“Dow had developed multiple ways of assessing its customers’ satisfaction, but they wanted to take it further. They wanted to generate the insights necessary to build differentiated, high-impact customer experiences that would add long-term value to their customers, their organization and their industry,” said Jay Finnane, EY Global Consulting Account Lead.
The team quickly realized the cross-functional nature of customer journeys. Consistent delivery of positive customer experiences requires strong collaboration of functional and business teams, and a common definition of success. This insight highlighted the need for all parts of the organization to work in harmony and offer a unified “one Dow” experience. Following this, the team redesigned workflows, previously centered around internal efficiency, to align to customer needs.
“It can be exceedingly difficult to separate the noise from what we call the ‘moments that matter.’ When doing so, it’s incredibly important to identify the customer touchpoints that have the most influence,” noted Riccardo. “These insights led us to identify how we could create better experiences for our customers while driving purposeful growth for our organization.”
The learnings from Dow’s listening and research prompted the team to propose a revised enterprise-wide customer segmentation, a portfolio of service offerings, and a framework to help prioritize both customer needs and internal projects. Some customers value efficiency and low price, others flexibility and speed, or collaboration and innovation. The combination of customer segmentation and service offering provides the framework to guide a broad range of services, including managing credit limits, offering technical support and determining the level of dedicated customer service.
To bring it home, the team identified another correlation — customer experience and employee satisfaction. “One ‘aha’ moment during our customer journey mapping exercise was when we found, in the vast majority of instances, customer pain points aligned to employee pain points,” explained Riccardo. “One example was customers having to wait to get answers to specific questions. Typically, the reason for the delay was that employees were struggling to find the right information in a timely manner.”
The design of Dow's new standard customer experience program underpinned all these discoveries – they were equipped to listen to and understand the customer, identify and design the right service offerings, and activate and scale the program across the organization. Following this methodology has allowed everyone within the business to gain line of sight on the impact their work has on customer experience and subsequently correlate it to financial performance.