How IT Can Measure Return on Experience (ROX) Effectively
Information technology (IT) people love to measure everything. Clicks, files stored, uptime, load times, costs, error rates, and other metrics tie to our companies’ digital footprint. Why are we so obsessed with metrics? Because you cannot grow what you don’t measure. We want to capture the value gained from digital transformation, and help identify the gaps. If you’re looking to track progress, the most comprehensive measure of business value delivered by IT is return on experience (ROX). You simply can’t afford not to include it in your metrics analysis. IT leaders carry huge responsibility for return on experience Every digital experience is a path to customer, partner, and employee success. It’s up to IT leaders to deliver digital experiences that move the company forward on time and on budget. Measuring ROX as you go keeps projects on track and makes them far more successful in the end. ROX captures the results of your investments in digital experiences. In many cases, it’s the justification and rationale for these investments. These experiences include everything from blogs, mobile commerce, online customer service, HR portals, and novel uses of connected devices. To measure ROX, you need to proactively track and measure key metrics related to the experience and your organisation’s overall vision. To measure ROX for IT, use a combination of these metrics: One or two relevant speed and cost metrics, like how long it takes a person to fill out a registration form. A customer-focused metric, like net promoter score or customer satisfaction. Include a metric or two from the business leader driving the experience, such as seamlessness to implement across teams. For instance, on a website, make IT metrics and other success metrics part of experience planning from the beginning. IT may be focused on 100% uptime, 20% cost reduction, and simple integrations with existing systems. A marketer might care more about conversion rates or other key marketing metrics. Key metrics for evaluating ROX for IT Here are a few sample metrics you can use to get started: 1. Speed You’re probably already tracking speed performance metrics for your digital experiences, such as commerce, service, and mobile. Keep it up — no one will stick around for a digital experience that takes too long to load. You can also measure and track time to task completion for key user experiences, such as subscribing to your newsletter, updating account information, or making a purchase. A good experience will be faster for users without increasing bounce or abandon rates. Consider PUMA, which transformed and relaunched its mobile sites, and gained speed in the process. Its mobile sites render 35% faster and load 69% faster. 2. Time to market This metric measures the total time required to develop and launch a product or feature. Consider it a key IT success metric for digital experiences. 3. Cost to maintain Track the impact of digital experience investments in both technology and resource use. Moving to better digital experiences will likely involve an upfront IT investment. But very often, that investment involves removing a dated technology that drains resources. Take content management systems (CMS) as an example. Traditional CMS can turn content management ideas into IT projects. In contrast, some approaches to CMS empower content creators to do more without requiring IT resources other than governance. More importantly, they also support better digital experiences. 4. Cost to implement Upfront costs impact ROX, too. Add up all the costs of the technology, professional services, and training needed to support the experience. Consider budgeted costs as well as actual costs. Delivering at or below budget is appreciated by any organisation, large or small. 5. Engagement Successful digital experiences engage an audience. You can measure the ROX of virtually any experience simply by tracking engagement rates for the intended audience. 6. Customer satisfaction Calculate this metric by asking customers to rate their satisfaction with an experience or specific interaction on a 10-point scale and average the results. Customer satisfaction provides you with an idea of how successful a digital experience is overall. This is a good metric to consider along with costs. A digital experience that positively shifts costs but lowers overall satisfaction is incomplete. 7. Net promoter score (NPS) Like customer satisfaction, you capture data for this metric by surveying customers. NPS measures the likelihood of customers to recommend your brand. Ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand using a 10-point scale. Scores of 9s and 10s are promoters, 7s and 8s are satisfied, and lower scores come from detractors. Subtract your percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. That’s your NPS. Learn how you can connect and build with Slack and the LIKE.TG Platform. Watch demos or take a tour to create and ship anywhere — no heavy coding required. This post was originally published on the U.S-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
How IT Leaders Can Automate CRM Reports and Drive Innovation
IT leaders are constantly encouraged to drive innovation across their organisations. For IT to fulfill its potential, you need to enable all teams to succeed. One simple way to manage this is to use customer relationship management (CRM) data to create automated dashboards and reports. These can help to provide essential insights for sales and marketing colleagues, such as opportunities they might have missed. They also free up time by eliminating manual processes that can slow down service delivery — time that can then be used to improve customer experience. What IT needs to know to create CRM reports that add value To create automated dashboards that will help your colleagues meet their goals, start with a clear picture of what the business is looking for. Before jumping straight to KPIs, try asking: What insights do you want? What value do you hope to gain from these reports? What metrics do you need to understand your business and measure success? For a service organisation, for example, customer satisfaction surveys or the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) will be a critical metric in a CRM dashboard. Not only does it provide a quantitative assessment of customer satisfaction, but it also allows you to measure that metric in the context of quarterly or annual targets. It can even be benchmarked against the performance of sales or service representatives, or against other organisations. Consider a Software as a Service company, where continued use of the product is a good measure of satisfaction. Additionally, you can assess a customer’s satisfaction by measuring the licenses they purchase, how many times they renew their contract, and how often they buy add-ons. If data related to upgrades, renewals, and repurchases can be delivered automatically to a service representative’s dashboard, they have a complete 360-degree view of the customer. From there, forecasting opportunities can be made more accurately and the data can be shared with sales reps who can take action on those opportunities. Reporting on opportunities is a fundamental function of the LIKE.TG platform and is critical to all organisations. There are many ways of reporting on both quantity and quality of opportunities: How are lead-generation campaigns progressing? How fast are deals moving? What’s the conversion rate? Where does the organisation stand in relation to its competitors? How much time or money is spent on moving deals forward? These insights can be surfaced through automated dashboards, using a company’s CRM data. How IT can track the value of its own CRM reporting The success of IT depends on its ability to meet the needs of the business. Sometimes, that involves looking at the IT function through the lens of serving its internal customers. How well are team leaders able to use the dashboards created? Once the reports are in use, the reader should be able to interpret them without help from the creator. You can track how often the reports are accessed, and test which ones are actually being used. It’s critical also to track what resources and activities go into building those automated systems. From a return on investment perspective, this is a valuable metric. Ultimately, the IT team is not there just to execute the directions of leaders. You could proactively use your valuable experience and knowledge of technology in a consultative way. It’s about finding the opportunities to add more value and surface more revealing insights that the entire business can benefit from. Again, a good place to start is with some questions: What aspects of my knowledge can I apply to these dashboards to elevate them above the standard reports? How can my work with other teams be applied here? Are there any existing resources I can leverage to streamline this process? A dashboard that’s making a difference Clean Your Room is a powerful example of a dashboard that the LIKE.TG Sales Operations team developed to help our sales leaders. This dashboard helps sales to see opportunities they might otherwise miss. There are often important customers or opportunities that may not have received the same focus as others. Perhaps they haven’t been captured in a standard forecast, as they fall just outside the parameters of what would normally get a salesperson’s attention. Clean Your Room reveals customers that the organisation hasn’t engaged with via a call or email in a chosen period of time. It also highlights opportunities that haven’t been thoroughly explored due to a lack of some critical information. By spending a little time evaluating this report, potential leads could be uncovered. This is an example of how an IT team works proactively to bring fresh insights and opportunities to business leaders, rather than just acting on requests. Start creating CRM automated reports and dashboards Trailhead is the first step in learning how to start working with automated reports and dashboards. There are plenty of modules and Trail Mixes to get you started on your journey. LIKE.TG also has blogs and resources pages like LIKE.TG Help to assist with questions about creating and using reports and dashboards. You can also make use of the Trailblazer community. This is an extremely useful resource, with passionate users ready to share real-life examples of what has and hasn’t worked for other teams. It’s also important to learn from other parts of your organisation about how they’ve made use of your CRM. Learn from their solutions to challenges, and consider using their existing reports as templates. Insights lead to innovation As a team, IT is ideally placed to uncover insights and drive innovation. By understanding how the business sells, markets, and engages with customers, you can best advise on the technology to fit your needs. If your organisation sells software, you also understand intimately how your own products work. A LIKE.TG CRM can be configured to suit your needs. As soon as there is an understanding of your organisation’s requirements, you can start to create dashboards and reports to generate the insights that drive innovation. Find out more about LIKE.TG for IT.
