How do chemical suppliers optimize digitization?
Excellent customer experience
Consumer companies like Amazon are leading the way in customer experience, and they are constantly trying to make interaction more convenient and enjoyable. The same approach can give chemical suppliers a real competitive advantage, especially by standing out from low-cost competitors.
Digital company provides real-time quotation through dynamic transaction scoring in the supplier selection stage, and provides preventive maintenance suggestions through remote monitoring equipment in the service stage, so as to simplify and smooth customer journey at each step, so as to make customers satisfied. Through the use of digital technology, chemical suppliers can change from optimizing customer contact points to redesigning the whole customer journey, so as to reduce customer churn, improve the winning rate and reduce service costs.
One of the world's largest logistics companies studied sales and service issues with customers to identify the top 20 pain points, including poor sales response time, limited real-time tracking data, and inadequate customer service. Then, the company redesigned error prone manual processes, solved 16 of the 20 processes, and integrated key information into an easy-to-use digital interface to help customer-oriented personnel achieve seamless customer journey. Customer satisfaction increased. Sales, general and administrative costs are initially expected to fall by 20% to 30%, and once digitization is complete, by 60%.
How to optimize
In order to choose the focus of digital efforts, companies can look at the size of each opportunity and consider how to apply it to their business:
The service cost can be reduced by 15% to 50% through e-commerce, process digitization and the use of big data to allocate sales personnel. By seizing this direct benefit, a typical company can save enough money to fund the rest of its digital transformation - and create enough purchases and incentives to maintain momentum. This opportunity is the largest in the field of specialty chemicals and crop protection chemicals, but it is still attractive in the field of basic chemicals, petroleum chemicals and distribution.
By changing from traditional pricing and profit management to digital enhancement, the profit margin of chemical suppliers can be increased by 2-3 percentage points on average. Most of the value comes from the introduction of a dynamic pricing engine that takes into account data such as plant utilization, storage levels, and real-time customer needs.
Companies that want to take advantage of digital tools and capabilities to capture fast growth from less flexible competitors can increase their revenue growth by up to twice the market average. The most important initiatives may include creating first-class online sales channels; using advanced analytics to reduce customer churn, identify new customer leads, and support up selling; developing customer travel, attracting new businesses, cultivating loyalty, and increasing wallet share. The use of digital technology makes the sales process more efficient and the customer experience more attractive, which can improve customer satisfaction by 20% to 30%.
