How 3 Customers Successfully Digitally Transformed Using LIKE.TG
Digital transformation is an iterative process. How quickly you see results depends on the vision that you have for your business, and the metrics you are targeting. If you’re just starting out with your own digital transformation, it can be difficult to see how the long-term benefits are worth the effort. The good news is that many others have been through the process, and a lot can be learned from their experiences. Below, we hear from three businesses of varying sizes about their business visions, the steps they took in their transformation journeys, and the results they got. AFDigital uses LIKE.TG to enable data-driven human connections Founded in the Philippines in 2011, AFDigital began as a digital marketing agency. Since then, it has evolved into a multi-cloud LIKE.TG and MuleSoft implementation partner. The vision AFDigital uses a ‘glocalised’ approach. That means they support a physical, on-the-ground presence in key markets with a well-resourced Philippines-based delivery centre. Pauline Pangan, Founder and Managing Director, believes this model has been particularly effective in meeting their customers’ changing needs. “Our goal is to help our customers redefine the human experience with LIKE.TG technology. That’s why we are constantly investing in building our capabilities,” says Pangan. The transformation The company started out using a collection of unconnected apps to manage their business, before investing in a full LIKE.TG Customer 360 deployment. “We expanded our use of Sales Cloud, and started using Service Cloud,” explains Co-Founder and CEO Robin Leonard. “Then we started to use the single customer view in LIKE.TG as our platform for delivery, sales, service, and marketing.” AFDigital uses Marketing Cloud to power all the company’s nurture journeys. It also deployed Experience Cloud and built an ecommerce platform with Store Connect during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Finally, it uses Tableau for data analytics and reporting. “I am a strong believer that what you cannot measure, you cannot manage,” says Pangan. “LIKE.TG enables us to measure and manage the metrics that matter to our shareholders, our customers, our employees, and our partners.” The results AFDigital has seen an impressive 380% growth in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) over the last two years. It has also doubled its customer retention rate over the last 12 months, and the opportunity conversion rate has increased from 28% to 52%. Perhaps most impressively, the company has achieved 900% revenue growth since investing in LIKE.TG. The company can also use the enormous success of its own digital transformation as a case study to share with potential prospects. “We achieved all this amazing success because we invested time and money to build the right processes. I always tell our customers that LIKE.TG is already solving the business problems of tomorrow. The only limit in the value we can squeeze out of the technology is our imagination.” Anantara Vacation Club improves its customer service experience with LIKE.TG Anantara Vacation Club’s vacation ownership programme was created in 2010 with a single property in Phuket. Now, it spans nine luxury Club-owned resorts across Southeast Asia and New Zealand. The vision Anantara Vacation Club has built an impressive customer base of more than 14,000 Club Points Owners in less than a decade. To help provide consistent customer experiences worthy of the luxury brand, it turned to LIKE.TG. “When we had 500 to 1,000 Club Points Owners, we could still manage the process manually,” says Matthijs de Man, Director of Club Services and Innovation and Anantara Vacation Club. “But when you start getting 200 to 300 enquiries a day, it becomes unmanageable.” The transformation Prior to LIKE.TG, customer service agents dealt with enquiries through email, which was inefficient and time consuming. That’s when de Man and his team turned to Service Cloud for end-to-end customer management, from the moment of booking to the end of the stay. “For a Club Points Owner, it’s a seamless experience,” says de Man. Club Points Owners in China can now also log enquiries and communicate with customer service agents through the social media platform WeChat. Integrated Live Chat case management through the Club’s website has opened another in-demand customer communication channel. “Our entire customer service team has the same access to Club Points Owners’ information – whether they contact us through our call centre, WeChat, Live Chat or email,” de Man explains. “Club Points Owners now get a consistent experience through any channel they choose to use.” The results Service Cloud had an almost immediate effect on the Club. The Club Points Owner base grew by an incredible 200 per cent following the deployment. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are down from around 10 hours to less than two hours. Overall customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) never dip below 87 per cent and are as high as 94 per cent in the Japanese market. Chinese Club Points Owners also rate the Club’s customer service highly with CSAT scores consistently around 90 per cent. “The best thing about Service Cloud is that our employees now have a clear understanding of everyone they are talking to, and an essential view of all their previous interactions with us” says de Man. M1 reinvents itself to become a digital-first telco Now in its 25th year, digital network operator M1 has brought numerous innovations and achieved many firsts in the Singapore market. In 2019, it was privatised and became a key pillar of Keppel Corporation’s (Keppel) connectivity business. It then started work to digitally overhaul all its processes and offerings, with a customer-first approach. The vision “Our vision is to become a digital-first telco and provide new made-to-measure personalised experiences for our customers. We want to set a new standard for what a digital experience looks like in our industry, ” said Nathan Bell, Chief Digital Officer. The transformation M1 has rolled out Sales Cloud to B2B sales reps and is using Service Cloud in its contact centre. It is using Tableau CRM to provide data insights that can be used to provide customers with personalised recommendations. M1 also plans to leverage Marketing Cloud to provide customers with hyper-personalised offers and promotions. Combined with Datorama, this will provide real-time insights so that M1 can adapt campaigns to customers’ individual interests. To realise the full potential of its digitalisation, M1 has used MuleSoft to integrate LIKE.TG with its Operations Support System and other technologies. “Omni-channel is being redefined and we see increasing fluidity between channels, with customers moving more frequently from one to the next. LIKE.TG will help us keep pace with our customers and ensure a consistent experience, no matter which blend of channels they use,” said Bell. The results Throughout the transformation process, M1 has seen more than 1,500 employees learn new skills. “When implementing new technologies, adoption is typically a push exercise and you have to convince people why they should get onboard. In this case, it was different. Everyone wanted to know what they could do to help get this out to our customers fast. LIKE.TG enabled us to deliver an incredible outcome and one that’s sustainable as we move into the new norm,” said Bell. Most importantly, this outcome will support M1 in accelerating decision making and increasing relevance while realising its goal to be a digital-first telco. Ultimately, this leads to an improvement in the way it serves customers.
How 3 Innovative Businesses in ASEAN Achieved Customer Centricity
At LIKE.TG, Nichola Palmer works with customers to bring their stories of innovation and transformation to life. She highlights three small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the ASEAN region that use LIKE.TG to overcome business challenges. Forward-thinking companies across ASEAN are using digital transformation to meet rapidly evolving customer expectations and build deeper customer relationships. To achieve this, organisations need a single source of truth for customer data. Sales teams also need tools that can track customer conversations and reveal insights required to drive more meaningful value-added conversations with customers. Here’s how three successful companies use LIKE.TG to build better customer relationships: Grand Guardian Nippon Life GGI Nippon Life is embracing digital transformation to meet rapidly evolving customer expectations in Myanmar. When the company began local operations in 2013, internet connectivity was patchy across the country and technology uptake was low. That has changed in recent years, and the company is now redefining what it means to be customer-centric. “We understand that true customer centricity isn’t just about delivering basic insurance services,” says Ang Kian Wee, Division Head, Strategy and Transformation, GGI Nippon Life. “It’s really about understanding the needs of our customers, and how they change through different life stages.” To understand customer needs, the company needed a way to drive more meaningful conversations between salespeople and customers. So Kian Wee and his team turned to the LIKE.TG Customer 360 platform. They began with a Service Cloud implementation to digitise the recruitment process. The human resources team is now able to digitalise several processes relating to creation of job positions, job applications by candidates, and candidate selection. Next came a Sales Cloud deployment to enable salespeople to build a 360-degree customer view. “We established operating procedures within every process with guidance and instructions,” says Manoranjan Sahoo, Chief Distribution Officer, GGI Nippon Life. “We also pre-set tasks salespeople need to complete at every stage. “In June we closed about 50 policies with a small pilot team of five to six salespeople. That number doubled in August, and doubled again by December. “Sales Cloud has also improved operational efficiency. Previously, our salespeople spent two to three hours per day on paperwork. That’s now down to 30 minutes or less.” Dornier MedTech Dornier MedTech is a customer-centric global healthcare company that is embracing customer obsession and innovation. The company uses LIKE.TG to drive this transformation across its ASEAN operations, starting with Singapore and Japan. “The agility of any company in today’s increasingly disruptive world is a function of the mindset of the team and the speed by which critical data is made available to them,” says Issac Khoo, General Manager at Dornier MedTech. “LIKE.TG has enabled us to capture and reference the wealth of data points in the customer’s journey with Dornier MedTech” Prior to adopting LIKE.TG, processes were largely manual. This created a lack of transparency between teams as data was held in spreadsheets and difficult to share. The company initially deployed Sales Cloud to streamline approvals. Later, it rolled out Sales Cloud to sales teams across ASEAN to provide a 360-degree view of customers. According to Hiromasa Ito, IT Manager for Dornier MedTech in Japan, Sales Cloud has saved each sales rep there up to two hours a week on reporting. “Our sales reps now have more time to spend with customers and they have quick access to customer and product information through the LIKE.TG mobile app. It is also easier for them to share information with different teams.” Dornier MedTech is now also using Service Cloud to provide more efficient and personalised support. Enquiries are automatically routed to the right team and support engineers are notified right away when a customer needs help. In the past, this could take up to four hours. “A large part of support is knowing your customer and having a platform like LIKE.TG that can capture all our customer conversations gives us that knowledge,” says Martyn Yap, Senior IT Manager, Asia Pacific at Dornier MedTech Singapore. “It’s helping us get closer to our customer and deliver more proactive support.” Ranosys Technologies As a LIKE.TG implementation partner, Ranosys is helping to support its clients’ digital transformation with expert LIKE.TG consulting, development, implementation, and support. The company is also driving global growth from its Singapore headquarters, with an internal LIKE.TG deployment. Ranosys Technologies CEO Rameshwar Vyas and his team have replaced their legacy customer relationship management (CRM) software with Sales Cloud. They have also built a series of apps on the Customer 360 platform, including recruitment, workforce, and payroll management systems. “We’ve created a single source of truth,” says Vyas. “We used to generate reports monthly or quarterly, but there’s no need for that with LIKE.TG. Anyone who wants to check on the pulse of the company can see the data they need at any time.” The recruitment management system has increased human resources’ efficiency between 30 and 40 per cent. The workforce management system has improved resource allocation, and the payroll management system has increased back-end efficiency. As the company looks towards the challenges of the future, Vyas is focused on building new capabilities and upskilling employees for jobs of the future. “We believe developing employees is very important,” he says. “There are currently 37 people in our Practice and Solutions team. And we work with senior strategy consultants whose focus is to prepare us for the next biggest challenge, and to find ways to take our people to the next step.” To best serve your customers, you must understand what is most meaningful to them. Digital transformation at its core is about connecting your team with the tools they need to identify customer needs. Then they can drive and track more meaningful conversations that add real value to your customers.