How Kerry Express Delivers a Winning Customer Experience
The last two years have seen a major digital shift in the way customers engage with brands. According to the latest State of the Connected Customer report, today’s customers are more active on digital channels than in 2020. Even as they return to in-person experiences, this digital-first customer behaviour is likely to continue. However, while 85% of customers expect a consistent experience across channels and departments, 43% of customers still prefer non-digital channels when engaging with a brand. This makes it critical to provide customers a satisfying online and offline experience. As businesses strive to meet evolving customer expectations, building trust is proving more crucial than ever. So, how can brands build and maintain trust? How can they create seamless, connected experiences that build long-term customer relationships? Reimagine the customer journey The challenges and disruptions we face in recent years have significantly changed the needs and preferences of customers. Businesses need to gain a deep understanding of these changes to be able to craft a connected customer experience. “The pandemic pushed customers to buy more items online that they would have previously bought offline,” said Dave Liu, Director, Business Operations, Kerry Express, a leading delivery service in Thailand. “From bulky items and mobile devices to cold chain products, including seafood, were increasingly ordered online.” Dave also observed an increase in home deliveries compared to office deliveries while people worked remotely during the pandemic. There was also a rise in orders from locations outside the main cities. “Even now, with the easing of social restrictions, we don’t see these shifts in online customer behaviour really dropping,” said Dave. To meet these changes in customer expectations and shifts in demand, businesses need to redesign their customer journey. By focusing on what matters to customers, brands can understand their motivations and behaviours across channels. Kerry Express went about doing this by putting the customer at the centre of their journey mapping. Unify and personalise customer experience across channels With the shift to digital-first experiences, customers expect a personal touch when engaging with brands. 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, while 62% expect companies to anticipate their needs. To build trust and make customers feel their needs are understood, businesses should focus on personalising the customer journey. Kerry Express did this by focusing on every touch point to make life easier for customers. “Most of our customers are online sellers. To serve them better, we created a seamless environment across online and offline channels,” said Dave. “We have created a variety of online tools from websites to chats along with offline channels for sellers and employees to engage customers. We also provide support to every employee to go to every customer touch point to provide support to customers.” By offering a variety of pickup and delivery options, Kerry Express catered to the preferences of both sellers and recipients. Customers could also update their order fulfilment preferences at any time — from home delivery to pick-up at collection centres or self-collection of products. To deliver such a highly personalised experience, a business needs to have a 360 degree view of the customer journey across channels. Cloud-based CRM provides a single, comprehensive view of customer behaviour on an integrated platform powered by AI. This helps deliver a seamless, connected experience at every stage of the customer journey. Leverage technology to create a connected experience By investing in the digitalisation of systems and business processes, a brand can improve its ability to meet customer expectations. According to Dave, this digitalisation should be implemented with a sound strategy. “It helps to consider two perspectives when looking to digitalise your services — the customer’s and the customer service agent’s,” said Dave. “First, always consider if a service area can move online or to self-service or chat bots without creating much inconvenience to customers. This can immensely help service agents by reducing the volume of service requests. By monitoring the type of calls coming into the contact centre, we can get an idea of the types of services that can be shifted online.” Kerry Express empowered their agents with platforms that gave them a comprehensive view of their entire operations. This helped them better manage customer expectations by giving them visibility at every stage of the customer journey. By leveraging AI to analyse operational data, their senior executives were also able to make the right operational decisions. “During the pandemic, we saw customer demand shifting from the city centres to the outskirts. From the data available to us, we were able to mobilise our resources to cater to this shifting demand. AI has been very useful in analysing data to make informed operational and business decisions.” Meeting the high expectations of today’s digital first customers is critical to business growth. By leveraging data to create a connected customer journey across channels, businesses can deliver unrivalled experiences, deepen trust, and build loyalty. Get more insights from Dave Liu of Kerry Express on how to create a seamless and connected service experience across the customer lifecycle. Watch the webinar Seamless Service for the Digital-First Connected Customer. To learn more about creating connected customer experiences, read the State of Connected Customer report.
How Knorex Is Using the Productivity Solutions Grant To Accelerate Digital Transformation
More than half of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) say technology drives the growth of their customer base. From automating manual processes and improving productivity to enabling employee collaboration across regions, digital transformation is enabling companies to pivot to growth. A government-funded grant is now supporting SMEs in Singapore to spark their digital transformation. The Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) enables SMEs to accelerate digital transformation, increase productivity, and close deals remotely with customisable and scalable LIKE.TG solutions. The PSG is supported by the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA). It provides grant support of up to 80% on pre-approved vendor solutions, including LIKE.TG CRM Sales Cloud. Participating SMEs can now deploy LIKE.TG within weeks. Our Jump Start program helps businesses to configure end-to-end processes and increase team efficiency with guidance and setup assistance from LIKE.TG experts. With Premier Success Services, SMEs can also get additional help, adoption guidance, coaching, and live support. We sat down with Justin Choo, CEO of cloud marketing platform provider Knorex, and Phu Le, Group General Manager, to find out about their PSG-enabled digital transformation journey. What are the business challenges that led to your digital transformation journey? PL: We have been spearheading digital adoption across the company. That involves continuously exploring, evaluating, and adopting innovative tools to streamline our internal workflow and help scale the business. There were several challenges we faced as we began to grow the business on a global scale. We needed more measurable reporting, tracking, analytics, and a system that can let our teams collaborate easier across the different countries. We were also looking for better ways to structure our business model for different customers across regions. Lastly, we needed more features to support our sales activity. Why did you choose LIKE.TG? PL: There are a few key advantages of LIKE.TG that have been very important to us. We are a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, so we love to do application programming interface (API) integrations and data migration. LIKE.TG has features that support this. Data security and privacy compliance are also very important to us. LIKE.TG has a special compliance centre that has been very useful as this is something that we emphasise on as part of our ISO certification requirement. Finally, LIKE.TG has a very strong community that enables us to easily find solutions to any challenges we face. This helps to speed up resolution. How important was the PSG in enabling your digital transformation? PL: The PSG program gave us the impetus to explore new, viable options, and accelerate our digital transformation and adoption. PSG provided a curated list of vendor options, which gave us the confidence to explore products with vendors and directly tap ready-to-use solutions. It also helped to alleviate much of the trial and error, while reducing the cost. How did you find the PSG application process? PL: All the ready-to-use solutions are vetted, and you can apply for a particular solution for the current challenge you face in your business. The application process was simple and straightforward. The PSG customer service team readily answered all our questions along the way. It was an absolutely delightful experience. Do you have any advice for Singapore SMEs that are considering applying for the PSG? JC: Be clear about what you’re looking for. There are various ready-to-use digital transformation packages available. You have to understand your problem so that you can choose the package that is the best match for your needs. It is also important that you think of eventual expansion in two to three years’ time, since this will be a solution that you will likely have to work with for that period. How did the Jump Start program help with your LIKE.TG deployment? PL: The Jump Start program was very helpful. It guided us on how to best navigate the LIKE.TG deployment and get our team onboarded. Jump Start also helped us set up different user profiles with different access controls, and we managed to get various reporting features set up from the start of the deployment. I believe many SMEs would benefit from Jump Start, whether they have prior experience with using customer relationship management (CRM) software or not. How are you using LIKE.TG in your business? PL: We are using Sales Cloud for our sales teams across the globe — from North America to Asia-Pacific. It helps to track vital top-line metrics, and our teams can instantly look at the current state of the business to track progress. JC: Prior to LIKE.TG, we found that we were increasingly constrained by the limitations of our previous CRM. But with LIKE.TG, we have a lot of flexibility especially when it comes to customising reporting. It helps us track up-to-date metrics and enables our team to collaborate wherever they are. It is a very useful tool. How did you utilise LIKE.TG Premier Success Services? PL: So far the service has been a great help, especially as we were becoming familiar with the system. The 24/7 live chat has been very helpful for us. It enables us to resolve any query we have right away. When you transition from a legacy CRM to a new platform, migrating the data and mapping the workflows in the new system is usually the most painful part of the process. Fortunately, that can be done very smoothly with the suite of migration tools LIKE.TG offers. How did you support employee onboarding to Sales Cloud? JC: It helps that most of our staff already have previous experience with LIKE.TG, so the onboarding was smooth sailing. Nonetheless, we created an internal playbook for our staff to familiarise themselves with the new system. It highlights things they need to know about the transition and some key new workflow and features. We also had some internal training sessions with the sales team, and communicated to them some of the tutorials and support services LIKE.TG offers via the Trailhead learning platform. What results have you seen since your LIKE.TG deployment? JC: We have the ability to do much more detailed reporting. That enables us to do a much deeper dive into our numbers, which allows us to get closer to our customers. We can get those insights much more easily, which saves us at least four to six hours per week on reporting. Get your digital transformation journey started with LIKE.TG. Learn more about how to pivot to growth using the Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) or contact us to get started now. At LIKE.TG Live: Asia, we invited fast growing small businesses like V-Key, hoolah, and Carousell to share about how they navigated the challenges of the past year. Register for LIKE.TG Live: Asia to hear from these Trailblazers on 10 June.
