[ABOUT] A Founder's Story: An Outsider’s Perspective, Earned from the Inside

[PRACTICE NOTE]  An Outsider’s Perspective, Earned from the Inside

REFERENCE: “The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life”

When Competence Is No Longer Enough

There is a moment in most careers when competence becomes comfortable. When the work is still good but the friction that made it meaningful has been replaced by fluency. I had reached that moment.

I had built a career that moved deliberately across industries, retail, hospitality, financial services, entertainment, technology. The Ritz-Carlton taught me that culture is not a value statement. It is an operating system. Army Intelligence taught me that clarity under pressure is a discipline that can be designed. Building an Inc. 500 company taught me that the distance between a commercial idea and a commercial result is almost always an experience problem in disguise.

By the time I had accumulated all of that, I was good at what I did. Genuinely good. And that was precisely the problem. Competence without challenge is a comfortable place to stop growing. I was not ready to stop.

The Redirection

The redirection came from a series of conversations with people I trusted who kept arriving at the same conclusion independently. If you want to find the place where customer experience is most consequential, most structurally complex, and most genuinely unsolved, go to pharma and life sciences. They said it with reverence, the way you describe a problem that deserves more serious attention than it has received. They called it the last frontier of customer experience. I have repeated that phrase in virtually every significant conversation I have had in this industry since, because it remains the most accurate description I have encountered. A place where the stakes were as high as stakes get and where the model for how experience should work at commercial scale had never been fully resolved.

I stepped into the industry not to disrupt from a distance, but to learn from the inside. To bring an outsider's lens while deeply respecting the expertise, commitment, and scientific rigor of the people already there. That combination became essential. Novel ideas only become viable when they are co-created with those who understand the terrain.

I heard that and felt something I had not felt in years. I wanted in.

What Pharma Gave Me

Pharma gave me a gift. Not an easy welcome. The industry is demanding, regulated, and complex in ways that take years to genuinely appreciate. The gift was something else. Pharma gave me back my creative energy and the specific kind of passion that only genuinely unsolved problems at scale can generate.

Inside Bayer and Pfizer, I experienced a creative renaissance. I was designing things that had never been designed in those organizations before. Enterprise-wide customer experience strategies that translated brand intent into consistent field delivery. Omnichannel listening systems that treated HCP sentiment as a leading indicator of commercial performance rather than a post-campaign metric. Journey-based thinking and tools applied to stalled and underperforming brands to diagnose and resolve the points where value was quietly leaking away. Large-scale field force programs built around the colleague experience as the upstream driver of customer impact. Bespoke measurement systems that elevated field signal into boardroom-relevant leading indicators. At Pfizer, the role itself evolved from Global Customer Experience Lead to Global Customer Excellence Lead as the work moved into the company's first Global Chief Marketing Organization, intentionally positioning customer excellence closer to commercial leadership and performance accountability.

None of it would have been possible without the scientific, regulatory, and commercial expertise of the colleagues who built it alongside me. But the fact that it needed to be built at all was the signal.

The journey was not easy. Pharma rightly holds new ideas to a high standard of evidence. Bringing customer excellence into organizations that had not treated experience as a designed commercial discipline required sustained advocacy. I wrote a book, The Customer Excellence Enterprise, published by Wiley, because the discipline needed a framework leaders could examine and debate. I spoke at more than fifty conferences, roundtables, and executive dinners, and sat across from countless commercial leaders making the case. I helped stand up Michigan State University's Master of Science in Customer Experience Management program as founding faculty. The resistance I encountered made the thinking sharper. I respected it then and respect it now.

The Observation That Could Not Be Set Aside

Every year, lists are published ranking the world's best customer experience companies. The same names appear consistently: Amazon, Apple, Chewy, Ritz-Carlton, Nordstrom, USAA, Trader Joe's. The character of those lists holds year after year. Pharma is not on them. Not occasionally. Consistently and structurally absent.

This is not an indictment. Pharma demonstrates extraordinary organizational commitment to scientific rigor, regulatory accountability, and manufacturing precision. The absence is not a character failure. It is a design gap. Experience as a commercial discipline has not been given the same structural home that science, manufacturing, and brand have occupied for decades. The evidentiary standards of science are nonnegotiable. The precision standards of manufacturing are engineered into the system. The trust standards of brands are carefully governed and protected. Yet there was no equivalent experiential standard guiding commercial engagement. Experience was left to chance, interpretation, and fragmented ownership. The missing link in the equation has always been the experiential dimension. The pandemic made that gap harder to set aside. But it predated the pandemic. It was structural, not situational.