How 3 Retailers in Asia Boost Customer Engagement with Marketing Tech
According to more than 8,000 marketers around the world, the single greatest challenge for the profession this year has been real-time customer engagement. It’s no surprise, then, that the main priorities for marketers looking into the future all revolve around improving customer engagement and creating seamless experiences. The 2021 State of Marketing report, released this past month, reveals what has been top of mind for marketers as they adapt to new customer behaviours and expectations. At the top of the list of priorities are: Innovating Engaging with customers in real time Creating a cohesive customer journey across channels and devices Improving marketing ROI and attribution Improving collaboration There are already great examples of businesses that are nailing customer experience and engagement. They are doing it through the innovative use of technology and collaboration between marketing, sales, and service. Here are three great examples: 1. Tokopedia When growing, almost every business reaches a stage where increasing headcount is no longer enough to keep up with service demands. With more than 100 million active users per month, Indonesia’s largest marketplace platform Tokopedia had to create new ways to deliver trust at scale. The solution came with the optimisation of channels such as email, live chat, and self-service. Tokopedia was able to implement its LIKE.TG solutions in four months and with zero downtime. Using LIKE.TG gave Tokopedia a 360-degree view of customers. The business achieved some great customer engagement outcomes as a result, including: Seventy percent drop in repeated contacts Ninety percent drop in the complaint-to-transaction ratio Forty percent improvement in response times for customer care Read more about Tokopedia’s success here. 2. Sendo Sendo, one of Vietnam’s largest ecommerce businesses, connects more than 300,000 sellers to millions of buyers. Three years ago, their customer service team of just 20 agents had to scale quickly in a heavily siloed technological environment. The solution involved integrating all data into a single system. This provided a single customer view as well as customer access across multiple channels. Service Cloud and Social Studio enabled this and more at Sendo, including real-time reporting to measure and improve KPIs such as call handling time. Having all customer information in one place resulted in an increase in productivity by more than 30%. Customer satisfaction has increased 20%, and survey response rate has grown by a massive 150%. Read more of Sendo’s story here. 3. Fisher & Paykel Premium appliance brand Fisher & Paykel is on a mission to be the most human-centred appliance brand in the world. Accomplishing this requires a deep understanding of what people want and need from their products. As the company sells directly to consumers as well as through a network of retailers, it’s critical that all tools and data are centralised for easy access by other areas of the business. LIKE.TG solutions have helped Fisher & Paykel break down silos and improve efficiencies. Marketing Cloud helps the company tailor communications to individual customer preferences based on previous behaviours. Builders, designers and retailers can make use of a dealer portal built on Experience Cloud that simplifies collaboration and order tracking. And integrating Service Cloud into Fisher & Paykel’s call centre is helping service teams get instant insight into the customer at the other end of the phone. Together, these measures have reduced transactional calls by 60%, and the time it takes to train new operators has shrunk from nine months to three weeks. Get more insights into Fisher & Paykel’s success here. In 2021, business success involves a deep knowledge of customers as well as one-on-one communications. When all teams have a single and shared view of the customer, customer experience moves to an entirely new level.
How Accenture is driving customer and employee success in the Philippines
Accenture established its LIKE.TG practice in the Philippines in 2012 with a small team of CRM specialists. Today, the practice comprises 1,900 employees who work across Advanced Technology Centres in Cebu and Manila. It has also been awarded the highest number of accredited practitioners within the country. I met with the team to discuss the development of the practice and how they are driving customer and employee success. Here are the key takeaways, including best practices for building and maintaining LIKE.TG talent. Practice achieves 44% increase in LIKE.TG certifications In 2023, Accenture’s team in the Philippines increased its number of LIKE.TG certifications by 44%. The number of certified individuals in the practice has also increased by an average of 24% year on year over the last four years. LIKE.TG and Accenture have worked closely together to upskill the team and build new capabilities. Our joint LIKE.TG Days are just one example. The most recent event saw more than 200 people come together for learning and inspiration. We discussed our roadmap, priorities for growth, and new opportunities for collaboration. We also presented a deep dive on our AI-driven solutions and shared product demos. Accenture also held onsite certification exams during the event with 115 consultants taking part and a high number passing their exams. In addition to LIKE.TG Days, we’ve partnered with Accenture to run several industry-specific enablement sessions. These sessions have been aligned to Accenture’s key practice areas, including education, financial services, public sector, and utilities. On top of all this, Accenture launched the first LIKE.TG Developer Group in the Philippines back in 2016 and it has continued to host learning sessions, meetups, and campus programs for those interested in sharpening their LIKE.TG skills. Get articles selected just for you, in your inbox Sign up now Growing a diverse pipeline of talent Bringing net new LIKE.TG talent into its business is just as important as upskilling existing talent. That’s why Accenture works with universities to teach students LIKE.TG and other job-ready skills. The business has established the Accenture Technology Academy which is open to students at several universities in the Philippines. The academy not only enables students to learn new skills, but fast-tracks their applications to join Accenture after graduation. More than 800 students from across different universities have participated to date, with around 25% going on to secure placement within Accenture. Another program designed to nurture new talent is Accenture’s Near Hire Training (NHT) program which helps marginalised and unemployed individuals become entry-level voice and data encoding agents. A free training program, NHT is designed to give everyone an equal opportunity to build new skills and gain employment in a call centre or business process role. Accenture is also a proud supporter of the For the Women Foundation which helps upskill and secure job placement for working mums and other women. Through all these initiatives, Accenture has been able to grow its pipeline of talent and create a diverse and inclusive workplace. Capturing new opportunities onshore and offshore Accenture’s practice in the Philippines has largely existed to support customers in other regions. However, local demand for LIKE.TG skills is growing and presents an exciting opportunity for consultants to work with customers face to face. To capture these opportunities and grow onshore and offshore, Accenture is continuing to expand its capabilities. Building generative AI skills is a particular focus as it will help Accenture deliver more value for customers in areas like customer service and business process outsourcing. Marvin Bonifacio, Cebu Tech Lead and LIKE.TG Technical Architect at Accenture in the Philippines, has also become the first in the country to be certified as a Sales Champion for LIKE.TG. This represents the team’s ongoing commitment to its partnership with LIKE.TG and helping more businesses harness the benefits of the platform.
How ACFC’s Vision for Customer Engagement Leads To Sustainable Growth
ACFC has been delighting Vietnamese fashionistas since 2009. The luxury fashion retailer is a member of the Imex Pan Pacific Group (IPPG), and markets more than 22 international fashion brands through a nationwide network of around 250 stores. Despite building an impressive base of more than 2 million VIP customers, ACFC is striving to deliver even better customer experiences — both in-store and across digital channels. Louis Nguyen, CEO of ACFC, says the company is facing the same challenges most retailers are contending with in the digital era, particularly when it comes to connecting with digital-native Millenials and Gen Zers. “Young customers interact with brands not only through traditional channels like media and stores, but via multiple channels across physical and virtual spaces — from traditional e-commerce to live streaming and social commerce,” he says. “Customer needs and preferences change rapidly, and brands have to catch up with these changes as quickly as possible,” he explains. “We must use customer insights to understand customer needs, so we can offer them personalised products and services that are relevant to their needs in real time.” Delivering a total customer experience Smart brands are using digital transformation to put their customers at the heart of everything they do. Louis says ACFC’s digital transformation vision aims to empower sustainable growth as an omni-channel retailer with a customer-centric mindset. “Technology solutions help bring more value to our customers, and bind them to the company,” he explains. “Technology also transforms our business from a traditional retailer into a new digital retailer with more revenue streams than ever thought possible.” Louis believes successful customer engagement is the source of sustainable growth, but effective engagement must extend beyond product or service offerings and marketing communications. “We must deliver a total customer experience,” he says. “That means considering the feelings our customers have when visiting our bricks-and-mortar stores, ecommerce website and mobile app. They need to feel comfortable, at home with our brand, and that their specific needs and interests are understood.” Chinh Dinh, CIO at ACFC who is directly responsible for the digital transformation of the business also shares the same vision as his CEO. Chinh works closely with executive directors and mid-level managers at ACFC to understand business needs and provide the technology initiatives that support business growth. He believes that for retailers to grow, they must be able to deliver personalised customer experiences. Creating a 360-degree customer view To achieve that, Chinh and his team have turned to LIKE.TG. They plan to use Customer 360 to build customer personas and deliver personalised customer experiences in real time. “ACFC aims to use Customer 360 to collect customer-related information, gaining insights that we can then use to serve our customers better through real-time personalised offerings,” he says. ACFC will draw on Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Interaction Studio and Datorama to build and deploy an integrated solution, with help from implementation partner Gimasys. However, digital transformation doesn’t come without growing pains. Careful change management is often required to unify processes and people. “Digital transformation is our motivating force for change,” says Chinh. “However, with new technology adoption, business processes change. People also need to change to align with the new way of doing business.” Managing change for success Chinh says training the ACFC team on LIKE.TG via Trailhead is helping to ease that transition, and initial employee feedback has been positive. The critical element of a successful digital transformation, however, is a clear understanding of the reason for change. “Be clear when you communicate why you are doing the transformation. Have a clear strategy and roadmap, but be ready to employ the change management process,” Chinh explains. “Then you will need partners to support and help you through the long, difficult but interesting journey of digital transformation.” Customer engagement is the new currency of success in the digital era, and customer-centric technologies are putting more personalisation power in the hands of brands. ACFC is using LIKE.TG to develop a customer-centric mindset and deliver complete customer experiences across all online and offline channels. To learn more about creating connected customer experiences, download The Secret to Seamless Service: Connected Channels ebook. Find out how Customer 360 can help your brand deliver personalised customer experiences.