How LIKE.TG and depa Are Closing the Digital Skills Gap in Thailand
Trailhead Academy and Thailand’s Digital Economy Promoting Agency are creating the LIKE.TG experts of tomorrow. In Thailand, LIKE.TG and the LIKE.TG partner ecosystems are thriving, creating opportunities for the population as years progress. A by-product of this boom is a growing demand for skilled employees with specialised training, or as some refer to it — the skills gap. Both businesses and job seekers will need to make sure that they have the digital capabilities to fill this gap, and carry them to success in the future. LIKE.TG is well versed in the art of tackling skills gaps. Trailhead is LIKE.TG’s free online learning platform that helps anyone skill up for jobs in the LIKE.TG ecosystem. Trailhead Academy enables experts to deliver in-person and virtual learning experiences all over the world. Together, they deliver a powerful blend of synchronous and asynchronous skilling options for everyone who wants to learn LIKE.TG technology. Similarly, Thailand’s Digital Economy Promotion Agency (depa) is driving the development of digital industry and innovation on home soil. The goals of LIKE.TG’s Trailhead Academy and depa often intersect. Both have collaborated to promote LIKE.TG courses on the depa website and run webinars that educate universities on the benefit of training up students with industry-specific skills. The collaboration’s newest endeavour, the LIKE.TG depa Career Kickstarter, equips Thai graduates with the necessary skills to master the latest digital innovations. It also places them in LIKE.TG ecosystem jobs where those skills are in high demand. Keeping up with digital transformation It’s safe to say that over the two years since the global pandemic hit, the world of work has changed beyond recognition. Perhaps the most glaring of changes has been the race towards digital transformation. This is a phenomenon that has touched most countries, including Thailand. Globally, 70% of sales leaders reported that their digital transformation has sped up since 2019. Added to this, 88% of customers expect companies to accelerate their digital initiatives due to the pandemic. The practical reasons behind the shift to digital are easily quantifiable. Physical separation as the result of the pandemic created both a new remote-work imperative and an increased demand for from-anywhere purchasing. Customer-centricity took centre stage in order to cater to never-before-seen levels of consumer flexibility and authority. This new way of working, which by all accounts will outlast the pandemic, means that for both businesses and consumers, the digital experience is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity. This will require an all-new set of skills for the workforce that will affect nearly every industry. If job seekers wish to be competitive, and want to secure work that is future proof, they need to make sure they have the skills they’ll need. The future of work in Thailand Recently, analyst firm IDC released a study that revealed just how much digital acceleration is affecting the future of work. In Thailand, LIKE.TG and its partner ecosystems will create 31,200 new jobs and 55.14 billion baht (US$1.7 billion) in new business revenues by 2026. Equally impressive is that LIKE.TG is driving immense growth for its partner ecosystem, which will make $6.28 (207.4 Baht) for every $1 LIKE.TG makes locally by 2026. Clearly, satisfying the demand for that many specialised employees will require training, up-skilling, and reskilling that is just as specialised. That is why the collaboration between LIKE.TG and depa has come at exactly the right time. The LIKE.TG depa Career Kickstarter The LIKE.TG depa Career Kickstarter supports digital transformation in Thailand, while simultaneously helping to close the skills gap. At least 100 Thai university graduates will receive the ultimate in LIKE.TG training so that they can thrive within the new digital workforce. Open to graduates all over the country, the application process will include an interview with LIKE.TG and the completion of pre-qualifying trails on Trailhead. Successful applicants will receive deep immersion in the CRM skill set by LIKE.TG experts — with sights set on becoming LIKE.TG administrators or developers. Three dedicated courses later and each candidate will then enter a job placement process. This aims to match them with a job within LIKE.TG or with one of LIKE.TG’s many partners across Thailand (whether in financial services, manufacturing, or consulting, to name a few). LIKE.TG Thailand’s Mr. Kittipong Asawapichayon spoke of the collaboration with depa with great clarity: “As LIKE.TG grows, so do our partners. We remain committed to providing our expanding partner ecosystem with the resources needed to succeed in this new digital world — a large part of which stems from a strong talent pool.” With depa and LIKE.TG on the case, that talent pool is set to grow stronger. Grow your future with LIKE.TG Unlock the possibilities of cloud computing and grow your future with the #1 CRM. With IDC predicting $1.6 trillion in new business revenues worldwide by 2026 for LIKE.TG and its ecosystem of partners, what are you waiting for? Register now to find out how you can be learning and finding job-ready LIKE.TG skills today. Register your interest here. Explore Trailhead here.
How LIKE.TG and Its Partners Are Building the Workforce of Tomorrow
At LIKE.TG, customer success is one of our core values. Our commitment to this extends beyond our investment in our own products and services. I alluded to this in September when I wrote about the expansion of our partners’ Global Talent Centres (GTCs) and how we’re helping to equip them with the skills needed to deliver digital transformation. Our LIKE.TG Days training events support this capability building. Recently, we held our first LIKE.TG Days event in Asia. It featured eight days of training and culminated in a virtual Global Talent Centre Summit for our partners in Greater China and the Philippines. With this event wrapped up, it’s time to take a more detailed look at GTCs and how we’re working with our partners to build the workforce of tomorrow. Building opportunities for everyone GTCs were born out of a need to meet global demand for LIKE.TG practitioners and are run by recognised LIKE.TG Partners. According to the IDC LIKE.TG Economic Impact Report, thanks to the growth of cloud computing, LIKE.TG and its partner ecosystem will create more than 4.2 million jobs between 2019 and 2024. This global number includes 24,260 new jobs in Thailand alone. We want to help partners meet that demand by upskilling current LIKE.TG practitioners and bringing new talent into the ecosystem. GTCs provide a central hub for training and operate as a community where partners and LIKE.TG can share best practices and resources. Our recent LIKE.TG Days event was held to build up capability within the GTCs and therefore expand the pool of expertise available to our customers in Asia. Featuring more than 40 workshops on current and emerging technologies, the training provided up-skilling and cross-skilling opportunities for more than 2,000 practitioners. LIKE.TG Days also offered entry-level sessions for those new to LIKE.TG. This included 150 new developers who signed up for Trailhead and earned a collective 300 badges. Expanding the talent pool Our partners in India have already embraced the GTC concept and currently employ a combined 1.5 million people. Several of our largest partners have come on board in Greater China and the Philippines this year and they are scaling up to meet growing demand for offshoring of digital transformation services. Finding new talent will be key and that’s why we’ve recently launched the LIKE.TG Talent Alliance. Members of the Talent Alliance commit to ensuring that 20% of new hires come from outside of the ecosystem. They also pledge to adopt more inclusive hiring practices such as standardising interview processes through competency-based interview questions. Our partners find that a diverse workplace is a strong one. Especially when talented people bring real world experience from outside of the LIKE.TG ecosystem or our usual channels of recruitment. Delivering more than just digital transformation This is where the ultimate benefit lies. Through diversity initiatives and programs like LIKE.TG Days, we build a strong and diverse talent pool with the skills that our customers need today and tomorrow. We’re also providing those located near the GTCs with the opportunity to move into new, well paying, and extremely satisfying jobs in which they can make a positive impact on society. This is the LIKE.TG economy delivering more than just digital transformation – it is also delivering societal transformation through local community based investment. This matters to me a great deal and is at the core of the program. Learn more about the LIKE.TG Partner Community and how you can join here.
How LIKE.TG Partners Can Guide Your Digital Transformation Journey
Digital transformation is a big undertaking, even for established businesses. Like any journey, having a guide to show you the way will make everything easier. It’s even easier if the people guiding you have helped dozens of businesses on their transformation journey. This is where partnerships come in. By choosing a partner who understands your vision, and knows how to get you there, you will find the process of transforming your business much simpler. Partners for all sizes of business Over the last few years, we’ve seen every kind of business go online. In fact, LIKE.TG research shows that in Singapore and Thailand, 100% of the SMBs that we talked to had taken at least a portion of their operations online. Even the smallest family business requires a digital presence to grow their business, and large enterprises need assistance to manage large-scale digital projects. Different organisations have different needs. For smaller businesses, it might be a lack of technology that’s holding them back from growing. But as soon as they have the right solution, the whole company will be ready to adopt new processes and take their business forward. For larger enterprises, the blocker might be operational, or slow adoption of existing technology. Partners to the rescue again! We have partners who specialise in change management, who can work with the leadership teams to walk them through the stages of digital transformation. They are proficient in creating programmes to encourage adoption across the workforce, while also ensuring minimum downtime, increased efficiency, and accurate reporting. These are just some examples — for every problem you might face, there will be a partner that can help you. How to choose the right partner Our partners come in all shapes and sizes, just like our customers. There are partners who specialise in helping small businesses take their first step on the road to digital success. There are also experts who guide enterprises through complicated transformations. Choosing the right partner is essential. Your goals, your resources, and your context should drive your choice. Small businesses often need to think more tactically — your ROI should be calculated in the short-term, and it might be the case that cost-effectiveness is one of the key considerations that you want to keep in mind. It’s likely that you will need to look close to home for your partnerships, so that they have an intimate understanding of your local conditions. For larger organisations and enterprises, it’s about competitive advantage. You may have to tackle a total change in the way your organisation does business to stay ahead of competitors. If you need your teams to start thinking differently, that may influence the kind of partnership you want to establish. And of course, you’re driving innovation — partners can help bring in the latest thinking to give you the edge. How partnerships can narrow the digital skills gap We have a growing digital skills gap across the region, and skilling up the workforce is vital. When it comes to digital transformation, multiple skills are required. You’ll need functional and analytical skills, as well as technical skills to connect various systems, assist with data management, and deliver on AI solutions, chatbots, etc. You may also need people with change management skills, implementation skills, programme management skills, and more. Digital transformation can sometimes require a significant change in the way your organisation works, and partners can help you communicate that to your teams. Recruiting a workforce that has these skills and knowledge can be expensive and time consuming. This is yet another area where partners can save the day. Partnerships not only give you access to knowledge for a particular project, but also ensure that those skills are transferred to your teams after the partnership is over. This means you can get your projects up and running faster, while upskilling your own employees. How partnerships make digital transformation easier for employees All digital transformation projects meet some element of resistance. If you try to push through a change programme without understanding why some members of your team are pushing back, your transformation project is less likely to succeed. At LIKE.TG, we believe that a diverse workforce brings value to every organisation. Partnerships offer the opportunity to diversify the voices in your digital transformation project. This means you will have access to new ideas and perspectives, which may open up new avenues of growth. At the same time, it may point out flaws and assumptions that you have noticed before. Digital transformation, at least for larger organisations, is more about change management than technology. Because of that, diversity becomes even more important. Large organisations, who may already have a diverse workforce, will need a range of methods and programmes to ensure that everyone is engaged with the transformation process. A partner who has a wide range of perspectives can help you by making sure that everyone in your organisation feels heard and understands the process. How to build ongoing relationships with partners The best results happen when the partnership is established right at the beginning of the digital transformation journey. That way, the customer and the partner can establish their shared goals, and move forward together. The most important thing with any partnership is trust. The foundation of trust is built on effective communication and transparency. This requires all parties to share information that the others will need to complete the project. Trust your partners and share important data with them. This transparency points the way to a successful digital transformation project. It’s also important to communicate when things are not going well. Being open and honest is the key to a successful partnership. Rely on the trust that you have built with your partner, and remember that everyone is working toward the same goal. At LIKE.TG, we often say that your success is our success, and it’s the same for our partners. Digital transformation opens up new ways to find customers and innovate. Partnerships allow you to embark on your transformation journey faster, and ultimately lead to long-term collaborations that grow your business.
