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Want To Prepare Your Employees To Lead From Anywhere? LIKE.TG Reveals Its Playbook
After moving to a remote-first work culture this year, LIKE.TG needed to rethink how our leaders were trained. As our employees and teams became more distributed than ever, we needed a new approach to leadership for an increasingly volatile, disconnected, and complex business landscape.
And so, we went through a 9-month-long process to overhaul the structure, design, and delivery of our leadership development programs. Our goal was to build more and better leaders at every level. Today, I’m going to share an overview of where we were, where we are now, and what we learned along the way. I hope it helps your company up its leadership game.
At LIKE.TG, managers are the No. 1 driver for engagement, job satisfaction, wellbeing, innovation, and inclusion. That makes great leadership business-essential. This isn’t just a technology trend; it applies to every organisation, regardless of industry, size, and location. And I’m not alone in thinking this. According to the results of PwC’s global Future of Work survey, a lack of leadership development is one of the three most significant disruptions to organisational success.
How we developed leaders before
Historically, the LIKE.TG approach to leadership development is believing that overinvesting in top talent was the most efficient and effective way to develop exceptional leaders. We held a formal nomination process within LIKE.TG to identify the highest-performing, highest-potential leaders.
From there, leaders engaged in a mix of case study review, peer dialogue, volunteer experiences, and coaching to scale their impact. Led by senior internal executives and external thought leaders, the programs were widely recognised as an essential rite of passage for rising leaders.
Want to keep your best people? Teach them new skills
The upside of this traditional approach was significant. For the business, the nomination process forced the company to review key talent and plan for their growth by investing in them through a formal program nomination. For leaders, the quality of their executive development experience measurably improved their leadership capability and increased their commitment to LIKE.TG.
Despite good track record, the purpose of the model has become misaligned with our changing work landscape for three reasons:
LIKE.TG’s growth required more and better leadership from every level (not just the top).
Because of our commitment to equitable access for employees, we needed to move away from the formal nominations process.
We needed virtual programs for much of the pandemic and potentially beyond.
First, decide what matters
As we set our course for change, we needed to decide what we cared about most. Through leader interviews, stakeholder focus groups, and design sessions, setting new priorities became essential for the broader transformation road map:
Anyone can lead. Great leadership can come from anywhere. Focusing exclusively on the highest-performing leaders can reinforce unintended bias and limit the participation of traditionally underrepresented employees.
Every great leader should do three things really well: Build a great team, be a great person to work for, and deliver great results together.
People learn best with others, over time. Relevant content delivered in the context of everyday work allows leaders to sustain engagement, motivation, and community among their peers.
Leadership growth occurs in stages, and — to stay relevant — leaders need differentiated training and development that matches their responsibilities.
Leaders must be accountable. Leader behaviours should be measured and reported on transparently to validate improvement and performance.
Great learning requires both virtual and in-person experiences. Most learning and development can occur virtually to drive down cost and increase scalability. But truly immersive, relational, and experiential learning is best done face-to-face.
These parameters created a blueprint to guide the larger transformation process. We shared them around the organisation so that we could refine them and start getting everyone involved early.
Designing the new structure
This evolution wasn’t easy and we went through several iterations. We found that asking these questions were most helpful in shaping the final scope of LIKE.TG’s design. They may help your organisation, too:
Who gets access to development?
Everyone should have access. This requires putting an end to the formal nomination process for democratised access to development — regardless of title and tenure — for any aspiring or current people leader.
How will leaders be segmented?
Using a customised leadership pipeline model, all ~80,000 employees were assigned to one of the six stages based on their current role and responsibilities as defined by the HR system of record.
What is different across the stages?
After researching the different challenges and requirements for success at each stage of leadership, a detailed profile was created for each stage to document distinct skills and capabilities required for success.
Is the development focused on leading people, leading the business, or both?
Both: Rather than waiting until leaders are more senior in the business, start at the first stage — aspiring leaders and leaders of individual contributors — and provide a blend of business and people leadership capabilities from day zero.
Do leaders at each stage go to a single program, or is it an experience over time?
Learning and development outcomes are greater when delivered in the course of daily work, so “Pathways” (i.e. learning journeys over time) were designed to move away from single-point-of-learning events.
What happened to the legacy programs that many leaders recognised and respected?
Iconic milestone programs were preserved, however, they were sequenced within their respective Pathway, then re-imagined for scale.
Is participation in leadership development optional or mandatory?