How AFDigital Tracks Wellness & Improves Employee Experience With Data
Business leaders across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region are prioritising employee wellness. According to a recent report by Willis Towers Watson, supporting employees’ physical and emotional health is a top priority for companies throughout the region. Two in five APAC employers said they plan to enhance mental health services and stress management. Forty percent of employers want to improve employee wellbeing programmes. Notably, more organisations in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and India, are prioritising employee wellbeing programmes than other APAC regions. AFDigital is one such company that is making a strong commitment to improving employee wellness. Founded in the Philippines in 2012, AFDigital specialises in social media marketing, customer journey automation, training, and digital marketing operations. They work with a wide range of enterprise customers and small and medium-sized businesses across the region. Understanding employees better Pauline Pangan, Founder and Managing Director at AFDigital, says COVID-19 was a catalyst for her company’s renewed focus on employee wellness. “We realised that we need to be proactive in improving our employee’s wellbeing now more than ever,” she explains. “We are so far away from each other because everyone is working remotely, and it’s stressful because of the uncertainty about what’s going to happen.” Before Pangan and her team could improve employee wellbeing, they had to understand the health and wellbeing challenges her people are facing. To do this, AFDigital has taken a data-driven approach with monthly employee wellness surveys delivered through the LIKE.TG CRM. AFDigital is now able to see survey results in a wellness dashboard. “In the beginning we didn’t have awareness about what our employees were experiencing, because they wouldn’t necessarily come to us and say they’re struggling,” she says. “The survey is a safe, anonymised platform our employees can use to share their challenges.” Focusing on the individual Pangan says the wellness surveys help identify where employees are starting to feel challenged, and the impact this is having on their mental, emotional, physical, financial, and developmental wellbeing. “We started to notice mental health becoming a challenge,” says Robin Leonard, Co-Founder and CEO at AFDigital. “People were saying they were burnt out, and had meeting after meeting with no gaps. That’s where we started seeing that while it’s great we were productive, it was not sustainable.” Leonard explains that personalised insights from the wellness surveys are helping the company take a more individualised approach to improving employee wellness. This was particularly useful during the height of the pandemic. “We were finding people who were struggling with their work because their household was struggling,” he says. “For example, we could identify if our people had no space to work from home and rent them a small nearby workspace so they could safely work away from their home.” “Employee wellness has to be very one-to-one. The individualised insights coming from the wellness survey enable us to take that approach.” Redefining human experiences While Pangan says it’s certainly true that happy employees are productive employees, boosting productivity is not necessarily the top priority. “We are prioritising wellness as a business not just because we care about productivity. But because we want our team to be the best humans they can be,” she explains. “When they are given the tools and awareness to nourish themselves and increase their wellbeing, that’s when they are able to do their best work in service to our customers. This hopefully creates a ripple effect in the community.” Focusing on the human-side of the equation comes with another key benefit — fostering genuine human connections between employees. This, says Pangan, has in turn helped to create more authentic customer engagements. “We don’t employ machines, we employ human beings. And they are servicing human beings,” she says. “It’s a very intimate type of business engagement. That’s the reason why we changed our mission statement to ‘redefining human experiences’.” Finding the bliss point Pangan says that balancing data-driven decision making with a human approach has been critical to the company’s employee wellness strategy. “We have amazing technology that enables us to make data-driven business decisions”, she explains. “It affords flexibility to make human emotion-based decisions, which allows us to achieve the bliss point balance of a tech-based, human-focused business.” Pangan adds that recognising increased employee vulnerability throughout the pandemic has helped to build deeper connections. “COVID-19 has opened this conversation for us,” she says. “It feels like we can see each other now. We need to bring each other together and be more connected. As employers, we need to make everyone feel that we belong and care about each other.” Human capital is our greatest asset as a business. We need to bring out the best in them to get the best from them,” Pangan concludes. “When our employees are happy, that’s when they do their best work.”
How Boys’ Town Uses Automation to Bring More Value to Their Clients
Boys’ Town has a long history of helping children and youth in need. The Singapore-based charity was founded in 1948 as a residential care facility for disadvantaged boys. Since then, the organisation has significantly expanded. It now supports girls and boys with a range of youth services including residential care, fostering, respite care, youth outreach, adventure therapy, and clinical intervention. Today, Boys’ Town is using significant digital transformation to modernise paper-based manual workflows and increase process efficiency with LIKE.TG automation. Yet the organisation’s goal remains the same — to help youth in need learn the strategies and skills they need to cope with trauma and thrive as valued members of Singapore society. “Most successful implementations in our sector are a means to an end,” says Tan. “Technology must always be vision- and user-centric, always empowering both our staff and youth. LIKE.TG helps us achieve that by increasing process efficiency, allowing our team to add more value to the lives of our clients.” However, with more than 70 years’ of operational history, modernising the organisation has been a long road. Tan explains that digitisation began about 10 years ago, with the first step to move paper-based workflows onto Microsoft and Google tools. “Those old processes always required a lot of human intervention,” he says. “For example, our donation processes in the past required staff to print a huge amount of receipts and manually send them out to donors via mail. Today, this process has significantly reduced and we cannot imagine going back to those days.” Integrating apps and consolidating data in one single platform Tan says LIKE.TG has been a game changer for Boys’ Town. It is more integration-friendly than other CRM vendors the organisation was considering. “We found that other CRMs we were considering did not provide the same ability for customisation, and integration was not as straight-forward as LIKE.TG.” Customisation and integration ability has been critical for Boys’ Town’s digital transformation. Tan and his team has used LIKE.TG to customise a set of integrated apps that consolidate donor, volunteer, and client data on a single platform. “We use LIKE.TG as our main platform, and we have customised four core apps,” he explains. “Our Donation Analytical Datamart (DAD) management system processes and stores donor data. It is used to issue donation receipts and submit tax deduction information to the tax authority. “We also have a Volunteer Management System (VMS) that automates online volunteer registrations and screening of volunteers, and an Integrated Case Management System (ICMS) that processes and stores case management data. Finally, we use our Residential Program Management System (RPMS) to manage all data relating to our residential boys such as their school and program attendance and medical records.” Tan explains that the DAD and VMS are integrated through LIKE.TG to create a single source of truth for donor and volunteer interactions. The ICMS and RPMS are also connected to provide a central Salesforce-based front-end system that youth and social workers can use to track and consolidate client data. Increasing efficiency and productivity with automation Tan explains that LIKE.TG’s capacity for customisation has helped to automate processes across the organisation. And this has returned significant efficiency gains that reduce the administration burden on Boys’ Town’s dedicated Youth, Case and Social workers, as well as their Community Partnerships team. “It was difficult to store and search for donor, volunteer, and client data before implementing LIKE.TG,” he says. “For example, multiple donations can be associated with one donor, and dozens of cases can be attached to just one of our approximately 1,500 clients. Since adopting LIKE.TG, it has become incredibly easy to trace and find links between records that we would otherwise not be able to match up.” Tan says it is difficult to quantify the time savings achieved through LIKE.TG. There was no explicit measurement or studies made because the organisation has implemented process automation over time. However, the Community Partnerships team has estimated the time-savings to be in the range of 30-40%. Likewise, for the Youth Work and Social Work teams, they save an estimated average of 15% and 30% of their time, respectively. “The automated workflows that we do within LIKE.TG are the cherry on top. Automation saves so much time that would otherwise be consumed by tedious activities and duplicated efforts.” For example, online donations, donor records, and client case notes and approvals are now automated through LIKE.TG. Automating client reports for appointments, attendance, and other useful data also provide a unified client view. This allows youth, case, and social workers to share the same source of client information. “Those are just a few of the many automated processes within our LIKE.TG ecosystem that help our team focus on doing more for our clients,” says Tan. “Their time is now better spent with our clients’ parents, teachers, and other stakeholders. LIKE.TG takes the admin burden off them.” Putting the client at the centre of everything they do Despite some internal resistance and uncertainty in the early stages of the LIKE.TG implementation, Tan says LIKE.TG is now critical to the organisation. “It took some change management, training, and time to get to where we are today. But my colleagues are definitely grateful to have LIKE.TG. We cannot imagine going back to a time without a centralised online database that’s easy to use and navigate. It is now a digital pillar of our organisation that we can’t do without.” Looking to the future, Tan says technology will continue to play a role in Boys’ Town’s ongoing evolution. But the needs of their clients will always be at the heart of future implementations. “For the next three to five years, we will continue to develop more inter-service and inter-organisational collaboration initiatives, as well as tightening existing governance and compliance policies,” Tan concludes. “Everything we do will be about continuing to make sure our organisation is a better place for children.”