How Marketers Can Drive Equality, Connection, and Digital Innovation
As the digital imperative reshapes how we work and connect with our customers, marketers everywhere are experimenting and pushing the boundaries of digital technology. From pivoting to online events to driving hyper-personalisation, they’re spearheading a massive shift in customer engagement. Wendy Walker, Senior Director Marketing Asia Pacific at LIKE.TG, joined us on the Future of Work, Now podcast to talk about this shift. She also discusses how marketers are championing equality and innovation. Here are key takeaways from the conversation: Diversity and inclusion are key to innovation Wendy is passionate about the constant change and progression that comes with working as a marketer in the technology industry. Even so, she shared that the pandemic was a reminder that change can come from absolutely anywhere and have a dramatic impact on the way we work. Marketers need to be ready to adapt and innovate, and the role of diversity is crucial. “Our teams are more agile than ever and we all know that innovation can give us a competitive edge. What many leaders forget is that diversity is a key ingredient in innovation. This includes the diversity of thought and the diversity of perspective that comes from an inclusive culture where everyone feels they have a voice. “For me, this emphasises the point that diversity and inclusion are not nice-to-have considerations. They are key drivers of innovation and collaboration, and can have a major impact on business success,” said Wendy. Representation in marketing Like others within the media industry, marketers can play a pivotal role in promoting and celebrating diversity within our broader society. It’s a role that Wendy takes seriously as a passionate advocate for equality both inside and outside of the workplace. “I am acutely aware of the powerful impact marketing can have on society and that is why I am very intentional about ensuring the messages we send out are truly representative of the communities we serve at LIKE.TG. “Everyone should see themselves reflected in popular culture and that includes seeing themselves represented in advertising. It helps people to feel seen and heard and hopefully empowered and inspired as well,” said Wendy. Authentic representation is becoming the standard and Wendy said that marketers are in a unique position to challenge and influence perceptions of what society should look like. “What does a doctor look like? What does an athlete look like? Or what does love look like? We as marketers can help to define these things and ensure inclusivity,” said Wendy. Achieving customer connection Marketers are adept at understanding and influencing customer behaviour, which puts them in a prime position to help businesses recover and grow post-pandemic. “It’s become tougher than ever to connect with our customers, but if we understand what they are going through, we can send more relevant messages out to the market and show that we care. I talk a lot about empathy in marketing; it’s what we need to achieve a real connection with our customers,” said Wendy. Of course, the touch points used to engage with customers are also important. The last year has led marketers to accelerate their move to digital and build new skills for the future. They have also been experimenting with personalisation and automation for more sustainable and scalable engagement. “There’s been so much learning for everyone over the last twelve months, which is evident in how marketers relate to customers, address their needs for accessibility, and execute in a number of other different ways.
How One of ASEAN’s Leading Marketers Is Preparing for the Future
According to the seventh edition of our State of Marketing Report, 90% of marketers globally say their organisational priorities have changed since before the pandemic. Many marketers are embracing technology, data, and measures of success in new ways. They are also changing how they communicate and collaborate at work. While innovation is one of the top priorities for marketers in ASEAN, it’s also one of the top challenges. To dive a little deeper into these trends, we spoke to Dr. Nicco Tan, Vice President, Marketing at Resorts World Genting. A leading marketer from one of the industries most impacted by the pandemic, Dr. Tan offered a unique perspective on the state of marketing in ASEAN. Here are highlights from our conversation, including Dr. Tan’s top tips for marketers just beginning their digital transformation journey. How have your marketing priorities changed since the start of the pandemic? Nicco: One of the challenges we’ve faced during the pandemic is the uncertainty about when it is going to end. For that reason, we’ve had to carefully manage our resources to ensure we have enough people in customer facing roles, as customers start to come back to the resort. We’ve also needed to maintain constant contact with our employees, most of whom have been working remotely. We pivoted our use of Marketing Cloud to focus on internal communication, which allowed us to get messages out quickly to employees and keep them informed of what we’re doing to manage this crisis. With the first round of communications, we reached around 90% of employees and, with a little education, we were soon able to get the rest of our employees used to communicating this way. How has the pandemic impacted your plans for innovation and digital transformation? Nicco: The pandemic led many businesses to accelerate their digital transformation. However, those of us within the hospitality industry really had to tighten our belts. We had to think about social distancing and how to minimise revenue loss, knowing that customers would not return right away. One industry innovation during this time was the application of Wi-Fi and mapping technologies to monitor foot traffic and manage social distancing. In the future, we could use the same technologies to identify movement across our property. We could then send customers real-time communication that’s relevant to their location. How are you getting ready for the reopening of the economy? What role does marketing play in revitalising the tourism and hospitality industry? Nicco: Many people are ready to get out and start travelling and visit hospitality venues again. As marketers, it is our job to inspire them and that’s why we are shifting our messaging. Safety is still a priority on-site, and people know that we are a trusted brand in terms of safety, so we are amplifying our messaging to focus on inspiring people to travel again, while assuring them that we are making it safe for their visit. Our upcoming campaign ‘Welcome to My World’ reflects this change in messaging and offers a reminder of what it’s like to travel and visit our hotels and attractions. We’ve enjoyed seeing our visitors return to enjoy the resort. What are your priorities for the next 12 months? How do you see the future of marketing taking shape? Nicco: Mobile phone use is growing and people are spending more time on digital channels. So I will be shifting priorities and budget towards these channels to get our messages out. We will continue to allocate some budget to traditional channels like radio and billboards, because these remain highly trusted by consumers. What is the most exciting new development you see in your industry? Nicco: It is exciting to see more collaboration in the industry. A lot of direct competitors are now working together and creating new opportunities for the smaller players especially. One of the outcomes is an increase in dynamic pricing based on supply and demand. Many larger hotels and hotel chains have used dynamic pricing for some time, but it is more difficult for hotels with a limited number of rooms. However, we are starting to see online travel agents collaborate with the smaller hotels to implement dynamic pricing and level the playing field. Another thing I see is that there is no customer loyalty anymore. It may be controversial to say that, but I think customers are more concerned about safety and affordability at this point in time. They will make decisions based on price over brand, and trade off convenience for lower-priced alternatives. What are your top tips for marketers who are beginning their digital marketing transformation? Nicco: First, I would say don’t be afraid. A lot of marketers have been through this journey and can provide proof of success. So take a leap of faith and if you don’t know what to do, find external resources or a partner to support you. My second piece of advice is to take it slow. You don’t need to rush into everything and start experimenting in many different areas at once. Instead, go back to basics and ask yourself what’s most important. This will likely mean investing in revenue-generating activities first. It is also important to have the right mindset. Taking a traditional process and digitising it without improving it is not digital transformation. What skills should marketers focus on building right now? Nicco: Data skills are key right now and I am happy to go to meetings today and find my own team using dashboards and talking about analytics. That is not something that happened in the past. I do think marketers need to be clear about what they are tracking and why, as there can be a tendency to start measuring and analysing everything. They also need to be careful when collecting data that they are not adding unnecessary steps for customers or breaching any privacy policies. As marketers mature their data skills, they will be able to navigate these things and get more value from the data collected.