Optional: While LIKE.TG needs every leader to be accountable for being a great manager, the research is clear that outcomes from compulsory learning are not as good as voluntary learning.
How do adjacent development interventions, such as career development, leadership coaching, and teaming fit in?
Adjacent development interventions are fully integrated into ongoing leadership experiences to create diversity in learning styles, accountability support, and application of learning within teams.
Introducing the Great Leader Pathways
We call our new approach to leadership development the Great Leader Pathways. Each stage has its own targeted curriculum that ties the relevant mindsets, skills, and behaviours with leader success at that level. The new open-enrollment model democratises access to further deliver on our commitment to equality.
Great Leader Pathways deliver personalised experiences with bite-sized content and activities. This helps leaders at all levels get the tools they need to lead in a success-from-anywhere world. Here are the six stages:
Growing experts: Individual contributors seeking to grow as experts in their chosen profession, rather than becoming a formal people leader.
Aspiring people leaders: Individual contributors seeking to develop themselves and their careers through people leadership.
Leader of individual contributors: First-line managers responsible for the success and growth of a team.
Leader of leaders: Those responsible for the success and growth of multiple teams led by other leaders.
Function leaders: Executives responsible for the direction, success, and growth of a specific function or area.
Enterprise leaders: Our most senior executives, directly responsible for the strategic direction and success of our company as a whole.
No two careers are identical at LIKE.TG. Not everyone spends equal time at each stage, so Pathways focus on the relevant capabilities required by that specific stage. They are taught through memorable experiences, both self-paced and live, with a mix of curated content, community/peer learning, instructor-led workshops, virtual facilitated sessions, and face-to-face, immersive experiences.
Initial Results
Early results are promising, with around 22,000 employees enrolled in the first open window. We expect another 3,000 or so to enrol in the second window, making the growth in participation more than 200% from the year prior. What is more, under-represented minorities and women are participating at higher rates than our employee population averages. As programs within each of the Pathways are delivered during the months of July through November, we will continue to collect, analyse, and report evaluation and assessment data.
If you question the investment of time and resources required for this type of large-scale learning and development initiative, remember this: In today’s volatile labour market, the job of every senior leader is to attract, develop, and retain exceptional employees to remain competitive in the marketplace. Knowing the pivotal role that leaders at every level play in this process, how can you afford not to invest in well-designed, high-impact leadership development initiatives?
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Trying To Identify a Corporate Purpose? You Don’t Have To Save the World
It’s easy to declare yourself a purpose-driven organisation. It’s much harder, however, to identify just the right purpose to elevate your business strategy and operations.
Many companies are driven by stakeholders’ demands to stand for more than just profits. The belief that building a compassionate corporate culture helps to attract people, from partners and customers to employees, often drives organisations to align their business strategy closely to their company’s values. It is the primary way that companies build trust with their employees and customers.
So how do you identify and activate a purpose? Or decide on just one? Sustainability, diversity, equity, poverty, and upward mobility are all noble causes, but no company can effectively address them all.
Defining your purpose
To identify a purpose, leaders need to consider what their stakeholders (both internal and external) are passionate about, what is needed in the community and the world, and what the company is uniquely positioned to deliver.
Leaders need to look at what they’re already doing (a new product, service, partnership) and ask themselves how to use it as an opportunity to elevate and align it with a societal issue their stakeholders care about. They can then begin to articulate and fulfill their purpose in a more fruitful way.
Consider these examples, which are clear, precise, target real societal issues, and apply what each organisation does well to address them: Genius Group’s purpose is to build a successful community of purpose driven entrepreneurs, while The Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations (SFCCA) aims to preserve cultural traditions and connect new generations with their ancestral heritage. When trying to identify a corporate purpose, ask yourself these questions: How do we make a difference to our customers and our market? How do we do it differently? What do our employees love about their job?
Answering these questions helps organisations take a broader view while ensuring their purpose is not reduced to a marketing slogan or so exaggerated that it does not address precise needs.
Activating and elevating your purpose
Once you have articulated the unique “what” and “why” you do what you do, the next step (and indeed the bigger challenge) is activating it throughout the organisation. Mobilising every employee to march to the same beat and incorporating the purpose into their daily jobs are essential for a successful activation.
Business leaders need to be knowledgeable of business practices that undermine the credibility and integrity of their purpose. When stakeholders see a gap between what you say and what you do, you lose trust. But if you make a bold strategy move to align with your purpose, even if it requires a short-term cost, it’s an enormous boost to building trust and confidence in your organisation.
