Sales through online? LG Chem establishes LG Chem On, a comprehensive digital sales platform for customers!

Want to order LG Chem products? Or make an inquiry? Until now, technological collaboration with LG Chem involved various means of communication including face-to-face meetings with the employee in charge, making calls to check the delivery status, and of course, e-mails. In other words, it was somewhat cumbersome to purchase LG Chem’s products. To offer a more convenient experience to customers, LG Chem established a comprehensive digital sales platform, ‘LG Chem On.’ And working behind the scene to introduce ‘LG Chem On’ was the DCE team of DX (Digital Transformation) department. What discussions led the Digital Commercial Excellence (DCE) team to develop ‘LG Chem On?’

‘LG Chem On,’ a comprehensive digital online platform
which reflects customer needs

Hello! Please introduce the DCE team and what DX is.

•Do Hwe-gil, Specialist: Hi, I’m Do Hwe-gil, and my responsibility in DX is to establish the Digital CRM. The team name ‘DCE’ stands for Digital Commercial Excellence. We designed and introduced ‘LG Chem On’ through digital transformation of all sales activities within the Petrochemicals company and businesses to offer a smoother process for both customers and employees who are in charge of sales.

•Kim Joong, Team Leader: Hello, I’m Kim Joong, leader of DX DCE team. The team consists of members equipped with diverse work experiences in the digital transformation field, each contributing to perform the DX task. Our project is still ongoing, but I can’t feel more proud to see the accomplishments we’ve made so far.

•Shim Gyeong-min, Specialist: Hi. I’m Shim Gyeong-min in charge of DX for LG Chem’s foreign sales branches. Before I joined LG Chem, I did my master’s degree in England on machine learning. My career had been focused on DX in the production field until Kim, my team leader, offered me an opportunity. Based on my experience of managing business data, now I’m responsible for DX tasks at LG Chem’s foreign sales branches, especially those related to sales and logistics.

What exactly is LG Chem On, a comprehensive digital sales platform?

•Do Hwe-gil, Specialist: The LG Chem On website, to put it shortly, is a digital platform which surpasses the traditional method of sales that relied on face-to-face communication, and enables customers to browse LG Chem’s products simply by going on the web.  Before, customers, mostly home-appliances or automotive part producers, experienced inconvenience regarding communication, as they had to contact the LG Chem official at each stage of the process including orders, customer registrations, technological collaborations, shipments, etc. Now, LG Chem On can simplify such process.

We analyzed requests gathered from over 500 customers and established LG Chem On with focus on quick browsing of products, real-time/untact business process, and easy access to specialized information.
As you can see on LG Chem On website, the platform provides recommendations for each part, as well as the status of products available at your region. If you have a specific color of ABS in mind, you can search products by image. In short, it may occur to you that LG Chem On is an ‘online shopping mall for LG Chem products.’

•Shim Gyeong-min, Specialist: To establish the system of LG Chem On, our team collaborated with Salesforce, the US-based CRM solutions company. We’re happy to have improved the limitations in the Petrochemicals industry by setting up our system and enabling customers to check their work process in real-time. Also, this is LG Chem’s first time providing an online customer approach service, which adds meaning to our project. We hope to expand our services to making orders of products and shipments.

Any experience or case of applying DX?

•Kim Joong, Team Leader: Last year, we carried out a project to change the logistics process for LG Chem employees in Germany. For foreign sales branches, the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system had been the only tool available for use. This is a system that automates and manages finance, manufacture, human resource, and operations. That means, the employees depended solely on phone calls and e-mails to manage incoming stock from the headquarters and shipments to customers. Our team analyzed the difficulty in their process and built a system that shows the real-time data of incoming and outgoing products and stock. The employees gave positive feedback on the new system, which improved their working conditions. We were glad to be able to support them.

•Shim Gyeong-min, Specialist: I’ve been in DX since the beginning of this field, which allowed me a wide range of experiences. On one side, I was responsible for DX in production such as quality prediction, facilities predictive maintenance, and process mining. On the other side, I gained experience in DX for foreign sales. I’ve had trials and errors, but also accumulated a lot of insights. One thing I value the most is communication. When people hear the words DX, A.I., and automation, they tend to think that our team will always realize something great to help with their tasks. But that’s not the truth. In reality, our work involves hard-thinking on analyzing the workers’ needs and applying DX to make the best out of it. It requires continuous monitoring throughout the project timeline on whether it is effective or not until we can actually apply it to the field. We understand that sometimes, field workers cannot reply to our inquiries right away due to multiple tasks. But only when DX can work closely with employees in the field and collect their requests can we obtain positive outputs. That’s when we feel that our work is worthwhile.

What are challenges of working in DX?

•Kim Joong, Team Leader: When we meet field employees, we see their high level of stress regarding different systems around them, and the difficulty of assigning extra labor forces into our projects. So we held team meetings with different departments to explain the vision and importance of digital CRM, emphasizing that only through their cooperation can we build a perfect system and process. It was a relief to have all the associates, managers, and team leaders’ support to kick off the LG Chem On project.

Is there a know-how to figure out customers’ needs?

•Do Hwe-gil, Specialist: It’s more important to hear the needs of the personnel who is in charge of the job than of the company itself. However, in most circumstances, our counterparts would not tell us directly what they need or want. In such cases, it is wiser to have one of LG Chem’s sales representatives who has grown with the customer and can get the gist of what our customer has to say to us. Also, I think it’s necessary to hear from the field employees on a regular basis.

Last question. What goals or directions does the DX team have? What last word do you want to leave?

•Bae Jong-hoon, Specialist: We’re living in the world where DX is not a choice, but a must. Not only in our everyday lives, but also in our workplaces, digital transformation is bringing tremendous changes and giving us an opportunity to take another leap. Please look forward to the changes digital CRM and DX will bring to the Petrochemicals company.

With digital CRM at LG Chem On, we hope that LG Chem customers could get easier and faster access to LG Chem’s products. Also, we look forward to improvement of digital transformation technologies. LG Chem will remain loyal to keeping the values of our customers and keep walking to establish a systemized platform.