Qualtrics supports Dow digital transformation

Materials science company Dow has reported its Qualtrics-powered digital transformation has helped generate $300m in value.

The company has used Qualtrics Digital CX and the Qualtrics XM Institute CX Maturity assessment to improve customer experience (CX).

Dow used the Qualtrics tools to identify how it could improve the effectiveness of its online and digital properties. This has led to the development of an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered digital capability that enables customers to create new products faster using Dow’s formulation visualisation and predictive modelling tools. 

Dow said it used Qualtrics XM for Customer Frontlines to assess multiple customer personas spanning their customer journeys to understand the unique needs of each Dow customer. According to Qualtrics, customisable data displays were used to analyse and publish key results internally, which increased transparency across the organisation and enabled the CX team to measure how customer experience progressed over time.

Dow compared these CX insights with operational and financial metrics such as on-time delivery, product availability and revenue growth to understand correlations and opportunities for improvement. These insights helped to inform decision-makers on changes that could be made to the customer journey, including the implementation of new shipment visibility and tracking capabilities, upgrades to order placement experiences, and structural changes and tools that enhanced supply, demand and inventory management. According to Dow, these changes have boosted its customer satisfaction score by 20%.

Dow said the improvements have also led to a 450% increase in repeat visitors to its digital commerce platform and an increase in new leads generated via digital engagement from 5% to 65%. It said it also saw an increase of over 200% in digital orders.

“We see Qualtrics as the central enabling platform that helped us design, build, prioritise and enhance our CX best practices over time”

By layering company operational metrics on top of experience data gathered using Qualtrics, Dow discovered that satisfaction and buying behaviour are significantly influenced by product availability at the time of order placement. This has enabled it to focus on investing in integrated planning and inventory optimisation technologies, which has resulted in lower inventory levels Dow said it has been able to reduce inventory volume by 7%, equivalent to over $1bn in cash flow, while improving customer confidence in product availability by 10% and its CX score by 8.5%. 

Overall, the digital transformation at Dow has created $300m in value in less than five years thanks to revenue and margin growth, as well as structural cost reductions.

“We see Qualtrics as the central enabling platform that helped us design, build, and then confidently prioritise and enhance our CX best practices over time,” said Riccardo Porta, global director for CX at Dow.

“From the early days of our journey, Qualtrics solutions have allowed us to rationalise and monetise our CX disciplines to unlock new value for our customers and Dow. We also value the support and partnership that Qualtrics and its Experience Management Institute (XMI) are providing to the AMCX Consortium, a group of B2B manufacturers aimed at benchmarking and elevating CX across B2B,” he added.