How Brands Deliver Delightful Customer Experiences Consistently
Retail and consumer brands responded to the challenges of 2020 with admirable resilience, agility, and innovation. In a short time, they launched a variety of new services and customer experiences. These included options to buy-online-pickup-in-store, virtual appointments, flexible payment options, and livestream ecommerce. As a result, customer expectations for what makes a great digital experience have increased. In fact, more than 80% of B2B and B2C customers now believe the experience provided by a company is as important as its products or services. Delightful retail experiences help to drive brand loyalty and create lifelong customer connections. This can have a significant impact on the bottom line over the long-term. All that energy and innovation around the customer experience has changed retail and consumer brands forever. Now the challenge is to continue this spirit of innovation and deliver delightful customer experiences consistently. Meeting the demand for more personalised experiences In a recent webinar, Matt Marcotte, LIKE.TG Global Head of Retail and Consumer Goods Industry Advisors, shared his advice on how to deliver exceptional customer experiences. He said it comes down to three things: Actionable customer data The ability to personalise customer experiences Optimisation of consumer engagement and experience Getting to a single source of truth for customer data is the ultimate goal, particularly for retail and consumer brands. Solutions like LIKE.TG Customer 360 bring sales, marketing, commerce, and service together around a single view of customer data on an integrated platform. Customer data needs to be collected, consolidated, and stored securely in a place where teams can access it as needed. When teams have a shared understanding of the customer, they can work together to create more personalised customer experiences. “Finding technologies that really make the collection of data, the creation of the single source of truth, the ability to talk across systems and departments easily, is really something that all companies should be striving to do,” Matt says. One great tool for this purpose is Tableau. It can help analyse your customer data and provide a deeper understanding of customers. These insights help to identify further opportunities for personalisation and uncover customer trends within your data. “Personalisation doesn’t need to be as complicated as it sounds to implement,” Matt says. “It all starts with intent and a relentless focus on putting the customer at the centre of everything that you do as a brand. Then, find ways to use technology and data to get to know them better.” Creating consistency across platforms The ability to connect your planning and execution within the same platform is critical for personalising and optimising your consumer engagement. Matt says this helps brands to create a holistic view of the customer that lets them: Unlock growth Improve program execution Build better pricing strategies Develop more effective promotional activities and channel incentives Luxasia, the leading omni-channel partner for luxury beauty and lifestyle brands in the Asia-Pacific region, is a great example of this in action. They develop personalised beauty experiences and connected customer journeys for customers online, offline, or in-store. The Luxasia team knows that they are selling emotional connections as much as physical products. They use feedback and customer data to help them make beauty more personalised through relevant product recommendations. Consistent, excellent experiences like these develop stronger relationships with customers and drive loyalty over the long term. “Consumers make decisions based on how they feel. As brands, part of getting to know customers is building relationships, and relationships are emotional,” Matt says. This is reflected in LIKE.TG’s most recent State of the Connected Customer report. It found that 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. “So, in a world of increasingly endless choices and commoditised products, the experience the consumer has with the brand is really important,” Matt says. As retail and consumer brands optimise these experiences, we will see the impact this can have on building loyalty and lifetime relationships. With LIKE.TG as a partner, retail and consumer brands can deliver exceptional customer experiences and build their customer base. Find out how retail and consumer goods brands are enhancing customer experiences with LIKE.TG. Tune in to watch the webinar on-demand.
How Coffee Reignited the LIKE.TG Singapore Office Experience
When is a cup of coffee more than a cup of coffee? The Singapore Workplace Services team has been pleasantly surprised by the positive response they have received to the office coffee perk. Many Singapore employees have been greatly enjoying the reimagined coffee break experience as they come together to connect with their peers. Travis Lim, Senior Manager of Workplace Services, and his team decided to focus on transforming a very common — and historically mundane — office moment: a cup of coffee. We sat down with Travis to learn more. What was the motivation for your team to create a moment of connection from the typical coffee experience? We knew that a lot of employees start their day with a cup of coffee, so we started thinking about what that experience was like.Every time I go somewhere to get coffee, I don’t get a welcoming feeling. It’s transactional. I wanted to make this experience transformative: an experience that could completely change how the employee was feeling. I wanted them to love the experience so much that the coffee moment alone was good enough to make them come back the next day. Part of making that experience great is focusing on how it can help the employee connect to their peers. The Singapore office’s coffee cart features latte art with familiar faces! You didn’t just bring in a coffee cart, you took your team to a barista training course to learn about the brewing process and create a truly custom experience. Why was that important to you? Everything we did to prepare for the coffee cart’s opening was to understand what would make it a memorable experience. The barista training course gave us the knowledge to collaborate closely with our coffee vendor: we adjusted the roast on the coffee beans for a better flavour and let our employees taste it and give us their feedback. We learned that our employees preferred plant-based milk, so we brought in three different options. When there is a holiday or an executive visitor, we add custom designs to the latte art.Not only is it a positive moment in someone’s day, it creates a natural moment of socialisation that people have been missing. We knew the employee could take time to chat with their colleagues while their drinks were brewing. The cart became a moment of community. Jasmine Xu (L) and Bonnie Chin (R) creating specialty coffee drinks during the Lunar New Year event What has been the employee response to the reimagined coffee experience? We are always trying to get ahead of the experience that employees want so they are excited about what’s next. And it’s working! Employees have told us that the coffee cart is one of the best parts of their day. It’s even working on me; I never used to drink coffee, but now I can’t go the day without stopping by the cart. The baristas know I like cinnamon, so they always add some to my drink. It’s that customised experience — the feeling that we know who you are and we care about the kind of day you have — that we want to give to everyone. Your team’s curated experiences have been very well-received. What’s the secret to getting them right? Our strategy is to listen to what our employees want, collaborate closely with our partners, and experiment. Most of all, at every event, we want to turn something transactional into a transformative experience.This is also not something we achieve alone. We couldn’t do it without the support of our leadership, who fully trusts us to create an environment that is best for employees. The Singapore Culture Guides- employees who volunteer their time to support culture events- and Employee Engagement partners also work hard to deliver many exciting events with us. We are very fortunate to have such supportive partnerships working together to bring the LIKE.TG culture to life. L-R: Jasmine Xu, Bonnie Chin, Travis Lim, Tammy Ang, and Brenda Rodrigues of the Singapore Workplace Services Team LIKE.TG was named Singapore’s #1 Best Workplace in Technology 2022 (large category) as well as one of Singapore’s Best Workplaces. Both awards are credited to a high rating of employee trust and engagement. The Singapore Workplace Services team’s dedication to building trust and engagement is a testament to the LIKE.TG culture. We asked Travis’ colleagues about their experience: What did it feel like when you realised your team had created such a well-received employee experience? “Ecstatic — it was pure joy to see our employees so happy to see their colleagues in person! You could really see it in their smiles and body language. The catch-up moments everyone was having were really special in those first few weeks. Also, I felt relieved. [It was] a relief to see everyone happy back at their workstations and enjoying the space.” – Brenda Rodrigues, Supervisor, Workplace Services “Welcoming our colleagues back to work after lockdown was a huge transition…With more and more employees returning to office to connect and socialise, seeing their smiles and faces give us the reason to keep curating and improving employee experiences in office.” – Tammy Ang, Lead Coordinator, Workplace Services Your team goes above and beyond to focus on the employee’s experiences at the office. Why is that? “It is the culture that makes it different here. Employees are writing their own inspiring chapters and we [live] by our values daily. There is a sense of purpose in doing meaningful work and it is a safe environment where we can bring our authentic selves to work daily. [Because of this,] our team is never afraid to try and change things along the way. And of course, not forgetting about social connection, to listen and understand what the employees really want. Seeing employees’ smiles across their faces is worth going above and beyond!” – Jasmine Xu, Workplace Services Associate“Do it from love, not for love!’ – This is how we started together as one team and built our foundation from there. It goes beyond ticking a to-do list. It’s not just about fulfilling just a task, it’s the love of connecting our people together. Passion is the word and it keeps us burning. ” – Bonnie Chin, Office Service/Administration Manager
How CRM Automation Can Help Boost Your Marketing ROI
Over the past two years, digital engagement hit a tipping point, with more customer interactions taking place online than in the real world. This rapid digital acceleration was initially seen as a temporary measure to compensate for the pandemic and its associated restrictions. As time has passed, though, it has become clear that it’s here to stay. The stratospheric rise of the digitally driven market has generated and continues to generate unfathomable amounts of customer data. This data can cover the whole buying journey, from the initial search all the way to the post-sale follow-up. For marketers, this data is largely useless unless it’s put to effective use. That is where automation comes in. When fed into and optimised through a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, that data can be automated in a variety of ways that directly improve your marketing ROI. The good news is that automation doesn’t have to be complicated and there are several things you can do to get started right now. Automation’s many paths to improved ROI The pot of gold for marketers in 2022 will be forming the deepest possible relationship with the individual customer, often without the luxury of face-to-face interaction. The only way to achieve such intimacy is through a comprehensive and dynamic view of that customer’s digital behaviour. This is exactly what Marketing Cloud offers. It takes customer data from a range of sources and creates actionable insights for you to take forward. Here are some of the many rewards reaped by automation tools: Improve customer satisfaction Marketing Cloud allows you to understand everything about your customer. This knowledge allows you to identify their unique wants and needs. You can then show them content, assets, and messaging at the right time in the right channel. In other words, the customer is getting exactly what they want, when they want it. Attract return customers A continuation of that benefit is the ability to attract return customers. As you’re able to provide such granular personalisation, relationships become ongoing and open-ended. Within Marketing Cloud, you’re able to make use of applications such as Email Studio, Journey Builder, and Interaction Studio. Each of these offer unique ways to nurture personalised customer experiences at every touch point. Boost lead conversion rates Personalisation based on in-depth data means higher levels of customer engagement. The more customers you engage through automation, the more leads you’re able to convert. Foster customer loyalty Marketing Cloud’s Loyalty Management application gives you the ability to automate personalised loyalty programmes. Add this to the opportunities for personalised shopping experiences provided by Commerce Cloud, and you have a powerful combo to foster customer loyalty. Accelerate speed of execution Not only is setting up automation simple, but thanks to the degree of automation available to you, you’re able to work faster, which frees up more time to focus on other important tasks. Optimise ad buying Thanks to highly customisable audience automation, you can feed segments directly into the world’s largest social media platforms. Segmentation is also an automated breeze, as you can ask the CRM to find customers similar to your best customers. Alternatively, you can stop showing ads to newly acquired leads, then funnel them into a new segment, saving you money. The integration jackpot! Marketing Cloud integrates with a group of specialised LIKE.TG applications, each one designed to deepen your relationship with customers and improve marketing ROI. LIKE.TG’s newest application that integrates with Marketing Cloud is Customer Data Platform (CDP). It allows even more powerful data-driven insights for deeper personalisation, to the point where you can get to know and cater to the individual customer. When looking at the data sources that feed into Marketing Cloud, the world is your oyster. Whether you’re using Sales Cloud, another CRM platform, or even disconnected data points such as contact information, that data can be fed into Marketing Cloud. In other words, if you’ve got some data from somewhere, you can bring it in, work with it, and use it as the basis for automation. Getting on board the automation train If you’re new to the automation of marketing data, the prospect can seem a little overwhelming. Before you start, it’s important to know which kinds of marketing data can be automated. The short answer is almost everything. If you can write a process down on paper, then you can automate it. A helpful way to determine what requires automation is to take a forensic look at your current processes and operations. Note down what is taking up the most time in the execution of campaigns, and target these first. For example, finding similarities between individual customers and creating segmented audiences can take a huge amount of time without automation. The task here is to do your research and due diligence, look for these procedural weaknesses, and determine what can be automated through Marketing Cloud. Another way to frame your plan of attack is to analyse your existing data sources. For sales, if you’re relying on online spreadsheets that don’t talk to each other, you might benefit from feeding that data into a CRM such as Sales Cloud, then integrating it with Marketing Cloud. Similarly, if you’re using disconnected data sources to track individual metrics, you may look into consolidating those into a single source. Whatever the case may be, know that if your data pipeline is siloed and unwieldy, there are ways to bring it all together to achieve a single source of truth. Don’t rush, or be a prisoner of the moment A common pitfall for organisations who discover the power of automation is that they attempt to do too much at once. These platforms are operational investments and are designed to become mainstays of your business. Therefore, you should start slowly and really dig into your existing processes and systems. This should allow you to understand which product or combination of products will best serve your objectives. That aside, these products can only serve you if your data is of a high quality. A CRM gives you a database of past purchases, as well as demographic data, customer preferences, key contacts, and any problems that the customer may have encountered. High-quality CRMs take it even further, tracking clients and leads as they progress through the marketing pipeline. The better the quality of your data, the more you’ll be able to benefit from automation, and the more your marketing ROI will improve. Read about how Marketing Cloud has helped other businesses automate their marketing.
