Kurita Water Industries accesses more data to better serve customers with Dynamics 365

A river of data

Water sustains all life, and Kurita Water Industries believes that studying and mastering the properties of water can help humans live in greater harmony with nature. That’s why the company is focused on providing comprehensive, sustainable solutions for water treatment—including environmentally sound water treatment chemicals and facilities, industrial cleaning, and soil and groundwater contamination remediation. 

Kurita saw an opportunity for digital transformation to expand on its mission, increase its customer base, provide more personalized customer experiences, and increase sales. Founded in 1949, the company has a long history and massive amounts of customer data to draw from to build customer relationships—if sales representatives can easily access, understand, and effectively use it. Kurita had relied on paper-based systems before switching to spreadsheet software to manage data. But even that proved untenable, imposing a massive burden on sales staff and managers, and wasting hours of time on manual data retrieval that could be better spent using insights from that data to deepen customer relationships. 

In addition, Kurita’s field representatives didn’t have easy access to data, and as a result were not always making the best decisions for the company or for its customers. Customers and relationships with those customers are as foundational to the business as water itself. Kurita representatives make frequent in-person visits to customer sites, maintaining both the equipment and the trust customers have in Kurita. Successful relationship management often came down to the experiential knowledge and personal connections of individuals, which isn’t easy to scale.

Customized solutions

To get the best data into the hands of its representatives, Kurita chose to work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 products. The company was particularly interested in the way Context IQ embeds Microsoft Teams chat within Dynamics 365 Sales. “Every day, sales representatives communicate with back-office staff, technical, and R&D staff using Microsoft Teams, so the integration of Teams with Dynamics 365 is very convenient,” says Yusuke Matoba, General Manager of DX Promotion Department, Digital Strategy Division at Kurita Water Industries. With an end-to-end view of each customer’s unique journey provided by Dynamics 365 Sales and Sales Insights, Kurita sales representatives are better able to understand and meet the specific needs customers have. “If we are able to deeply consider a customer’s need using company-knowledge, we can provide better options,” says Matoba.

Matoba also highlighted the possibilities for streamlined data democratization with Microsoft Power BI. “After implementing Dynamics 365, we got so many requests for data visualization from our sales division. If we ordered the development of those to a third party, it would cost a great deal of time and money,” says Matoba. “Already, some of our staff have acquired the skill to use Power BI and create dashboards. I believe it accelerates the data utilization and DX of the management process.” Kurita uses Microsoft Teams and Dynamics 365 in tandem to build new project profiles quickly and assign its employees to project teams. 

The global availability and customer trust Microsoft has built also appealed to the team. “We are an international enterprise, and we must consider everything from that point of view. Microsoft is a multinational company and has case histories around the world. It’s important to us,” says Matoba. For solution implementation, Kurita followed an approach that prioritized building trust and consensus among its agents, analyzing their workflows, and communicating with them every step of the way.

Flowing forward

With the solution in place, Kurita is seeing positive change. With 70 years of case studies now at their fingertips, sales representatives can act as water consultants for customers, as well as trusted advisors. This empowers each representative to sell proactively. With all the information easily available, it’s easy for Kurita to earn customer trust and build relationships of deep understanding. Sales managers can use Context IQ data from sales across the organization seamlessly, saving time and reducing frustration by allowing the team to easily view pipelines and targets. 

The benefits for Kurita’s customers are measurable as well: the “unique voice,” as Matoba says, of each customer and problem is more clearly heard and understood. Kurita has been using trends in metrics like volume of customer communications and the amount of reduction in water and energy use the company proposes to customers to measure the success of its new connected sales system. 

Going forward, Kurita is better positioned than ever for the demands of the future. As the company seeks to maintain a balance between meeting local needs and strengthening global competitiveness, effective data management will be key. With powerful tools to analyze data and put it at Kurita’s representatives’ fingertips, communications to customers and back-office staff flow smoothly and transparently, helping Kurita work in greater harmony internally and with its customers, as it expands its reach to support greater harmony between humanity and nature around the world.

Find out more about Kurita Water on Twitter and LinkedIn.