at Performance Development Group, where she owns client outcomes across PDG’s pharma portfolio: when a commercial team invests in engagement capability.
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