How CRM Helps Small and Medium Businesses Win Customers
Customer expectations are always changing. As more and more customers become digitally savvy, it’s important that you adapt the way you do business. One thing that is increasingly important is a consistent customer experience. In particular, personalisation is becoming a vital part of marketing, sales, and service. CRM can help you with this task, and it’s not just for large enterprises. Based on the latest research presented in our Small and Medium Business Trends Report, 67% of growing SMBs have invested in CRM software. In the same report, more than half of SMBs that we talked to said they were investing in service, sales, and marketing technology. A CRM system gives you one unified view of your customers. It helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more. Using CRM helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability. Faster sales: Win more deals with less effort through automation of your sales process. Smarter marketing: Find more leads and engage your audience with personalised content. Better service: Keep more customers with outstanding personalised service. LIKE.TG has solutions for every kind of organisation. Even the smallest business can get started with powerful CRM technology that will change the way they work. Read the infographic below to learn how using a CRM platform can help you win customers: Data sources: * Win The Deal With The #1 CRM For Small Businesses: https://www.LIKE.TG/ap/solutions/small-business-solutions/win-customers/ ^ Find Customers with the Best CRM Tools and Packages: https://www.LIKE.TG/ap/solutions/small-business-solutions/find-customers/ # Fifth Edition Small and Medium Business Trends Report ✝ LIKE.TG for Small Business: CRM and Customer Support Software: https://www.LIKE.TG/ap/solutions/small-business-solutions/overview/ For details on this infographic, please click here.
How Customer Centricity Unlocks Profitable Growth and Success for SMEs
What is customer centricity? How can growing startups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) prioritise customer centricity to fuel growth and drive success? Customer centricity is about providing personalised, connected customer experiences across all channels — before, during, and after every transaction. Customer-centric businesses deliver more empathetic experiences to win over customers and build more highly valued customer relationships that return real business value. Having a customer-centric mindset is more important than ever in a digital-first world. Whether you are a digital-native organisation or a traditional structured company, putting the customer at the centre of everything you do is critical to a successful digital transformation. The problem is that many SMEs try to solve one problem at a time and lose focus on the big picture. That tends to create a disconnected ecosystem of siloed platforms, which can result in disjointed customer journeys and cause a customer success gap. Prioritising customer centricity is one of the key factors to SMEs’ success and growth. Focusing on putting your customers at the centre of everything you do as your big-picture goal will help to close the customer success gap, support your customer journeys, attract investor interest, and scale your business. Here’s how. 1. Close the customer success gap with a single source of truth Customers’ expectations and behaviours have shifted as we continue our transition to a digital-first world. According to LIKE.TG’s latest State of the Connected Customer report, 73% of customers now expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. That means customers no longer want to be categorised. Customers want personalised communication on any — and all — channels they choose. A few years ago, we started with the concept of 1:many. It then moved to a 1:1 model, thanks to the evolution of the Marketing solutions. Now, it has evolved into what we call the 1:U, where customers want the brands they love to know them on a personal level. To close the customer success gap, you must put the customer at the centre of everything you do. That requires the right structure and technology to unify your data and create a single source of truth. 2. Choose technology that supports your customer journeys To prioritise customer centricity, the technologies you choose should support your customer journeys. The right technology can help achieve this in three key ways. First, it drives automations to add efficiency and consistency across your customer journey ecosystem. Second, it creates a single source of truth with customer data accessible to everyone, from anywhere. Third, it enables you to make data-backed decisions, and provides the agility you need to react to situations quickly. Take Zenyum, for example. The Singapore-based smile cosmetics company deployed Sales Cloud to allow their team to analyse data by country within the markets efficiently. At the same time, Service Cloud and Experience Cloud help them create a sophisticated personalisation pipeline that delivers deep data insights, including a 360-view of each customer interaction. It is also used to connect different teams on a single platform, increasing efficiency, and reducing turnaround times by 40-50%. As a result, Zenyum has achieved 8x improvement in lead activation rate. 3. Attract investors and get funding for your business How do you secure funding for your growing business? Securing business funding can be a difficult challenge to overcome. Investors, venture capitalists, incubators, and accelerators take customer success seriously when assigning value to your business. In a recent discussion with James Watson, Director of Investments at Catcha Group, we talked about what SMEs need to do to attract investor interest. “We always look for companies that have relatively low cost to acquire customers, and have a platform that can retain them successfully with minimal churn,” he said. “You need to continue to show growth in obtaining new customers and make sure they are retained successfully without spending too much to retain them. Being able to innovate quickly, pivot your business, and directly serve your consumers is the key differentiator we look for in companies.” Customer-centric companies are able to achieve this by leveraging data to understand customer behaviour and make insightful decisions to best serve their customers. 4. Scale your business with a digital-first mindset At LIKE.TG, we define scalability as increasing revenue without substantially increasing resources. Achieving that is about using a digital-first mindset to create better efficiency and ensure that any additional resources are reflected in your return on investment (ROI). This digital-first mindset has to be fused into your company culture. You need to identify the prime areas for automation, hire the right people ahead of the curve, and don’t become over-dependent on one person or isolated knowledge. Building your business with scalability in mind and taking a customer-centric mindset are the keys to growth and success. Vietnam-based test automation platform provider, Katalon, is putting this concept into practice. The company has doubled in size in less than 12 months, and credits LIKE.TG as a catalyst for their growth. To scale into the enterprise segment, the company uses automation through Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Platform and Inbox to enable the customer success team to touch every customer account while maximising efficiency and cost effectiveness. These solutions have reduced manual processes by 70%, improved conversion rate, and increased accurate forecasts by 50%. The company is also using LIKE.TG to streamline the entire sales funnel and divide tasks between sales and customer success teams, while maintaining a seamless experience across the entire customer journey. LIKE.TG enables Katalon to hire in any country and optimise serving their customers globally, while keeping a culture of accountability through their remote sales, service and finance teams. This capability has contributed to a four-fold increase in revenue team growth. 5. Innovate and grow your business with a customer-centric vision This is more evidence why the SME’s roadmap for sustainable growth should be centred around a 360 customer-centric vision that puts the customer at the core of the experience. Building your business with scalability and customer centricity in mind is critical to growth and success. Learn how to create a winning strategy that can help you stay competitive and innovative in this fast-changing environment. Take your business to the next level and be the game changer for your business. Watch our customer centricity video now to learn how to unlock profitable growth and success for your business.