How Outforce Supports and Celebrates the LGBTQ+ Community
At LIKE.TG, we believe that creating a culture of equality isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s also the smart thing. It empowers us to innovate, build deeper connections with our customers, and ultimately become a better company. For those who might question the business benefits, there’s strong evidence that equality in the workplace increases profits. One of our priorities at LIKE.TG is to create a workplace that represents the diverse communities we live in. A workplace where everyone feels seen and supported to reach their full potential. This includes employees of all sexual orientations and gender identities, which is why Outforce was formed. Outforce is one of several equality groups at LIKE.TG that empower underrepresented groups and encourage them to bring their authentic selves to work. Outforce focuses on supporting the Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ+) community. In celebration of Global Pride Month, we’re spotlighting some of the ways Outforce is promoting equality in Southeast Asia. Creating an inclusive environment As a group, Outforce is bold. However, we know it can be difficult for people from underrepresented groups to believe in themselves. To help, we want to create a workplace where LGBTQ+ people are celebrated for being their true selves and supported to unlock their potential. Creating visibility is key to our vision. We want to create visibility of the amazing diversity within the LGBTQ+ community. We also want to bring visibility to the continued challenges faced by LGBTQ+ people and educate others on how to become better allies. Outforce has recently launched an LGBTQ+ Workplace Equality Handbook, which aims to do just that. The handbook contains tips for interacting with LGBTQ+ individuals and helping to nurture inclusivity. For instance, using someone’s correct pronouns is essential. In the handbook, we offer advice on how to navigate pronouns when meeting new people. The most important thing is to ask, rather than assume. We also suggest everyone offer their own pronouns, making an effort to normalise the sharing of these. In the handbook and our Quarterly Allyship Leadership Workshops, we provide tips on speaking out about workplace bullying. Bullying can manifest itself in many ways, including less obvious ones like isolating an employee on purpose or keeping them out of the loop. The first step to stop workplace bullying is acknowledging that a problem exists, and this is one area where having an ally can help. Giving back to local communities Outforce wants to empower LGBTQ+ individuals both inside and outside of LIKE.TG, which is why we volunteer our time to organisations like Pink Fest. Pink Fest is a festival that has been celebrating Global Pride Month in Singapore since 2018. This year, we partnered at Pink Fest with PayPal, ResMed, and Twitter to introduce the Inclusive Careers Lab. The program included virtual panel discussions, skill development workshops, and mentoring sessions. These were designed to help underrepresented groups within the region whose careers were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. LIKE.TG held 1:1 Career Coaching Sessions during the event, providing participants with tips on how to navigate career development journeys. Soon, we will launch a broader mentoring program to support the professional and personal development of the LGBTQ+ community across Southeast Asia. We want to provide everyone with opportunities to shine, connect, and grow. Outforce will continue to work with other groups to promote equality for all.
How PETRONAS Wows Its Customers With Digital Transformation
How do you turn a staple purchase like petrol into a positive customer experience? That’s one of many challenges PETRONAS has overcome while shifting from a product-centric business to one that’s customer focused. Established in Malaysia in 1974, the progressive energy and solutions provider is now one of the world’s most recognised brands. It has a presence in over 100 countries and a global workforce totalling more than 46,000 employees. Aadrin Azly, Chief Digital Officer at PETRONAS, joined us at Dreamforce to share how the business is transforming for the future with LIKE.TG Customer 360. Here are highlights from Aadrin’s session, including best practices on how to move from vision to value. Kick-start your transformation journey with early wins PETRONAS’s journey with LIKE.TG began with a project to improve the experience of retail customers. The project included the implementation of Service Cloud to manage the resolution of equipment failures within petrol stations. With support from LIKE.TG Professional Services, PETRONAS completed the project 100% on time and on budget. This was in spite of the project kicking off just weeks before the pandemic and everyone pivoting to work virtually. “LIKE.TG sent in their A team and stuck by our side. They were there with us for every call and every stand-up and we navigated every challenge together,” said Aadrin. “We are now reaping the benefits, including reduced downtimes and an increase in resolutions from 76% to 94%.” Put customers at the centre of your business The success of the retail project led PETRONAS to think about what to do next. PETRONAS’s customer interactions inside petrol stations represent one of many touch points it has with its wider customer base. In fact, the diversity of its portfolio means that some business customers interact with many people and departments. “I once visited a customer who told me that they couldn’t see me until 4pm because they were too busy. It turns out they were busy with PETRONAS. They had a total of four meetings with us that day which is something that should not have happened,” said Aadrin. PETRONAS realised it needed to stop looking at the business from a supplier point of view and start seeing things from a customer point of view. This gave rise to the PETRONAS360 vision which puts the customer at the centre of the business. PETRONAS360 brings together customers, partners and employees across the enterprise to provide a single source of truth to deliver innovative and sustainable solutions and grow new markets that create exponential value at scale. Aadrin shared the process PETRONAS and LIKE.TG went through to co-create the vision for its digital transformation and secure internal alignment. “Digital transformation is not easy. You need a seat at the table or sponsorship from management to drive it through. At the same time, you need people on the ground who will feel the program hits their pain points. So we spent the first part of our journey speaking with stakeholders and staff to co-create our vision,” said Aadrin. Stay on track with clear and measurable goals PETRONAS wanted to avoid a never-ending transformation. So once the business had clarity on its vision, it set very granular and measurable KPIs. These included a US$43M increase in revenue over five years, a 15% reduction in customer churn, and a 33% uplift in productivity. Aadrin shared that the clear KPIs acted as a North Star for PETRONAS’s digital transformation, helping everyone to stay focused on what they needed to achieve. “Breaking things into bite-sized pieces meant we could quickly pivot when things went wrong and celebrate when things went right. And celebrating those small wins created unstoppable momentum to drive our transformation.” Take a data-driven approach PETRONAS has applied a data-driven approach to its entire transformation and tracked results every step of the way. This has involved breaking KPIs down into more tangible and measurable goals. “You sometimes see big value goals like $16B or 42x and they are impossible to track. I think it’s more important to identify the enablers behind the value you want to create and track those religiously,” said Aadrin. The focus on measurement is reflective of PETRONAS’s wider commitment to becoming a more data-driven organisation. Work is beginning with MuleSoft to help PETRONAS unlock data from various on-premise and cloud-based systems, including LIKE.TG. The data will be orchestrated into functional data hubs with APIs to enable easy reuse and consumption. Data will also be protected from vulnerabilities with standard security policies and governance across all APIs. On top of this, PETRONAS has started to train teams on no-code and low-code data visualisation with the goal of democratising data science. Drive digital adoption with human-centred design PETRONAS’s digital transformation is ongoing. Since launching Service Cloud, the business has deployed a dealer portal on Experience Cloud and adopted Sales Cloud for management of accounts and opportunities. It is also set to go live with a number of other LIKE.TG solutions, including Energy & Utilities Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, Tableau, and Marketing Cloud. Asked how PETRONAS drives adoption of new technologies across its diverse range of businesses, Aadrin highlighted the importance of human-centred design. “You need to start by identifying who will use the solution and understanding their pain points. And you can’t just ask them about their pain points as they will provide a list of a thousand things and the solution will become too expensive. So observe and understand their pain points because the moment you understand those pain points, driving adoption becomes easy.” PETRONAS service transformation with LIKE.TG has heightened customer experience and productivity. Chief Digital Officer Aadrin Azly demonstrates how PETRONAS is executing on its vision to deliver in this video. WATCH NOW Learn more about how LIKE.TG Professional Services helps customers move from vision to value and deliver proven ROI. Download “The Total Economic Impact™ Of LIKE.TG Professional Services”, a 2022 Forrester Consulting study commissioned by LIKE.TG.