The company’s stated purpose can feel disconnected from its operations and strategy when values are not properly aligned with business strategy. Thus, the purpose becomes nothing more than empty words, and trust is either never gained, or worse — lost.
The goal is to drive employee behaviour, not parrot the company tagline, by communicating how each person’s job helps the company achieve its purpose.
Stay true to your purpose for trust with employees
The pandemic has accelerated many organisation’s purpose-driven initiatives. In recent months, the Great Resignation has driven business leaders to motivate their workforce with clarity of purpose. When you consider the importance consumers and employees place on trust and living your purpose, it’s easy to see why.
According to a global “Strength of Purpose” study by Zeno Group, consumers are four times more likely to trust and purchase from a brand with a strongly-articulated purpose. Moreover, they are 4.5 times more likely to champion the brand, and six times more likely to defend the brand in a challenging moment. In the State of the Connected Customer report, customers expect businesses to act responsibly. Eighty-five percent of customers say their purchase decisions are swayed by how companies treat employees and sixty-eight percent of customers around the world trust companies to act with society’s best interest in mind.
At the same time, employees, emboldened and empowered by the tight labour market, prefer to work for purpose-driven organisations.
Business leaders should ask themselves if their structure, systems, and resourcing equips employees to bring the organisational purpose to life. Specifically:
Are you a magnet for the right talent, hiring, and retaining people that allow you to excel at the capabilities needed to deliver on your purpose?
Do you connect with intention across boundaries, breaking down silos so people across the organisation can work together to achieve its purpose?
Do you invest in your purpose, putting your money where your purpose is?
A company that’s meeting all three criteria could position itself more authentically to job candidates, bring teams together for better collaboration, provide customers with a more connected experience, at the same time, allocate a percentage of its profits to underinvested communities.
Stay true to your purpose for trust with customers
Stakeholders, in particular customers, need to know and understand your purpose to develop trust. Have you defined your purpose as a solemn promise to your customer? Remember, the world may not need more software, sofas, or soap, but it does need companies to use their unique strength and passion to address real problems.
Not too long ago, a company’s trustworthiness centred primarily around protecting customer data, and its purpose was to sell products customers wanted. Not anymore. Customers have unparalleled choices, access to information, and a massive platform to share their opinions. Company values weigh more than how it used to be with 66% of customers stopped buying from a company whose values didn’t align with theirs — up from 62% in 2020.
If organisations can establish and constantly demonstrate their commitment to living their brand purpose to customers, trust will follow.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
How Financial Services Can Improve Customer Experience With a Data-Driven Approach
The pandemic has significantly changed customer behaviour across industries. To meet the evolving needs of customers, many businesses are accelerating the digitalisation of their services. Financial services institutions, in particular, are witnessing a rapid shift to the digital-first customer experience — where customers prefer to access a service virtually while expecting a seamless experience across channels. From opening a bank account online, to making investments or an insurance claim digitally in minutes, today’s customers expect quick, convenient service with minimal in-person interaction.
To meet these growing expectations of customers, many banks are transitioning from traditional banking to ‘open finance’. This new model allows customers to access an online marketplace and choose from a range of financial services, including banking, insurance, and wealth management, tailored to their specific needs. It gives customers better control of their finances and increases access to fairer and more equal financial services. This shift to digital-first customer experience is here to stay and will continue to evolve.
According to McKinsey, 75% of first time digital channel users will keep using these channels, even as lockdowns and social restrictions continue to ease. This has also significantly shifted the service standards expected by customers. 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across marketing channels and departments. And if the customer service offered by a business is good, 91% of customers want to maintain that relationship.
To deliver these hyper-personalised experiences, financial services institutions need to have a comprehensive view of the customer journey. So how are they developing their digital capabilities to meet the service standards expected today?
Turning challenges into opportunities
Gaining insights into customer needs is critical in delivering fast and seamless service. While financial services institutions have digitally transformed their systems, many have been slow to embrace service transformation. Siloed customer data on legacy systems makes it a challenge for service agents to seamlessly engage customers.
63% of customer service agents say they struggle to balance speed and quality of service. And 79% of service professionals say it is impossible to provide great service without a complete view of customer interactions. These challenges faced by service agents are impacting customer experience. Only 27% of banking customers say they received great customer service and support. And 80% of customers will switch to another company after just one poor experience.