How Customer Engagement Has Changed, According To 15,600 of Them
To say this year has been different would be a huge understatement. Storefronts went digital, kitchen tables turned into conference rooms, and how we live, work, and shop have been generally turned upside down. What hasn’t changed for businesses, however, is the importance of providing an outstanding customer experience. In fact, 80% of consumers and business buyers say experience remains as important as products. Of course, how to deliver those differentiated experiences transformed as life moved online and economic uncertainty moved in. Our fourth State of the Connected Customer report, based on a global survey of over 15,000 consumers and business buyers, details how, and provides invaluable insights for business leaders navigating their paths back to growth. The report details key elements of customer engagement in our radically changing times, including: Earning trust pays dividends People want to do business with brands they can depend on. While that was true before 2020, it’s an undeniable fact in a world taken by pandemic, social justice movements, and environmental crises, among other issues. Eighty-two percent of customers agree a company’s trustworthiness matters more than it did a year ago. Like most relationships, gaining trust doesn’t happen overnight. Businesses must earn trust through their actions over time, and it’s not getting any easier to accomplish. Sixty-one percent of customers say it’s difficult for a company to earn their trust – 7 percentage points higher than the previous year. Evolving customer expectations present an opportunity for businesses to get closer to the audiences they serve through their actions. How are they showing up and what are they saying on issues beyond their particular industry? Ninety percent of customers say how a company acts during a crisis reveals its trustworthiness. And, this year, 56% of customers say they’ve reevaluated the societal role of companies. Customers want to see brands prove they’re interested in more than simply surviving through the pandemic and other crises. They want to see good corporate citizens making a difference in the communities they serve. A company’s ability to build trust is inherently linked to its values. Customers expect brands to share their values and communicate honestly and openly. Brands that turn their back on doing the right thing risk taking a hit to their bottom line. Consumers will take their business elsewhere. The majority (62%) of customers say they have stopped buying from a company whose values didn’t align with theirs. Empathetic, unified teams build differentiated engagement Whether customers shop for themselves or on behalf of their companies, they expect interactions with brands to not only be convenient and digital first, but also infused with empathy and understanding. To no surprise, our survey results show customers want organisations to relate to their specific needs and expectations at every touch point. And they are making purchasing decisions based on personalised experiences. There’s never been a more critical moment for companies to know their audience and relate to what they’re experiencing. Brands that get this – and actually invest in appreciating their customers’ varied perspectives – can gain a competitive advantage by delivering connected and contextualised engagement. While 66% of customers expect companies to understand their personal needs and expectations, only 34% say they usually do so. Moreover, more than half (52%) of customers expect offers to always be personalised. So, how can companies get it right? One important way is for brands to ensure everyone under their roof has real-time information. When customers engage with a company, they shouldn’t have to worry about reaching the right person. Our research shows 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. However, 54% say it generally feels like sales, service, and marketing don’t share information. “Disconnected experiences used to inconvenience customers,” noted Tiffani Bova, Growth and Innovation Evangelist at LIKE.TG. “They still do, but they cause so much more damage in our current environment because they signal insensitivity.” Prior to 2020, customers were well on their way to becoming more digitally dependent in their interactions with brands. From Amazon to Hulu, more and more customers grew accustomed to having their wishes granted at the push of a button. In a socially distanced environment, those same customers – and many new converts – have come to view digital engagement as not only a convenience, but a necessity. Brands, in turn, have had to accelerate their digital transformations. In just one year, online customer interactions grew from 42% (2019) to 60% (2020). While the sharp increase is, in part, a reflection of our overnight transition to a socially distanced society, the upward trend shouldn’t come as a surprise. Most brands were already in the midst of transforming their digital capabilities to cater to customers. COVID-19 just gave those plans a push. Customers agree, with 88% saying they expect companies to accelerate their digital initiatives because of the pandemic. Furthermore, 68% of customers agree that COVID-19 has elevated their expectations of brands’ digital capabilities. In 2020, people are living and working much of their lives online. In fact, the vast majority (68%) of consumers say they’re online more often than not. As a result, they’re looking for companies to provide more digital options. Fifty-four percent would like companies to introduce new products or services in response to the pandemic. “To me, this really drives home the point that, yes, digital transformation is essential, but we need to think about it as part of something bigger,” observed Brian Solis, Global Innovation Evangelist at LIKE.TG. “The companies that use this moment to understand not just how to digitise their existing businesses, but how technology can drive new, innovative experiences that set them apart will prove more resilient as we move into the next normal.” More insights to explore The findings uncovered by our research reveal a customer base that craves personalised, digital-first experiences from brands they can trust. As our world continues to adapt and shift day by day, business leaders have an opportunity to use this knowledge to revamp how they engage their customers. In addition to the broad trends covered above, this research offers insights across demographic subsets and geographic boundaries. To further dig into this data, check out our interactive Tableau dashboards. This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
How Customer Loyalty Turns SMEs Into Brands That Last
When it comes to long-term business success, customer loyalty is key. In today’s global marketplace, customers have become digital-first shoppers with thousands of suppliers at their fingertip. They can purchase any product imaginable in a heartbeat and being top of the shortlist when customers consider a purchase has never been more impactful, especially for SMEs. The key to making it there? Customer loyalty. What is customer loyalty and why is it important? Customer loyalty epitomises how customers feel about your brand, how willing they are to make a repeat purchase and whether they would recommend you to others. In today’s hyper-connected world, customer loyalty is much more important – and harder to earn. Customer expectation is at an all-time high and customers are more willing to switch brands if they have a bad experience. They also share their experiences, good and bad, more frequently. In the trust-based economy what buyers tell their friends has become key, and business success balances on customer satisfaction more than ever before. Loyal customers are also the biggest spenders. In fact, a 5% increase in customer retention has the power to increase profit by five times that amount. Just as significant, existing customers are 50% more likely to try new products and spend more on average than first-time buyers. Customer loyalty drives the bottom line and the digital economy has unlocked its impact. Quantifying loyalty The way customers shop online today has also opened up new lines of communication. More customers interact with brands directly rather than buying via third-party channels and personalising these interactions is an opportunity to make customer relationships more meaningful and appealing. With the right tools, your SME can leverage this connection and gain valuable insight into existing customer loyalty. As a result, you’ll also be able to develop tailored strategies to boost loyalty based on what your customers value most. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) Actionable data – and lots of it, is key to understanding your customers and increasing loyalty. Many successful businesses use the Customer Retention Rate (CRR) as a tool to gauge whether customers are choosing to stay with them. However, the CRR omits the human factor – how customers feel about your brand and your products. But a more complete picture can be obtained by using the Net Promoter Score (NPS), a simple, two-minute survey that transforms customer sentiment into an actionable metric. By asking customers how likely they are to recommend your brand to a friend on a scale of 0 to 10, the NPS subtracts the percentage of “Detractors” (scores of 6 and under) from the percentage of ‘Promoters’ (scores of 9 and above) to calculate a comparable loyalty benchmark. Simple, right? But the NPS is deceptively powerful, and high NPS scores are proven to correlate directly with growth. In fact, Harvard Business Review called the NPS the single best predictor of growth and the one number you need to grow as a business. While it provides a strong benchmark, the NPS alone is not complex enough to understand where loyalty originates and how to improve it. To overcome this, consider adding an open-ended question to your survey like “how can we improve your experience?”, or “what do you like most/least about our product?” By asking customers what matters most, you can develop a loyalty strategy that targets real needs, rather than blowing the budget on perks that don’t rate. Something to keep in mind is that the NPS varies greatly across industries. For example, if you’re in the car rental business, a score of 15 may be stellar – but in the streaming industry, the same score could be abysmal. Get articles selected just for you, in your inbox Sign up now Understanding customer needs Perhaps your SME already has solid NPS scores. Great! But now what? While the NPS is a starting point to benchmark future initiatives, the real prize is understanding what matters most to customers. Some are loyal to specific products and their price, quality or ease-of-use. For others, these perks play no role whatsoever; they are loyal to your brand, its reputation or image. Your customers are from all walks of life and won’t fit smoothly into one category or another. However, to develop a stellar strategy for boosting loyalty, it’s important you understand what drives your customers. A few basic categories your customers may fall into include: Satisfied customers: feel they receive high quality products Price-loyal customers: feel they receive the best value for their money Loyalty-programme customers: enjoy receiving freebies through loyalty memberships Convenience customers: enjoy the ease of a product or service Brand-loyal customers: love the company and its products By using the NPS to understand customer composition, you can set up a strategy and solutions that meet their specific expectations. Do your customers favour quick and easy fulfilment? Offer overnight shipping for the convenience crowd. Is price important? Consider special promotions and discounts for bargain-hunters. A sound loyalty strategy identifies key issues with tools like the NPS to make sure perks and promotions gel with what customers really want and are meaningful. Key loyalty builders Today, building customer loyalty goes beyond price and individual perks alone. To feel a connection, customers also want personalised experiences and new ways to engage. They want to feel heard across all the channels they use. In short, they want to feel seen as a real human, rather than a random entry in a spreadsheet. Our LIKE.TG State of the Connected Customer report reveals key insights on how to build loyalty by focusing on customer interaction. To boost loyalty: Offer Loyalty Programmes More than 50% of customers see companies as too impersonal today. Loyalty programmes build a more personalised connection by rewarding customers with exclusive events, early access and members-only benefits. Provide Multi-Channel Support Lack of support is a notorious loyalty killer. Customers want to be helped in ways they’re most comfortable with, especially when they have an issue. Research shows that customers place the most value on quick and easy points of contact and documentation, like well-maintained FAQs and real-time messaging support. Offer Different Ways to Engage Customers often welcome opportunities to connect outside formal channels. In fact, 72% of customers expect vendors to personalise engagement to their own needs. Online communities, a social media presence or a well-maintained blog offer customers more choice to engage with you. Build Trust by Being Generous & Showing Gratitude 54% of customers don’t believe companies have their best interests in mind – 94% say trust is essential to become a loyal buyer. Sometimes, that means being generous, and incurring additional costs now for better engagement later. Forgiving return policies and warranty programmes build trust and create more loyal customers in the future. Evolve Your Business Over Time More than 50% of customers actively seek out the most innovative brands – and continuous evolution is key to keeping customers engaged and buying. By piloting new approaches, like user-generated content or gamification, businesses can innovate beyond the scope of their product and keep interacting interesting. The universal approach: customer experience While each of these strategies address some customers more than others, they all feed into a loyalty builder that appeals to almost everyone. Customer Experience – aka, the customer journey, encompasses everything including first contact, choosing a product to after-sales. In fact, 80% of customers say that they consider customer experience just as important as the product itself. What’s more, 70% say they would pay extra for a great experience. A great customer experience enables customers to engage with the brand and product at eye-level, at every stage with seamless handoffs along the way. Providing reliable support and letting the customer know their feedback matters – by way of the NPS for example – builds a two-way connection that invests customers in your brand in ways simply using the product cannot. The stark reality is that 67% of customers have recently switched vendors for a better experience. And the heyday of customer experience is only beginning: the younger the audience, the more likely they are to switch. Creating experiences that last Entrepreneur Tony Hsieh said: “Customer service shouldn’t just be a department; it should be the entire company.” Building enduring customer loyalty boils down to a simple but powerful truth: the customer comes first. By gauging loyalty with the NPS, using a data-driven approach to identify customer needs, and addressing them in a tailored and value-focused way, you can build lasting relationships, cut costs, drive sales and supercharge your brand. The reality is that it’s not the customer’s job to remember your business. But it is your job to ensure the customer has an outstanding experience that inspires them to become a loyal buyer and champion your brand.