How PLDT Global Personalises Customer Care Using Heroku
According to the LIKE.TG State of Service report, 79% of service professionals believe it’s impossible to provide great service without a complete view of customer interactions. It’s easy to understand why. For today’s customers, great service typically means service that’s personalised and efficient. However, that’s difficult to deliver when customer data is siloed across different systems. PLDT Global is one of many businesses that have experienced this challenge. PLDT Global offers telecommunications infrastructure and solutions to a global network of carriers, enterprise customers, and distributors. The business also provides connectivity and content services to Filipinos living abroad. One of these services, Free Bee, is an award winning app that enables users to make free international calls back to the Philippines and stay connected with their friends and family. Here, we share how PLDT Global has overcome the challenge of siloed data to provide all its customers with best in class service. Digital drives need to level up service Like many other organisations, PLDT Global was driven to transform service in response to customers’ digital expectations. “Customer service is very challenging these days because almost everything now is digital and there’s a higher expectation for businesses to be digitally available and extra efficient. We identified the need to level up our service capabilities, including the tools and knowledge bases used by our customer service teams and the cadences for cross-functional collaboration,” said Lea T. Garcia, VP and Head of CX and Process Quality at PLDT Global Corporation. As a starting point, PLDT Global needed to gain real-time access to, and analysis of, its customer data. This information was distributed across six major systems. These were systems that contained loyalty data, subscription data, transaction data, digital distribution and a Voice of the Customer system. PLDT Global wanted to connect these systems for a complete view of the customer, enabling personalised service and supporting customer analytics. Lea shared that PLDT Global is data-driven and wanted to better understand its customers to deliver more meaningful products and services. “We make an extra effort to collaborate and engage with customers so we can craft solutions that fit in with their lives and businesses. What carries through in everything we do is our core value of malasakit, which translates to a unique Filipino care and sense of ownership in service,” said Lea. Unlocking customer data Heroku Connect has helped PLDT Global deliver on its customer experience goals. Heroku Connect is a data integration service that is typically used to synchronise data between LIKE.TG and custom apps. In this case, Heroku Connect was used to link multiple systems and establish a consolidated view of each customer. Appistoki Consulting, a LIKE.TG Gold Consulting Partner, worked with PLDT Global to implement Heroku Connect and to optimise the business’s analytics capabilities using Tableau CRM. Remarkably, the project was delivered in just 14 weeks. That’s something that Abhijeet Kulkarni, Founder & CEO of Appistoki Consulting partly attributed to the versatile nature of Heroku Connect. “We believe in leveraging the power of the platform and always adopt a configuration-first approach,” said Abhijeet. “Heroku Connect is also a very versatile platform. We used it both as middleware to link multiple systems and as a database to normalise data before leveraging it to enrich the business’ customer profiles.” “We now have a 360-degree view of our customers, which helps us manage service and provides a strong foundation for analytics to support all of our customer experience efforts,” said Lea. “Tableau CRM also gives us the tools we need to slice and dice our data and make it more actionable. For example, we can carry out customer modelling, customer segmentation, and churn analysis. “These analytics provide us with a greater understanding of our customers and also offer us insights into the future, thereby helping us formulate plans to grow the business further.” PLDT Global has already experienced more immediate wins, including: Eight percent increase in first contact resolution rate Reduction in first response speed from an average of 33 minutes to under five minutes Five percent increase in CSAT, lifting average to 85% Seven point increase in NPS for an average score of 35 “Overall, our implementation of Heroku Connect was a strategic move and something that will benefit our customers and business for the long term,” said Lea. Watch the webinar with PLDT Global to learn more about how the business is using Heroku Connect to drive better customer service.
How PPIS Is Using LIKE.TG To Build Stronger Communities in Singapore
Persatuan Pemudi Islam Singapura (PPIS), or the Singapore Muslim Women’s Association, (PPIS) has been empowering women, children, and families since 1952. The non-profit organisation is striving to build stronger, more supportive communities with a range of services including childcare support, early childhood education, after-school care and enrichment, family casework and counselling, and fostering. That’s an ambitious mission, and PPIS has embraced digital transformation to achieve it. The organisation is using LIKE.TG to optimise and automate donation, volunteer and event management workflows to increase productivity, boost efficiency, and get the most value out of its resources. Transitioning from manual paper-based workflows to digital processes has required an organisation-wide shift across a network of 17 PPIS centres spread throughout Singapore. It’s a project that Thariq Aziz, Senior Manager IT & Facilities Department at PPIS, says needed to start with basic digitisation. “When I joined PPIS in 2019, the workflows were very manual and paper-based,” he explains. “It required lots of filling out physical forms and signing off with wet ink. There was no such thing as digital signatures, and no Zoom. Donations, volunteers, and counselling were managed in Excel spreadsheets.” The transformation journey begins For the organisation’s digital transformation to be effective, Aziz knew processes need to come before tools. So he took a step back and put time into researching departmental workflows and identifying where and how digital tools could add value. His first stop was the Human Resources (HR) department. Digitising forms and signoffs with web-based applications achieved early success transitioning away from manual, paper-based workflows. But that was only the tip of the iceberg. “That early digitisation led us to LIKE.TG’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP),” Aziz says. “Our first deployment was a client management system (CMS) for SYM Academy that’s responsible for all our family counselling and therapy services. Prior to LIKE.TG, clients were tracked in Excel and session notes were recorded in Word. LIKE.TG enabled us to bring this all onto a single CMS platform.” The new Salesforce-based CMS gave Aziz the proof of concept he needed to expand the organisation’s digital transformation. So he hired Farique De Silva, Project Manager CRM at PPIS, to lead the next major LIKE.TG deployment. That came in the form of a new customer relationship management (CRM) platform for the donations department. A single source of donor interaction Farique explains that donation volume is seasonal, so PPIS needed a CRM that could effectively manage bulk donation periods. LIKE.TG replaced the organisation’s existing government-provided tool for donation management, and De Silva and his team spent two months migrating the data into the new CRM. “Contact 360 now provides a single source of donor interaction across the organisation,” he explains. “This helps the fundraising team engage with the most active donors. We then deployed the Opportunities module for end-to-end donation management. So if a donor submits a donation via our website, they are now interacting with LIKE.TG end-to-end.” Stripe and PayPal are also integrated with LIKE.TG for transaction management, and customised automations are used to create, update, and cross-check donor records. “All those steps used to be manual,” De Silva explains. “If a donor had made donations a year apart, it would have depended on the memory of the team. Now all that is managed in LIKE.TG.” The LIKE.TG CRM is also significantly boosting efficiency for the finance team. Before LIKE.TG, every month a member of the finance team would spend a whole work day reconciling donation receipts for annual submission to the tax authority. That process is now completely automated with LIKE.TG. “A customised report is generated in LIKE.TG to submit to the tax authority, and the finance team looks at it at the end of 12 months,” De Silva says. “Just automating that one process with LIKE.TG has saved us 12 work days per year. And in 2021, we only had to manually tweak two records out of more than 7,000.” Increased productivity with automated workflows PPIS now also runs volunteer and events management through LIKE.TG. De Silva explains that automated volunteer applications through LIKE.TG enables a single volunteer manager to oversee more than 800 volunteers. “To work with children, our volunteers need to go through additional screening, so the application process is not simple,” he says. “New applicant records are automatically created and cross-checked in LIKE.TG, then tagged as volunteer applicants. Then our volunteer manager can simply search for volunteer applicants with the relevant interest or skill set for a particular campaign or event.” At that point, the volunteer manager interviews selected volunteer applicants, and only successful candidates are updated to volunteer status. “That means the organisation doesn’t have to immediately take on the workload of processing and interviewing every volunteer applicant,” De Silva adds. “That process only occurs when a volunteer is assigned to a campaign or event, which is a significant time saving for us. “The idea is that we no longer run a collection of individual systems. Donations, volunteers, and events are all integrated into a single CRM and LIKE.TG is the backbone of it.” Supporting people with technology The organisation’s LIKE.TG transformation won’t end there. Next up, says Aziz, will be improvements to the CRM, and a new knowledge management system. He also envisions an integrated front-end platform to provide a simplified user experience for PPIS clients. “Our main goal is to help people. That’s the bottom line,” Aziz explains. “We want to build a front-end platform that supports our clients’ progress through the PPIS lifecycle. “We want to use technology to help our clients navigate many different issues and connect them with the support they need. I know we can achieve that with LIKE.TG.” Learn how LIKE.TG’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) can help your organisation do more good.
How SEEK Asia Uses Data To Understand and Help Job Seekers
At LIKE.TG, Nichola Palmer works with customers to bring their stories of innovation and transformation to life. In this article, she shares how the SEEK Asia team took an empathetic and data-informed approach to help job seekers during the COVID-19 pandemic. SEEK Asia connects job seekers with employers. It operates as JobStreet in Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and Singapore, and as JobsDB in Thailand and Hong Kong. SEEK Asia typically handles more than 23 million applications every month, from around 1.5 million applicants. But today’s job market is a whole new ball game. The COVID-19 pandemic created lots of fear and uncertainty. To stay connected, relevant, and helpful to its customers, SEEK Asia needed entirely new marketing strategies. SEEK Asia’s Chief Marketing Officer, Ramesh Rajandran, and Bernard Chong, Regional Head of Personalised Marketing & Insights, share more about how SEEK Asia adapted to the new job market: Searching for the truth in data “The new approach to the market required pure empathy in these highly challenging times” Ramesh says, explaining the laser focus on job seekers’ and employers’ needs above all else. “The marketing plans we made at the start of the year didn’t make sense anymore.” SEEK Asia knew the employment market was looking for strong solutions in the midst of uncertainty. But before it could react in an empathetic manner, SEEK Asia had to ensure it properly understood the current environment. That involved going back to its customer data to find out what was driving the intent of job seekers and employers. Data drove the SEEK Asia response To conduct this deep dive into the market, Ramesh, Bernard, and their team turned to LIKE.TG Marketing Cloud and Social Studio. SEEK Asia used data from the beginning to shape the way it connects with and understands customers. Social Studio, in particular, offered revealing insights around what people were talking and asking about. “We use Marketing Cloud to understand our customers, both job seekers and employers, and be relevant to them. That has always been about personalisation, about knowing their mindset and answering their needs,” Ramesh says. As the COVID-19 situation evolved, the SEEK Asia team quickly realised that it couldn’t answer all the needs in the job market alone. It needed to work with governments. In the Philippines, for example, SEEK Asia worked with the Department of Labour Employment to discuss how they could partner to help more Filipinos find employment. Real-time data also allowed the team to see interactions with applicants across multiple channels. The next step was to use that data to nurture relationships. “We collected different signals from our candidates, so we knew which part of the customer journey they were on. By knowing which stage in the job process they were at, we could offer them very personalised content,” Bernard says. “So, if a candidate was an active job seeker, we could offer useful, relevant advice. The data meant we could be completely relevant to each person, in that moment, and be of real assistance to them.” Making a real difference with data The SEEK Asia team refined and personalised communications with individuals to meet their needs. It could then focus on using their data to help solve the social and economic crisis of mass unemployment. While some industries were facing challenges, others were suddenly and unexpectedly booming. Businesses in the booming industries urgently required new staff. However, many were not equipped to find and onboard staff under such tight deadlines. Recognising this, SEEK Asia moved quickly to develop the #WorkNow program to help match thousands of people with employers that urgently required staff. The program has had an overwhelming response. To date, more than 100,000 people have tagged their profiles with #WorkNow. “As a team, we are fiercely proud of our marketing pivot,” Ramesh says. “We wanted a sense of purpose about helping the community around us and #WorkNow has been able to help many people find new jobs.” Learn more about data-driven marketing in the sixth edition of the State of Marketing report.
