Qualtrics Insights Help Dow Unlock $300 Million in Value Through Digital and CX Transformation

PROVO, Utah & SEATTLE (Dec. 19, 2023) –  Qualtrics, the leader and creator of the experience management (XM) category, partnered with Dow, a renowned 125-year-old materials science company, to launch a digital transformation that has generated $300 million in value and a 20% improvement in Dow’s customer satisfaction scores.

“In the experience economy, the brands that win and continue to stay at the forefront are those that listen to their customers and improve processes across every critical interaction,” said Sachin Goregaoker, Chief Product Officer of Qualtrics XM for Digital Frontlines. “We are proud to help Dow realize its goal to make every customer interaction easy, enjoyable, and effective with a data-led enterprise-wide CX strategy.”

Dow aims to be the most innovative, customer-centric, inclusive and sustainable materials science company in the world, but anticipating customers’ needs and preferences presented challenges given Dow had no centralized CX teams or common CX measures across the enterprise.

For B2B organizations like Dow, the “customer” is often made up of multiple stakeholders, each with different titles, areas of expertise, locations, and decision-making power, requiring the buy-in of many stakeholders over a longer period of time compared to a typical B2C sale. However, organizations can’t afford to make a negative first impression. Qualtrics research found that a positive first B2B buying experience is more closely tied to a customer’s likelihood to renew than any other journey touchpoint.

Adopting an enterprise-wide CX strategy

Qualtrics XM for Customer Frontlines enabled Dow to ask questions of multiple customer personas spanning the entire Dow customer journey to understand the unique needs of each Dow customer. Dow used customizable data displays to quickly analyze and publish key results internally, increasing transparency across the organization and enabling the CX team to measure how the customer experience progressed over time.

Dow compared these CX insights with operational and financial metrics like on-time delivery, product availability, and revenue growth to reveal meaningful correlations and opportunities for improvement. These insights informed targeted changes to the customer journey including the implementation of new shipment visibility and tracking capabilities, upgrades to order placement experiences, and structural changes and new tools that enhanced supply, demand and inventory management that improved product availability. All of these deliberate enhancements resulted in a 20% boost in customer satisfaction scores.

Modernizing Dow.com with Qualtrics Frontline DigitalXM

Using Qualtrics Digital CX and the Qualtrics XM Institute CX Maturity assessment, Dow identified several opportunities to improve the effectiveness of its online and digital properties by designing new or enhanced digital experiences for customers. Among those, is a groundbreaking, AI-powered digital capability that enables customers to create new products faster by using Dow’s formulation visualization and predictive modeling tools.

As a result of its digital transformation initiatives, Dow saw breakthrough changes in some of the key performance measures, including a 450% increase in repeat visitors for its digital commerce platform, an increase of new leads generated via digital engagement from 5% to 65%, and a more than 200% increase in digital orders.

At the same time, customer satisfaction improved across nearly every digital touchpoint, from finding technical information on the website to placing orders. Overall, Dow’s digital transformation has created $300 million 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 prioritize and enhance our CX best practices over time,” said Riccardo Porta, the global director for CX at Dow. “From the early days of our journey, Qualtrics solutions have allowed us to rationalize and monetize our CX disciplines to unlock new value for our customers and for 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”.

Turning CX insights into operational and business impact

Dow’s collaboration with Qualtrics continues to strengthen its position as a leading materials science company while driving innovation, customer-centricity, and sustainable growth. By layering company operational metrics on top of experience data gathered using Qualtrics, Dow found that satisfaction and buying behavior are significantly influenced by product availability at the time of order placement.

This provided new insight into how to balance the benefits of higher inventory levels vs. higher cash flow. Armed with these insights, Dow invested in integrated planning and inventory optimization technologies, resulting in lower inventory levels without compromising customer experience. Dow reduced inventory volume by 7%, equivalent to over $1 billion in cash flow, all while improving customer confidence in product availability by 10% and the CX score by 8.5%.

To learn more, see https://www.qualtrics.com/customers/dow/.

About Qualtrics

Qualtrics, the leader and creator of the experience management category, is a cloud-native software provider that empowers organizations to deliver exceptional experiences and build deep relationships with their customers and employees – so they can understand their greatest friction points, retain and engage top talent, and deliver the right products and services. Nearly 20,000 organizations around the world use Qualtrics’ advanced AI to listen, understand, and take action. Qualtrics uses its vast universe of experience data to form the largest database of human sentiment in the world. Qualtrics is co-headquartered in Provo, Utah and Seattle. To learn more, please visit qualtrics.com.