Qualtrics Helps Dow Unlock $300 Million in Value

Dow is a renowned 125-year-old materials science company with a portfolio of plastics, industrial intermediates, coatings, and silicones for customers in high-growth market segments, such as packaging, infrastructure, mobility, and consumer applications. The Michigan-based company operates manufacturing sites in 31 countries and employs approximately 37,800 people. Dow delivered sales of approximately $57 billion in 2022.

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. Sales typically require the buy-in of many stakeholders over a longer period of time than typical B2C sales.

Dow has a stated mission of being the most innovative, customer-centric, inclusive, and sustainable materials science company in the world. But it also had significant challenges collecting and acting on customers’ needs and preferences given that it had no centralized customer experience teams or common customer experience measures across the enterprise.

That all changed when it adopted Qualtrics’ XM for Customer Frontlines digital module as part of a digital transformation that has generated $300 million in value and a 20 percent improvement in 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 XM for Customer 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.”

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

Dow compared these 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 addition of shipment visibility and tracking capabilities, upgrades to order placement experiences, and structural changes and new tools that enhanced supply, demand, and inventory management.

Using Qualtrics Digital CX and the Qualtrics XM Institute CX Maturity assessment, Dow also identified opportunities to improve its online and digital properties with new formulation visualization and predictive modeling tools. This led to a 450 percent increase in repeat visitors to its digital commerce platform, an increase of new leads generated via digital engagement from 5 percent to 65 percent, and a more than 200 percent increase in digital orders.

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 percent, equivalent to more than $1 billion in cash flow, all while improving customer confidence in product availability by 10 percent and the CX score by 8.5 percent.

“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 Portal, 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.”

The Payoff

Using Qualtrics' XM for Customer Frontlines, Dow has seen the following results:

• $300 million in additional value;
• a 20 percent improvement in customer satisfaction scores;
• a 450 percent increase in repeat visitors to its digital commerce platform;
• an increase from 5 percent to 65 percent in new leads generated via digital engagement; and
• a more than 200 percent increase in digital orders.