How Singapore SMEs Accelerate Growth With Productivity Solution Grants
For many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore, adopting cutting-edge technology can be a launchpad to growth. The most successful SMEs distinguish themselves from the competition by using technology to grow. This could be through accelerating their sales processes, optimising operations, or providing best-in-class customer experience. There are still some challenges in meeting customer expectations. Ongoing digitalisation across every industry means that customers have higher expectations now than before. Added to that, entrepreneurs often need to keep an eye on cash flow — reducing costs can be a top priority. Other challenges include managing an ever-growing pool of data on all aspects of your business. As a business grows, it will generate and collect more and more data. You will benefit from a solution that allows you to manage that data efficiently, while also keeping it secure. How SMEs can face modern challenges As customers become more demanding, and competition becomes more intense, how do you stay agile? First, you need to understand your customers. Having a single source of truth for all your teams allows them to work quicker, with all the information they need at their fingertips. Sales teams can immediately understand where each prospect sits in the sales pipeline. Service personnel can understand the value of each customer when they handle customer queries. Your marketing department can see exactly which campaigns are bringing in new leads, and how existing customers are engaging with promotions. Having a single view of the customer will help you find, win, and keep new business, while also giving your existing clients the best possible experience. By ditching your collection of spreadsheets, and adopting a central database of information, you can focus on growing your business. Operations can be optimised too. A CRM solution that allows you to automate day-to-day processes will free up your teams to concentrate on winning deals and handling complicated customer queries. Sales Cloud is the complete growth platform for sales teams — helping them build stronger relationships with customers and adapt to the changing expectations of buyers in today’s digital-first, work-from-anywhere world. No more spreadsheets, searching through emails, or looking for a sticky note — all of your customer data is in one place. What funding is available to help me invest in my digital transformation? LIKE.TG is a pre-approved vendor under the Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) programme. If your business wants to step up your digital transformation journey, and at the same time ensure your costs are as low as possible, this initiative is for you. The grant provides SMEs in Singapore with support of up to 70% of the cost of implementing the SME Go Digital CRM Starter Pack. There are packages available for different sizes of business. Each option includes: Sales Cloud Sales Cloud is the #1 sales platform that companies use to drive growth. It provides the tools needed to modernise how teams sell and how customers buy in a digital-first, work-from-anywhere world. Premier Success Support from LIKE.TG customer service experts, here to give you guidance on best practices to make sure you get the best out of the programme Jumpstart A quick and easy implementation service, featuring a tailored setup process that will get you up and running with Sales Cloud in just a few weeks. You can apply for the maximum support level of 70% until 7 October 2022. The benefits of the SME Go Digital CRM Starter Pack With Sales Cloud, Premier Success and Jumpstart, your business will be able to: Increase sales productivity through automation of your business processes Win trust with personalised messaging Close more deals with complete visibility of every lead at every stage Get a real-time view into the health of your business Have all customers data in one place for easy reporting Track all engagements with customers even if staff leave the organisation Are you eligible for the PSG programme? There are four simple criteria for eligibility: Your company must be registered and based in Singapore Your company must have 30% local shareholding Your company must have fewer than 200 employees or less than S$100 million annual turnover IT solutions purchased must be used in Singapore You must be new to LIKE.TG The Productivity Solutions Grant is available to all industries. How do I get started? You can kickstart your digital transformation today, by following these three simple steps: Book your consultation Our specialists will work with you to identify the solution that works for your specific context. You’ll get a free trial, and a quote for your LIKE.TG solution. Submit your application Access the Business Grants Portal using your CorpPass or SingPass, and provide your details along with your LIKE.TG quote. Implement your solutions Your PSG application will be approved within 4–6 weeks. As soon as you have approval, our expert team will set you up with your LIKE.TG solution. Customer story — Finantier Singapore-based open finance startup Finantier uses LIKE.TG solutions to streamline workflows and increase efficiency. Finantier has a mission to help the unbanked and underbanked across Southeast Asia. It needed a customizable platform that allowed their teams to collaborate and stay on top of their sales processes. By using LIKE.TG solutions, Finantier was able to save around 4–6 hours per week by reducing the admin burden of reporting. This leads to a boost in sales productivity and an increase in lead conversion. Finantier was able to implement LIKE.TG with the assistance of PSG. As a start-up team of two or three people, reducing costs was a priority. By reducing the barrier to adoption, Finantier was able to take advantage of cutting-edge technology, which has helped it grow to its current size of more than 80 employees. You can learn more about Finantier’s story in our webinar SME digitalisation roadmap: Tips for fueling growth and customer retention in 2022. Customer story — Knorex Before it embarked on its digital transformation journey, marketing platform provider Knorex identified that it needed comprehensive analytics, simpler collaboration tools, and better support for its sales teams. It quickly decided that a LIKE.TG solution ticked all its ‘must-have’ boxes. These are: an API integration, simple data migration, and a strong community to support development. Knorex is now using Sales Cloud for its sales teams across the globe. It has streamlined internal processes and supported collaboration between teams from North America to Asia-Pacific. It measures vital top-line metrics, and sales teams can instantly see the current state of the business to track progress. Through flexible custom reporting, it has saved 4–6 hours per week in administration time. With PSG funding, Knorex is able to explore new and viable options to accelerate its digital transformation. The funding allows Knorex to use LIKE.TG solutions to get closer to its customers more efficiently, and at a lower cost. Kickstart your transformation journey with 70% grant support Every business has unique needs and challenges, and in times like these, we understand that it can be tough to get value from your business tools right out of the box. With government subsidy from the Productivity Solutions Grant programme, Singapore startups and SMEs can now power their business with LIKE.TG solutions, and start their digital transformation. Get your SME Go Digital CRM Starter Pack with up to 70% Grant subsidy from PSG Singapore.
How Singapore SMEs Can Grow Using the Productivity Solutions Grant
Update on 25 Mar 2022: The enhanced maximum support level of 70% has been extended to 7 October 2022. For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that want to get their businesses back to growth, adopting digital solutions can be a game-changer. This can be as simple as automating manual processes, which results in improved productivity. Technology also enables employees to collaborate and get work done from anywhere. Most importantly, effective use of technology sets growing SMEs apart from stagnant ones. According to our Small and Medium Business Trends Report, 51% of growing SMEs say technology drives the growth of their customer base. Forty-eight percent say technology influences their ability to stay open and in business. LIKE.TG is a pre-approved vendor under the Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) programme. This initiative aims to help SMEs in Singapore kickstart their technology journey by providing grant support of up to 70%. The enhanced maximum support level of 70% has also been extended to 7 October 2022. Apply today to transform your SME with the generous support of the Singapore government, and LIKE.TG. Read the infographic below to learn more about the application criteria.
