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Corporate Home Benefits Retirees & Alumni News & Events Newsletter 2019 Winter Customer Care Centers turn complaints into loyalty building moments

Customer Care Centers turn complaints into
loyalty-building moments 

You know this from your personal experience as a consumer, whether shopping online, dining at a restaurant, flying on an airplane, or trying to assemble a piece of furniture – things don’t always go as planned. Yet there’s nothing more frustrating or loyalty-destroying than having your appeals for help fall on deaf ears, empty promises and red tape.

So, imagine the concern of Dow leadership, and every front-line employee for that matter, when our first Customer Experience Survey results highlighted how we handle complaints as a top customer pain point

Here’s how the new Dow – armed with its customer-centric ambition and commitment to making every customer engagement easy, enjoyable and effective – is taking action to turn negative feedback into positive outcomes.

Through a discipline called “Journey Mapping,” the teams discovered that the bad experiences our customers received were despite the best efforts of our people.

Based on recommendations from the Journey Mapping teams, a pilot Customer Care Center was opened in São Paulo, Brazil, on October 13, 2018.

The center is staffed by a dedicated and empowered team of professionals representing Dow businesses and functions, including logistics, invoice-to-cash and supply chain. This combination of collaboration and digitalization accelerates the entire resolution process, while providing customers with a single point of contact.

Within three months, 850+ backlog complaints were cleared, 98% of the 1,656 new customer complaints were contained as per target service offering, and complaint resolution times were reduced by an average of 40%.

Since the beginning of 2019, three more regional Customer Care Centers have been launched – in Midland, Michigan; Terneuzen, The Netherlands; and Shanghai, China. Leveraging the approach and the experience gained during the pilot, the other regional centers are on track to deliver similar outstanding results.