How Daughters Of Tomorrow Is Using LIKE.TG To Empower Singapore’s Underprivileged Women
More than 25,000 women from low-income families in Singapore are struggling to find and sustain a living. That’s a statistic Daughters Of Tomorrow (DOT) is working hard to change. The Singapore-based IPC charity supports underprivileged women in Singapore to build financially independent and resilient families. Since 2014, DOT has impacted more than 1,100 women through befriending, skills-training, job-bridging and post-employment support programs. That’s an excellent achievement, but Kaylee Kua, Senior Manager, Programs & Operation at DOT, says there’s much more to be done for Singapore’s underprivileged women and families. “There are a lot of women in Singapore who have challenges finding livelihood opportunities,” she explains. “Many of our beneficiaries have often had a long hiatus from work due to care-giving duties, and they may be disjointed from what is currently happening in the job market. “Our beneficiaries often do not have the privilege to further their education, and this results in them only having the accessibility to work in blue collar jobs. However, that often requires shift work, which is not mum-friendly.” To make matters worse, Kua says the financial situation for many of Singapore’s low-income families got worse during COVID-19. “A lot of low to middle income families lost their jobs during the pandemic,” she explains. “The income gap is widening, and this is creating a group of new poor.” This has created a perfect storm for many of Singapore’s struggling families. Kua says it’s a battle that must be fought on multiple fronts. “We have to help rebuild our beneficiaries confidence, and support them to reskill. At the same time, we need to help employers understand the challenges our beneficiaries face, provide working arrangements suitable for care-givers, and pay a living income.” Consolidating the development journey These are serious and complex problems. But the dedicated team at DOT is up to the challenge. They are using digital transformation to streamline operational processes and personalise their approach. “We started with four employees working from colour-coded spreadsheets,” Kua explains. “But as our team grew, it became more difficult to collaborate. As a registered charity, we also need to make sure our annual reports are accurate. But this was difficult without a consolidated data source.” DOT beneficiaries follow a thorough personal and professional development journey. This requires beneficiaries to engage with several DOT teams as they complete each stage of their journey. Kua explains that after women are referred to DOT by their social workers, they complete the DOT Confidence Curriculum. Many move on to the befriending program, then go through a bridging process into employment. Finally, beneficiaries receive six months of post-employment support. Each time a beneficiary moves onto a new stage in their journey, their case is handed over to the relevant DOT team. As the organisation grew, this process became increasingly difficult to manage. Unifying beneficiary data Kua says DOT needed a consolidated 360-degree view of each beneficiary’s personal progress and needs. The solution was LIKE.TG’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP). NPSP helps DOT to organise program, beneficiary and fundraising data. It provides a unified view of beneficiary data across programs, and supports personalised relationship management from a single platform. “Initial adoption in 2018 was tough,” says Kua. “We had to limit access to our old database and spreadsheets, and put a cut-off date on employee access to it. But as our LIKE.TG system grew with new functionalities, the team saw how it was improving our processes. “All the beneficiary data can now be easily handed over to the next team when a beneficiary progresses on their journey. LIKE.TG has helped us to streamline a lot of processes, and makes reporting much easier and more accurate.” Jonathan Tan, Assistant Manager, Marketing and Data at DOT, holds fortnightly meetings with volunteer LIKE.TG Architects who help with user training and platform customisation. “We use Trailhead for step-by-step guidance, and the LIKE.TG volunteers help us with more complex customisations. There are certain new processes we want to add in as we grow, and the LIKE.TG volunteers help us deploy new functions much more quickly.” Closing the income gap Tan says the next step on DOT’s digital transformation is to implement Pardot and Experience Cloud to increase donor funding and engagement, support outreach to volunteers, and provide more timely updates to befrienders about the progress of their befriendees. Kua explains the organisation is also looking into technology to eliminate human biases in decision making. This, she says, will ensure every beneficiary has the same positive experience. But in the short-term, Kua says DOT will remain focused on providing practical support and driving digital inclusion for Singapore’s underprivileged women and low-income families. “The truth is that many of our beneficiaries who have been in long-term employment are still struggling to make it out of the poverty cycle,” Kua concludes. “Over the next few years, we will be advocating for employers to help close the income gap. “Women are currently the main care-givers, and we need employers to understand their challenges and needs. While society changes its views on care-giving roles and responsibilities, we also need employers to re-evaluate the value of work and pay more sustainable wages, so that hardworking families can rise out of poverty. Technology will help us shift the needle.” Learn more about how Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) supports charity organisations to help people in need.
How Demand Generation Marketing Helps You Win Over Customers
You can’t sell something to someone you don’t know exists yet, and they can’t buy anything from a company they’ve never heard of. Demand generation marketing (or “demand gen,” for short) means finding, learning about, and winning over potential customers. It’s about helping that person realise that your product helps solve their problems (when that happens, it’s called generating demand). It’s not quite as easy as it sounds, so we’re here to make it simpler. There are plenty of obstacles between you and good demand generation marketing, but fortunately also plenty of ways to conquer them. In this piece, we’re going to walk you through some of these challenges, the keys to overcoming them, the objectives and processes that fuel successful demand gen, and why good demand gen is worth the effort. Then we’ll show you what successful demand generation marketing looks like in the real world. What is demand generation marketing? Demand generation marketing builds brand awareness, educates potential customers, and ultimately motivates them to interact with a brand. There are many ways to approach or think of demand generation marketing, but at its core it has five basic steps: Brand awareness and education: Make potential customers aware of your brand and product, and how they’re unique. Lead generation: Give those newly aware customers a reason to be curious about or interested in the brand, becoming “leads” in the process. Lead nurturing: Entice those leads to become more involved with the brand and more likely to purchase from it. You can do this through free content or gated assets the customer can get in exchange for sharing their information. Conversion: When a lead is properly nurtured, they start buying from your brand and become a customer. Tracking and data analysis: Learn from every conversion (and from failed conversion opportunities) to refine your demand generation approach and work toward more consistent results and higher conversion rates. What are the marketing challenges of demand generation? Demand generation faces a more crowded marketplace than ever before. Your competitors are all doing it too, so you need to find a way to stand out. The main challenge is keeping your customers’ and potential customers’ interest and attention focused on you — even as they’re inundated with lots of content. Those customers also expect more and more from brands. Having so many options affords them the freedom to be choosy, and they tend to pick brands that can speak to them on a personal level. Our State of the Connected Customer report found that 80% of customers say the experience a brand provides is just as important as its products or services. Additionally, our State of Marketing report found that 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. So how do you guarantee those quality experiences to thousands or millions of people at a unique personal level? Your data is the key to overcoming both those challenges, but it’s also a challenge unto itself. With so many different streams active – web, email, social media, etc. – how do you sort, organise, and process all that incoming data in a way that’s easily accessible for your teams? How do you make sure everyone has access to the same data, and how do you make sure that data is correct? Having a complete picture of your customer from all their various data streams is extremely valuable – to be frank, at this point it’s virtually a necessity for good demand generation. But creating that picture means being able to process a tremendous volume of incoming data very quickly, and being able to turn all that raw data into something easily digestible and useful for your teams.Businesses also need to figure out where AI fits into their demand generation marketing approach. Your competitors are using it, so you need to figure out how to use it better than they do. Get articles selected just for you, in your inbox Sign up now What are the key components of demand generation marketing? Who, what, why, how, where, and when? The six most common questions in the English language are also the key components of good demand gen. Whom should you be targeting? What do they need, and why do they need it? How and where do you reach them (and how do you tell if it’s working)? When is it time to check back in, change up your approach, incorporate new technology, or jump on a trend? The best way to answer these is with good data, audience segmentation, and targeting. Strong first-party data is best – that’s your potential customers (or “leads” in traditional demand gen parlance) themselves giving you the answers, but good market research and a good customer data platform can help you find them even in the absence of first party data. Once you know who they are, you should segment them according to both their needs and your strategy. All your leads probably want something you offer, but they don’t all want the same thing (or respond to it the same way). Finding and sorting these prospects is usually called “lead generation.” Once you’ve got your leads segmented out by who they are and what they want, the next step is targeting “why.” That’s also when you start answering your own “how.” No matter what they want or why they want it, the best way you’re going to help them realise you can give it to them is with quality content. Your data, segmenting, and targeting should give you a pretty good idea of what they’re receptive to, so your responsibility is to make sure you’re making that content as compelling as possible. AI is a big player here, as it’s the key to helping you deliver timely, personalised content at scale.“Where?” is about making sure that content reaches them in the right place. A good multi-channel marketing approach makes sure you reach your leads on the channels where they’re most responsive. From there, you move from lead generation to “lead nurturing.” This can mean different things to different businesses, but mostly it’s about taking a lead from being someone who’s aware of your brand to someone who’s actively buying from it. A good lead nurturing strategy makes all the difference in the world.Finally, you get to your “when?” You should be making data-driven marketing decisions based on how your leads are responding to your demand generation marketing efforts, so you know exactly when to scale up or down, or if it’s time to try another tactic. You also want to make sure your sales and marketing teams are using the same platform, so when your leads are ready to become customers, the transition is smooth and efficient. What are the key objectives of demand generation marketing? The first thing you need your demand generation to do is increase awareness and visibility. Nobody can buy from your brand if they don’t know it exists, and even potential leads who may vaguely know who you are may not realise exactly what you offer.Another major objective is generating and nurturing leads from that awareness. It’s not enough to simply make those leads aware of your brand, you want to motivate them to engage with it, and ultimately to convert. Once you’ve got a consistent recipe to turn awareness into leads into conversion, your demand generation becomes one of your most powerful drivers of revenue. The right plan can help you convert unaware prospects into repeat customers that keep your business growing. What is the demand generation process? So how do you actually do demand generation marketing? Let’s dig a little deeper into those key areas from above: Step 1: Create brand awareness with your content marketing, thought leadership, and social media content. Use SEO best practices to help more potential leads find your content. Step 2: Generate leads through lead magnets, data analysis, landing pages, forms, webinars, and other events. Offer high-quality free content or gated assets in exchange for customers volunteering their information. Step 3: Nurture leads using targeted email marketing, personalised content, and scalable marketing automation tools. Use unified data and cross-functional platforms to help marketing and sales work in harmony. Step 4: Improve conversions and sales by optimising your landing pages and user experience and by writing killer CTAs. You can use your data to implement intelligent lead scoring and qualification processes that make sure you only spend your resources on leads you can actually convert. Step 5: Track your results and improve your approach by identifying which metrics are most useful in evaluating your demand gen. And have a reliable process for adjusting based on what those results are telling you. AI is a tool that can make every one of those steps easier and more effective. AI-driven personalisation is the key to steps 1-3. AI lead scoring and data analytics drastically reduce the workload required to execute steps 4 and 5 effectively. What are the benefits of demand generation marketing? Following these basic guidelines and using the right automation tools makes demand generation marketing a powerful force that benefits your business up and down the funnel. At the top of the funnel, good demand gen gives you a wider audience that’s more familiar with your brand, which quickly translates to greater market share. Good lead generation helps fill up the middle of your funnel, while good lead nurturing makes sure they make it to the bottom. The personalised content and data-driven approaches you took on the way there help spark ongoing customer engagement and loyalty well beyond that first purchase.All this adds up to more customers, more engagement, more conversions, and ultimately, a healthier business enjoying consistent, replicable growth.
