DSM
DSM brings consumer-grade experience to B2B
Call for change
As beautifully designed, context-driven interfaces have become the norm on digital
platforms, consumers’ higher expectations about user experience have flowed through
all interactions online.
That includes
business-to-business space. Employees accustomed to the very best digital
experiences at home are less willing to put up with protracted processes or badly
designed interfaces at work.
For DSM, a multibillion-euro
life sciences and materials leader, this presented a huge opportunity. The ordering
tool used by its nutritional products line of business continued to see heavy
customer usage but was now fifteen years old and approaching its end of life. What’s
more, many sales were still going through by email, fax and phone, including a large
number from infrequent, “long tail” customers.
This created the ideal moment
for DSM to completely overhaul its online customer experience landscape. It is the
ambition of DSM to create a modern, user-friendly, scalable buying experience that
allows more self-service interactions through a digital portal to further increase
the service quality and agility for customers. In turn, this would free the sales
and customer service team to refocus on high-value customer relationships. It would
also improve user experience across the board and enable DSM to extend its reach to
a broader customer base.
When tech meets human ingenuity
DSM chose Accenture to design and build its new business buying experience.
Bringing together a
multi-disciplinary team of UX/UI and functional designers, technical architects, and
delivery and analytics expertise, Accenture and DSM instigated a One Team approach
to implement SAP Commerce Cloud.
Central to the whole project
was an agile MVP (Minimum Viable Product) approach. This enabled the team to build
the new platform in sprints, using a feedback loop with DSM’s customers and business
users to capture user needs and iteratively enhance functionality and user
experience at each stage. This customer feedback loop was achieved not only at the
individual level, through closer one-on-one engagement, but also at scale by
leveraging SAP's experience management platform Qualtrics.
The agile approach was crucial
in accelerating a complex project involving numerous decentralized DSM teams, each
with their own different needs. In fact, after just eight months, the new platform
was ready to be rolled out for Europe, with the Middle East and North America
following, and Latin America and Asia Pacific to come next.
The result is a modern,
streamlined, intuitive digital buying experience that integrates seamlessly into
DSM’s business architecture. The technology stack is now standardized across
multiple business units and regions, reducing the risk of technical debt, while
creating synergies and building value across DSM's business units. Scalability has
been ensured by integrating many of DSM’s ERP platforms through a single
high-performance data layer. That will enable the organization to roll out the
solution to other business units faster and more cost-effectively, while still
allowing local flexibility in each operating territory.
A valuable difference
By putting customer needs at the center of the project, DSM has vastly improved its
front-end buying experience.
The new customer portal
provides personalized product selections, individually negotiated prices and
streamlined reordering (vital in B2B where repeat orders are frequent). Customers
can now get real-time order/delivery updates, plus easy access to contract details,
invoices and supporting documents. They can also access a full product catalogue,
including integrated quality and regulatory information — especially important in
the highly regulated nutritional products industry.
With so much functionality
available through the portal, customers can manage more of their purchasing
themselves. That means faster and more convenient buying online, and an experience
that aligns with today’s higher expectations of what a digital service should be.
Indeed, the early feedback from customers has been overwhelmingly positive.
With the new Portal, customers
can get services instantaneously and at any time of day and week, which greatly
improves the service quality. At the same time, DSM’s customer care agents have to
handle far less routine administrative requests from customers, enabling them to
focus on providing a specialized “white glove” service to DSM’s most valuable
customers.
What’s more, thanks to the
project’s ongoing feedback loop, the organization’s culture has become more
customer-centric. Its ways of working are driven less by static technical
requirements and more by a dynamic understanding of customer needs. And it can now
combine analytics and continuous feedback from relevant touchpoints across the whole
customer journey. That insight is vital, enabling DSM to keep innovating and
improving the user experience. It also opens up new opportunities for growth, such
as enabling single one-off payments for smaller customers who don’t have a
pre-existing account with the business.
Of course, customer experience
is never complete. It must continue to evolve with customer expectations and
business requirements. That's why DSM's new data-driven and customer-centric
commerce platform is so important to its growth strategy, now and in the future.
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