The Consumer-Grade Imperative

The physicians, nurses, and pharmacists at the center of pharma's commercial system are, in the rest of their lives, customers of Amazon and Apple. I call this their Other Life, and it matters commercially in ways the industry has been slow to fully reckon with. In their Other Life, they live inside a consumer ecosystem engineered around clarity, respect, and the removal of unnecessary effort. Those expectations do not reset when a white coat goes on. They follow healthcare professionals into every commercial interaction, every field engagement, every digital touchpoint.

This is what I call the Consumer-Grade Imperative. Not an aspiration for pharma to become Apple or Amazon. A threshold. One that asks the commercial system to meet HCPs and patients where they already are in their other lives, designed with the same rigor as the science, the same precision as the manufacturing, the same seriousness as the brand. That gap registers quietly and consistently, in engagement, in trust, and in the decisions that determine whether science reaches the patients it was designed for.

That realization shaped a deliberate personal decision. Through my book, my academic work at Michigan State, and years of cross-industry speaking, I made a conscious choice to keep one foot permanently in the consumer experience world and one foot permanently in pharma. Not as a transitional posture but as an intentional practice. I began describing it simply as my superpower: the ability to move fluently between those two worlds, to bring the standards, models, and expectations of consumer-grade experience into contact with the complexity and rigor of pharma. It became the mechanism through which I created the most distinctive value, and it remains the lens through which all of this work is done.

Why I Could Not Look Away

In most industries, the commercial system and the value chain run on parallel tracks. In pharma, they are intertwined. The commercial system is the value chain. How science reaches patients is inseparable from how the organization generates return on its scientific investment.

That is why the stakes of getting the commercial system wrong are different in kind. When it fails to complete the journey from scientific potential to patient outcome, the cost is not a lost transaction. It is a patient who does not start therapy. A physician who disengages before the treatment conversation fully happens. A therapy that performed in a clinical trial and underperforms in the world, not because the science was insufficient, but because the system designed to carry it was never built to go the full distance.

I could not look away from that. Not because I arrived with answers. Because I had spent a career developing the tools and perspective to work on exactly this kind of problem.

The Capability That Changed the Timing

I had been working on this problem for years before I founded the agency. The insight was not new. The conviction that pharma's commercial system needed architectural redesign, not more programs, had been building through every conference, every executive conversation, every chapter of the book. What changed was the capability to act on it at scale.

For most of the time I spent inside this industry, designing truly integrated commercial systems in service of customers required a level of coordination, data synthesis, and real-time responsiveness that was operationally out of reach for most organizations. The vision was clear. The execution ceiling was real. Artificial intelligence removed that ceiling. Not by replacing the human judgment, empathy, and accountability that sit at the center of every meaningful customer relationship, but by providing the underlying capability to design, deploy, and sustain systems in service of customers at the scale pharma actually operates. For the first time, the ambition and the capability are in the same room.

That alignment is not incidental to the timing of this firm's founding. It is the reason for it.

Why This Firm and Not Another

When I left the industry, the obvious paths were available. I had the background and relationships to build a marketing agency that would have found clients. I did not build a marketing agency. Marketing shapes the promise. It does not architect the system that keeps it.

I had also built a genuine reputation as a customer experience leader in pharma, one of a small number of practitioners who had actually done this work inside major global organizations. I could have built a CX consultancy on that reputation. I did not. Understanding the experience is not the same as redesigning the system that produces it.

I built something different. Something that did not have a clean category name when I started it. The Customer Excellence Agency is a commercial systems architecture firm, built at the intersection of marketing, sales, and experience. Not as a synthesis of those three things, but as the discipline that governs how they work together as a system. When they operate in fragmentation, the commercial system leaks value at every handoff. When they are architecturally integrated around a shared definition of what the customer needs to experience, value is realized rather than lost.

The problem pharma gave me was the most important one I had ever been handed.

I intend to spend the next chapter of my career making sure it gets the architectural answer it deserves.

A Note of Gratitude

I remain deeply grateful to the pharma and life sciences community for the openness, intellectual rigor, and spirited debate that continue to shape this work. The challenges are real. The stakes are high. The thinking is demanding. But the shared purpose is clear. Advancing human health requires not only scientific excellence, but excellence in how that science is delivered, experienced, and trusted. Contributing to that effort, alongside leaders committed to raising the standard, is work I am proud to do.

Wayne Simmons is the Founder and Commercial Systems Architect of The Customer Excellence Agency. He is the author of The Customer Excellence Enterprise (Wiley), founding faculty of the MS in Customer Experience Management program at Michigan State University's Eli Broad College of Business, a Certified Customer Experience Professional, and a former customer excellence and customer experience executive at Pfizer and Bayer. He is based in New York City.

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