How Digital Unlocks New Growth Opportunities for Telcos
Cheng Kian Khor is Director of Communications Industry Strategy for LIKE.TG in the Asia-Pacific region. Cheng Kian has 24 years of experience in the telco industry, in a range of consulting, chief architect, and global solution leader roles at leading companies. More by Cheng Kian. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed more customers online, and they are staying there. Now it’s up to companies to meet customers online and offer digital-first experiences. According to a recent LIKE.TG State of the Connected Consumer report, 88% of customers expect companies to accelerate digital initiatives due to COVID-19. This demand for digital engagement presents an opportunity for communications service providers (CSPs). Some CSPs are already moving from selling connectivity to becoming digital-first service providers. Others are expanding their offerings and building lifestyle-focused digital commerce storefronts. It’s an exciting time for Asia’s CSPs as many begin to redefine what telcos will look like in 2021 and beyond. Putting the customer in control Singapore-based M1 is undergoing a digital transformation to be more agile and customer-centric, to better serve its customers in the digital world. Even through the crisis, the Singapore-based CSP has accelerated its digital transformation. “Our vision is to become a digital-first telco and provide new experiences for our customers,” said Nathan Bell, Chief Digital Officer at M1. “This will involve driving new digital capabilities into the business and reimagining our ways of working so that we can add more value to every interaction.” CSPs like M1 are using digitalisation to put customers in control. To achieve that, they must deliver consistent customer experiences across all digital channels. M1 uses LIKE.TG Communications Cloud to enable customers to build their own plans. This was vital when customers were avoiding store visits during the pandemic. It also provides a solid foundation for ongoing digitalisation. “More of our customers are looking for solutions that are available as they need them,” explained Bell. “We want our customers to know we are there to support them in their time of need. And that we can evolve to meet their ongoing requirements.” Becoming more than a telco Digitalisation also presents an opportunity for CSPs to embrace wider ecommerce. Some are now offering a broader range of merchandise, goods, and accessories. These are often bundled as attractive offers and promotions. From gaming chairs to hairdryers and apparel, some CSPs are diversifying their product catalogues and presenting slick digital storefronts. But what do gaming chairs have to do with telecommunications services? Absolutely nothing! And that’s the point. CSPs are using ecommerce to expand beyond traditional telco products and services. This is part of their journeys to becoming genuine digital lifestyle brands. Solutions like LIKE.TG Commerce Cloud help CSPs pivot towards digital sales. Commerce Cloud, for example, does the heavy lifting for CSPs. It enables companies to deliver pure digital commerce and digital-first mobile experiences. With Commerce Cloud, CSPs can create personalised shopping experiences across all digital channels. Whether the customer wants to buy the latest smartphone release, or a new Xbox gaming console. This opens an opportunity for CSPs to become so much more than a run-of-the-mill telco. Suddenly, the digital experience is no longer just about checking bills and phone plans. CSPs can become genuine digital-first lifestyle brands. Enabling digital-first experiences Of course, this is much easier said than done. Ecommerce has traditionally been an afterthought for CSPs. Cumbersome digital storefronts were typically bolted onto legacy systems. This created scalability issues. For instance, the surge of new smartphone orders on launch day would often overload telco websites that were not designed to cope with peak order volumes. Custom legacy storefronts were also cumbersome and slow to market when adding new products or offers. That made it hard for many CSPs to scale up for Cyber Monday and Black Friday sales. All these meant that it was challenging for CSPs to leverage digital commerce opportunities. That’s why CSPs are transitioning away from using heavily customised legacy platforms for commerce and customer engagement. Instead, they are embracing new digital-first, customer-centric cloud platforms. Communications Cloud and Commerce Cloud enable CSPs to skip the legacy bolt-ons. Instead, they harness cloud connectivity to deliver pure digital commerce experiences. They also enable scalable digital storefronts and customer-centric mobile apps. Unlocking the growth potential of digital The future is bright for CSPs that understand the full potential of digitalisation. Digital is an integral part of the post-pandemic world. To be successful, CSPs must meet customers online and deliver digital-first experiences. That’s how CSPs can become genuine digital lifestyle brands and unlock new growth opportunities. But unlocking these opportunities is not possible with legacy platforms and ecommerce as an afterthought. Digital-first user experience and commerce must become a key component of business strategy. Digital-first cloud platforms like Communications Cloud and Commerce Cloud can help drive CSPs’ digital transformation. Explore Communications Cloud and Commerce Cloud for your digital commerce requirements.
How Do We Make Customer Centricity More Than a Tagline?
A little while back, I had a conversation with best-selling author and digital anthropologist, Brian Solis. He’s also LIKE.TG’s Global Innovation Evangelist. The main focus of our conversation was customer centricity, which is a phrase we hear a lot these days. Brian sometimes describes himself as a futurist — another word we hear a lot. I’ll let Brian describe exactly what that means to him: “Digital anthropology lets us understand how technology impacts communities. If you want to deliver better customer service for a digital-first brain, you need to understand what it is that they value, and what they expect. It helps to humanise the business, giving technology a sense of greater purpose. We’re going full steam ahead on digital, and we tend to make it transactional. We miss that warmth, and technology’s power to develop more meaningful relationships. The role of a futurist is to translate those trends. We ask what the next few years are going to look like, so that we can start to plan ahead rather than react to the next disruption.” I really enjoyed my conversation with Brian. Here are my takeaways, including how we can make customer centricity more than just a tagline: What does customer centricity really mean? As Brian said in our conversation, you could ask any executive from any company in any industry whether their organisation is customer centric, and they would say yes. That presents us with a challenge: how can we define customer centricity? Many organisations use it as a philosophy, but perhaps don’t have the tools to turn that into practical activity. In reality, being customer centric comes down to whether or not your operations, decision-making, and planning are all based on the information you have about your customers. That data has to be accessible to everyone. If you don’t have a single source of truth about your customers, it is very difficult to be truly customer centric. Brian told me about some research that we’ve conducted recently. It found that only 13% of businesses around the world have a single view of their customers and can act in real time based on that data. That means we still have a long way to go before every company is truly customer centric. The gift of customer service Customer service teams have the opportunity to drive the move to total customer centricity. It could be said that customer service is often a weak link in the customer journey. You don’t often hear customers telling stories of being excited to contact customer service, after all. It doesn’t have to be that way. Some of the best companies in the world have turned excellent customer service into a competitive advantage. As Brian puts it: “Service means to serve, to help, to advise. If you think about it, it’s a gift. You might have a customer who’s in need of attention. And if you can deliver that, then they will feel a sense of reciprocity. That can turn into loyalty in the form of an additional purchase down the road, or a referral. And these are all wonderful things.” Successful businesses share the desire to deliver a better experience. An experience is an emotional reaction to a moment. If it’s exceptional, you’re going to remember it. This is where many businesses make mistakes. They either deliver bad experiences, or they deliver mediocre experiences thinking that it just checks the box. It takes effort, and the right organisational structure, to deliver exceptional experiences. A reset moment for business We have an opportunity to reinvent what it means to do business. This isn’t about the digitisation of old practices. We can invent new ways of working using the technology available to us. Part of this big reset moment is changing how we think about our data, and what metrics we choose to concentrate on. Measuring clicks to resolution, or response times, is measuring the barriers to customer satisfaction. What would happen if, instead, we started to measure the things we want to succeed at — satisfaction, lifetime value, etc.? These are human centred metrics that will ensure that we focus our efforts on improving the customer experience. Brian says we need to have a ‘control-alt-delete’ moment: “Customers now have a more powerful voice that is being exercised through their digital transformation. The next wave of disruption is happening because people are looking for, and finding, better experiences. So, if we want to become truly customer centred, we have to start thinking like the customer and looking for ways to fix what’s broken. We have to innovate and deliver something new that we might not have otherwise thought of before.” The ‘experience style guide’ Brian also introduced me to the concept of the ‘experience style guide’. Many organisations have a style guide that dictates how their marketing materials should look, or their tone of voice. How many have a document that defines what customer service should feel like for the customer? It has the power to become a very important piece of policy for any business. An understanding of your business’s experience style guide would be just as important as understanding its branding or marketing messaging. You can empower your customer service teams by reminding them that they are a key part of your organisation. Their efforts are a meaningful driver of positive customer experience, and have a direct effect on the value of the brand. It’s time for C-suite engagement This kind of change in attitude should come from the top. To succeed, your organisation needs a culture of innovation, a culture of empowerment, and a culture of customer centricity. The CEO is the only one who could own that. It can be incredibly difficult for executives to find the time to engage with this kind of thinking. In between meetings, we’re usually catching up on our inboxes, or dealing with dozens of competing priorities. Sadly, this makes it difficult to have that empathy that’s really required to understand your customer, and to know what a day in their life is like. The advice I would give is to become your customer. Try a reverse-mentorship with an employee, or with a customer who lives life differently than you. That way, you can understand their needs. For more insights into how customer service is the backbone of your brand, download our State of Service report.
How Does LIKE.TG Use Slack To Collaborate and Connect?
On July 21, 2021 LIKE.TG completed its acquisition of Slack. This brings together the #1 CRM and the trailblazing digital platform for the work-from-anywhere world. Businesses need to be successful from home and office — especially in this era of flexible work. Slack makes workflows seamless and supports the way people naturally work together: in real-time or not, in-person and remote, structured and informal. LIKE.TG and Slack bring together all your teams with the apps and data they need in a single, collaborative workspace. Plus, Slack Connect functionality lets internal teams engage more productively with external partners, vendors, agencies, and customers. So you can deliver the exceptional experiences that help grow your business. Slack is also changing the way we work here at LIKE.TG. We have new ways to connect anywhere, anytime. We’re building greater transparency into everything we do with teammates, stakeholders, partners, and customers. We’re sending way fewer emails, and we’re using features like Huddles for impromptu voice chats. In short: We’re collaborating in real-time. What does this collaboration and communication look like in practice? We talked to Samuel Steele, Head of Strategic & Sales Programs Office, ASEAN, and Mildred Chow, Creative Services Professional, Strategic & Sales Programs Office, ASEAN, both LIKE.TG employees based in Singapore. They gave us an idea of how they use Slack in their team, and how it’s changed their approach to work. Of course, the best place to have this conversation was on Slack! For details on this infographic, please click here.
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