Dow Chemical: Microsoft Dynamics CRM has 'caught up with Salesforce offering'

Dow Chemical aims to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 this April

Dow Chemical, the US multinational chemical solutions provider, has pledged to stay with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for the foreseeable future, as it believes the product has caught up with rival Salesforce.com's CRM suite.

Speaking to Computing at Microsoft Dynamics' Convergence 2014 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, Andy Clark, commercial excellence technology manager at Dow, said Microsoft was continuing to improve its product.

"I think their chief competitor is Salesforce. [Microsoft] was behind before and I don't know if they've caught up all the way but they are darn close and I think they are really trying to get there," he said.

"Salesforce push for people to sign up for three-year contracts, and these are starting to finish and companies are re-evaluating now. At Dow, we're happy and I don't see us re-evaluating anything," he added.

Clark explained that when Dow bought chemical manufacturer Rohm and Haas in April 2009, the manufacturer had an in-built CRM system from Lotus Notes and were also using Oracle Siebel and "other home-grown elements".

"My assumption is that there wasn't a true CRM strategy at Dow up until then, there were different stops and starts, different things used across the business but not necessarily a well-defined strategy," he said.

Clark wasn't involved in selecting Microsoft, but said Dow had help with implementing Microsoft Dynamics 4.0 from an unnamed third-party hosting provider.

Dow then upgraded the 2011 version of Dynamics in June 2012, and thereafter implemented single sign-on functionality using ADFS and DirSync to Office 365, which Clark said users "really liked".

In October 2013, Dow moved to the cloud version of Dynamics CRM, with the help of PowerObjects, which specialises in installing and updating Microsoft's Dynamics platform for businesses.

"They did most of the work. Our IT team still had some work to do, but PowerObjects had all of the tools to pick all of the data up and shoot it over. We didn't want to try to recreate these tools; there were some tools on the market but [PowerObjects] knew how to do it properly, so we just wanted to pay for that and have it done," Clark explained.

He said that the firm is still using the 2011 version of Dynamics but is looking to upgrade to the 2013 version in April this year. Although he was pleased about additional functionality that the update could provide, he is concerned about having to re-train staff to use it.

"I think the UI is very different so I'm concerned about change management; that's always our biggest hurdle, it is never the technology it is always change management," he said.

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Dow Chemical: Microsoft Dynamics CRM has 'caught up with Salesforce offering'

Dow Chemical aims to upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 this April

Dow will have a team dedicated to change management that will offer one-on-one training sessions, as well as producing relevant training materials for employees such as PowerPoints and videos.

Change management, Clark said, is something that will always be there with CRM platforms, particularly for businesses that have a wide array of users.

"We're global, so I have users in North America, or Pacific users who might use English as a second language or Latin American users who are selling in the middle of Columbia who have no connectivity, so there are many different scenarios," he said.

"Eighty per cent of people are fine but about 20 per cent of people need to be re-trained and that's the problem," he added.

Of the current issues Dow has with Microsoft which impacts on change management, is the use of its Outlook client.

"Outlook has conflicts with many of the plug-ins that users have and it's not always clear what that plug-in is.

"Microsoft said they know it clashes with WebEx but we use WebEx all the time and have no issues with that, so it is dependent on many other things like how different parts are installed. There are so many moving parts in the apps that there is always going to be a decent amount of change management," he suggested.

As for the announcements at Convergence 2014, Clark said he is keen to learn more about the marketing solutions offered by Microsoft as Dow needs something "a little more end-to-end" to replace several marketing tools it already has in place.

He isn't convinced that the Social Listening software will provide any benefits for Dow Chemical as it isn't a B2C organisation, although he believed that there may be some use of social tools for thought leadership in the future.

He was impressed with the campaign management and e-mail management functions that Microsoft displayed at the conference, stating that they would allow businesses to accomplish "some true marketing exercises".

About 2400 Dow Chemical employees are using Microsoft Dynamics CRM; about 700 in North America, 300 in Latin America and 700 in both the EMEA and Pacific regions.