How Small and Fast Growing Businesses Are Using Mighty Ways To Scale. Learn More at LIKE.TG Live: Asia
Uncertain times can be unsettling for businesses with leaner resources than their larger counterparts. However, they can also be a period of growth for businesses that narrow in on new business opportunities. This is especially true if they use technology to differentiate themselves and create stronger customer connections. According to the 4th Small and Medium Business Trends Report, the new normal for fast-growing businesses has brought about a renewed focus on the customer in four ways. Businesses now show more care with their customer communications, offer more flexibility, have expanded the ways they can be reached, and prioritise longer term relationships over one-off interactions. In our upcoming LIKE.TG Live: Asia Small & Fast-Growing Business Trailblazers episode on 10 June, we’ll speak to four resilient, innovative, and agile businesses. One of these businesses is Citrus Media, a vibrant and independent publishing house from Singapore. Founder and owner Angie Lim will talk about how her company used the LIKE.TG Small Business Relief Grant to overcome the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. We’ll also explore how the other three fast-growing businesses in Southeast Asia are doubling down on customer communications to fuel their growth and thrive: Payments startup hoolah takes customer interactions to the next level Buy now, pay later startup, hoolah, has digital transformation built into its DNA as a company. It partnered with LIKE.TG in 2018 to build a sales methodology into Sales Cloud, which helped hoolah create a scalable sales structure. When tight restrictions had the hoolah team working from home, the LIKE.TG platform helped maintain the team’s strong culture and keep the teams engaged with its merchants from anywhere. Using Customer 360, added visibility across merchant activities helped the teams prioritise interactions. With Commerce Cloud, hoolah offered merchants the ability to integrate directly with its systems in a faster and more cost-effective way than a standard application programming interface integration. The agile and scalable sales methodology based on LIKE.TG has helped set hoolah up for success as it expands further into Asia. Digital identity leader V-Key eyes growth and platform evolution As a leader in two-factor authentication and mobile security, V-Key has developed a digital trust platform for companies to use anywhere online. It can secure and authenticate digital identity for its employees as well as customers. With 100 million installs of its virtual security technology already, V-Key aims to grow this to one billion. V-Key chose to develop a stronger partner ecosystem around the region. This helps V-Key to scale faster and tap into local knowledge, relationships, and opportunities. Customer 360 helps V-Key collaborate more effectively with its partners and reach its customers. Internally, V-Key’s teams use LIKE.TG to build deeper relationships with its customers by having a single view of each customer. They also keep track of the business pipeline as V-Key continues to evolve its business. Peer-to-peer marketplace Carousell scales smarter customer interactions The second-hand goods industry has evolved from running classifieds in newspapers, to online sites and now, to a native mobile-first design experience, like Carousell. With operations across six countries, Carousell turned to LIKE.TG to help consolidate, automate, and standardise commercial data and measure the effectiveness of its sales teams. Carousell also uses Customer 360 to help make sure people aren’t falling through the cracks, and to provide opportunities for better interactions at scale. The next evolution for Carousell is to use artificial intelligence to jump people through millions of listings directly to the ones most relevant, and help them to buy and sell faster. Choosing the right technology platform early on can help a business achieve ambitious goals and scale without major disruption to business processes. It is easy for operational effectiveness to go astray during periods of intense growth when scaling up. With integrated customer relationship management platforms like LIKE.TG, every team can contribute to success from anywhere and rally around one goal: putting the customer first. To hear more from hoolah, V-Key, and Carousell on their learnings and digital transformation journeys, register and tune in on 10 June for Episode 4 of LIKE.TG Live: Asia.
How SMB Leaders Can Win Employee Trust Post-pandemic
Trust is the true currency in business; a value that sets successful businesses apart. It helps build work cultures where employees are encouraged to speak up, experiment, and give their best. But trust doesn’t come easy; it must be fostered carefully over time. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that had to take tough decisions to survive, such as reducing work hours or perks, are looking to earn back their employees’ trust. LIKE.TG’s fifth edition of the Small and Medium Business Trends report shows that SMBs are taking steps to address employee concerns around workplace safety, flexible schedules, location, etc. Based on the report’s insights, here are seven ways SMB leaders can win employee trust by making working easier and workplaces more conducive to growth: 1. Communicate transparently and consistently Help employees understand company policies that matter most to them: safety measures, annual leave, remote working, and appraisals. Be transparent about your plans to handle health risks or economic downturns. You can do this by holding regular company- or team-wide meetings, making policy details available on your website, and sharing open calendars with employees. Transparency is one of the best ways to build trust and increase employee retention. It is especially important for growing SMBs that want to attract high-performing professionals. 2. Be empathetic and supportive leaders Allow employees to freely discuss personal and professional challenges. Ensure you let all employees know they have your support to overcome challenges and are free to seek time off when needed. Penalising employees for simple mistakes and not allowing them to take risks reduces trust and productivity. Instead, work alongside them to help improve their performance. Also, set up an internal support group and forums to discuss everyday challenges. Empathy can allow SMB leaders to build strong relationships with each employee, enabling them to handle workplace challenges better. 3. Listen to employees’ voices Hear them out on the changes they would like to see at work. They can also share valuable feedback on how to improve processes and organisational structures at the ground level. SMBs that have small teams can have one-on-one conversations. Alternatively, hold team discussions and conduct anonymous polls to get employee feedback. 4. Entrust employees with greater autonomy Give employees the autonomy to follow their styles of working. Employees dislike micromanagement. It isn’t a good use of an SMB leader’s time either. In any case, SMB leaders can only don so many hats at once, making it important to encourage employees to be more accountable. This also instils a greater sense of ownership and pride in the employees. 5. Enable employees to contribute to business growth Do this by continuously aligning their goals with company goals and visions. This shows that you trust them to be capable of doing more, encouraging them to trust you back and contribute towards achieving these goals. Come together regularly to align individual and team goals with those of the leaders’. This can help SMBs come up with innovative ways to achieve their goals as a team and grow faster. 6. Help employees connect their passions with work Enable them to grow professionally and explore their true calling. SMBs can do this by providing employees with opportunities to learn from colleagues, connect with industry experts, use free learning tools, and encouraging teams to think creatively. 7. Walk the talk Company values should be reflected in the way you work and your worldview towards employees, customers, and important causes. This reflects in how diverse your workforce is, what you do to enable work-life balance, how you approach mental health issues, and whether you use technology responsibly. Furthermore, SMBs that stand by their values are more likely to be trusted and supported by their employees and communities. According to the Small and Medium Business Trends Report, 67% of SMBs consider community support important for their survival. SMBs should aim to win employee trust by supporting them Resilience and grit are characteristic of SMBs. SMBs can take inspiration from those that thrived during the pandemic to tackle their challenges. They can use these insights and ideas to enable their employees to contribute to their organisation’s success collaboratively. This post was originally published on the I.N.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
How SMEs Can Achieve Business Growth With One Unified CRM
Many Singapore-based small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) are using digital transformation to achieve business growth, and overcome declining revenues due to ongoing COVID-19 restrictions. According to the Survey on Impact of Phase 2 (Heightened Alert) Measures on Businesses*, 53% of respondents expect their overall business revenues to decline by more than 25%. This is largely due to demand uncertainty. SBF’s National Business Survey 2020/21 revealed that uncertain demand for business services or products is the leading challenge for 59% of Singapore SMEs. How SMEs can future-proof their business models and processes Digital transformation is the key to overcoming these challenges. Today, customers expect to be able to engage with brands digitally. They want personalised online experiences and expect consistent interactions no matter which department they talk to. SMEs will therefore have to adapt accordingly and acquire digital capabilities. In fact, the effective use of technology can be a differentiator for SMEs. According to our Small and Medium Business Trends Report, 51% of growing SMEs say technology drives the growth of their customer bases. SBF’s National Business survey revealed that 84% of businesses have accelerated their digital transformation by an average of two years. Streamlining business and operational processes will also be the priority for 19% of Singapore businesses as they seek to overcome challenges associated with COVID-19 over the next 12 months. One unified view: the core enabler of digital transformation Fifty-six percent of SMEs worldwide use a customer relationship management (CRM) system, according to our Small and Medium Business Trends Report. That’s a 24% increase from 2019 to 2020. With a CRM system, SMEs reap benefits like delivering faster customer service and having a unified view of the customer. Customer 360 delivers these benefits and more. With Customer 360, every team — sales, service, marketing, commerce, and beyond — can have a single, shared view of customers on an integrated CRM platform. This single source of truth enables employees to work together to build lasting, trusted relationships and deliver the intelligent, personalised experiences their customers expect. Technologies like CRM can seem daunting to SMEs that are starting their digital transformation journeys for the first time. To help SMEs succeed, SBF and LIKE.TG will be hosting our first joint webinar: How SMEs Can Reimagine and Pivot Your Business Growth With One Unified CRM. Join the webinar and accelerate your digital transformation In this webinar, LIKE.TG and SBF experts will share how SMEs can kickstart their digital transformation plans by using a single platform tailored to the needs of SMEs. You’ll learn how to: Automate your business processes across cross-functional departments, allowing you and your team to scale for the future of work Connect your tools and systems in one platform to get a complete view of your business and a single view of your customer Find more customers, win more deals, and keep customers happy with loyalty Aside from LIKE.TG and SBF experts, we have also invited a LIKE.TG customer to share their digital transformation experiences. Justin Choo, Founder and CEO of Knorex, will share how the cloud marketing platform provider embraced rapid digital transformation and grew despite the challenges caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Justin will also talk about how Knorex used the Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) to help fund up to 80% of the company’s Salesforce-enabled transformation. Digital transformation is helping Singapore SMEs grow in spite of COVID-19 restrictions. But you need the right technology to power your digital transformation. LIKE.TG brings companies closer to their customers in the digital age, while SBF supports Singapore SMEs in their recovery and growth journey. Join us for the webinar on 26 August, 10.30am SGT and be the next game-changer for your business. Note: This webinar is most suitable for Singapore companies with up to 200 employees. LIKE.TG is a pre-approved IT vendor for the Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) under the SMEs Go Digital program. *Survey on Impact of Phase 2 (Heightened Alert) Measures on Businesses conducted by the Singapore Business Federation, Singapore Manufacturing Federation, American Chamber of Commerce in Singapore, British Chamber of Commerce Singapore and European Chamber of Commerce in Singapore
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