When Dow completed its merger with Dupont in 2017, it issued a new, ambitious agenda: it wanted to become the most customer-centric material science company in the world.

But as a newly merged entity, it had no centralized CX team or widely used CX measures across the enterprise, Riccardo Porta, the global director for CX at Dow, told CX Dive in an interview.

Dow used customer insights created by Qualtrics to revamp its support services, improving customer satisfaction by 40% and reducing costs by 20% from 2019 to 2023, Porta said.

Dow decided to adopt Qualtrics, which was already in use by Dow Corning, a company it had acquired in 2016, across the whole company to collect voice of the customer insights. 

By garnering customer feedback throughout a customer's entire journey, Dow was able to identify roadblocks. Chief among them was displeasure with support services.

“At the early stage of our program, 2018-2019, very clearly from those insights, it became evident that customers were not happy about our way of handling customer complaints,” Porta said. 

Customers thought Dow was too slow in resolving issues, spent too much time trying to validate if the complaint was justified instead of handling it, and was not proactive in communicating the status of resolutions.

“The gap was definitely there because the way historically complaint management was structured, it was internally focused,” Porta said.

Dow set to work revamping its support services, changing the organizational roles and employees’ responsibilities around complaints. It changed its KPIs as well as the supporting technology to shepherd the complaint process.

“We change[d] people, technology, processes, and as a result, we saw over 40% improvement in satisfaction, over 20% reduction in cost because of complaints, and over 30% reduction in resolution time,” Porta said. “So it's truly a win, win, win proposition.”