To meet the high expectations of today’s customers, financial service institutions are investing in improving quality of service. C-suite executives are increasingly making customer experience and engagement a top business priority. One of their key focus areas is the transformation of the contact centre — an important customer experience touchpoint.
Critical to the contact centre’s quality of service is the ability to understand changing customer needs. Service agents need to have a single view of customer data across channels and departments. They also need to access financial transaction data (e.g. credit card, investments, loans etc.) from systems outside the organisation. Being able to bring all this data together to gain customer insights provides an important opportunity to improve customer service. This allows service agents to stay informed of customer behaviour and provide them the best experience.
Good data culture delivers a great customer experience
A cloud-based CRM is a powerful tool that can help your customer service teams stay connected to customers. It enables service agents to access customer data and interactions from anywhere in a secured online environment. When combined with a visual analytics platform like Tableau and CRM Analytics, your CRM can unlock the power of data and gain actionable insights to deliver faster, more efficient service.
Tableau empowers service agents with these data-driven insights to accelerate their decision-making. By prioritising data-driven decision making, you can build a good data culture in your teams. And by giving each team member insight into exactly what they need to make excellent decisions, you can help them consistently meet their customer service KPIs.
When a leading insurance provider in the Asia-Pacific region used LIKE.TG with Tableau, they were able to better understand the customer journey. This empowered their contact centre with insights to provide faster, more impactful service. Tableau analytics dashboards helped their teams track application status and issue policies in a timely manner. By combining data from across teams, Tableau helped their teams gain visibility into customer engagements and the end-to-end insurance journey. This significantly improved their speed and quality of service. Their senior executives were also able to continuously monitor business performance on dashboards and quickly respond to market changes. A data-driven approach helped both their C-suite and contact centre achieve operational excellence.
Adopt a winning approach, driven by data
Together, Tableau and LIKE.TG Customer 360 can empower your financial services institution to meet the expectations of today’s digital-first customers. Your service agents have access to unified customer data in a “single pane of glass” with key insights across the customer journey. Your business can see the world through your customers’ eyes.
With a comprehensive overview of the connected customer journey, financial services providers have all the information they need to elevate customer experience, improve operational efficiency, and drive loyalty. By adopting a data-driven approach, you can develop a distinct competitive advantage and transform your business from a cost centre into a revenue driver.
Learn how to delight your customers by crafting an unrivalled and personalised customer experience through connected data, digital intelligence, and automation.
How To Deliver a Successful Product Launch
Your brand has a new product on the way. Your marketing team has spent months partnering with product management to understand the roadmap and build messaging and positioning. Now it’s time for the fun part: telling the world about this new innovation with a product launch.
LIKE.TG defines a product launch as announcing a new offering to the public. Launches are opportunities to tell compelling stories about your product, not just about its functionality but also the impact it will have on people.
A passionate and relevant story builds trust with your core audience. That trust extends to increased awareness and excitement about the new product’s features. And that ultimately leads to more sales.
So how do you deliver a great launch? It’s a big, coordinated effort with product, sales, marketing, public relations, analyst relations, and events teams. Let’s take a look at the three types of launches that we have at LIKE.TG and what we’ve learned over the past few years.
How to create a marketing launch
A marketing launch is often called a “soft launch” and is used when introducing a new product — typically three to six months before general availability (GA) to the public. We do this to build the excitement that leads to the GA of the product and allow early adopters to test it.
Soft launches give our product team a chance to see how customers will use the product and what can be improved. Marketers can later use these customer stories when the product launches.
A key to success in this early launch is communicating the value of your new product to the media. Earned media is one of the best awareness you can get. Marketers and PR teams must deliver a clear, concise, and consistent story that’s interesting, easy to understand, and is a conversation starter. What makes your new product so interesting and why should people care? Demo videos, blogs, emails, and small events can all work together to explain the answer.
Planning a successful GA launch
Once your product has finished its pilot program, the product team will be ready to make it generally available to the masses. Preparing for a general availability launch is no small feat.
As a marketer, the sales team is your main audience for a GA launch. Your job is to help them clearly explain the product’s value to customers.
Sales can be a tough audience! They’ll want content that is clear and direct, which means no marketing fluff. At a large company like LIKE.TG, we believe in keeping it simple and relevant. We focus on use cases: how are customers adopting the product? We also focus on industry-specific cases and always factor how the product ties to the rest of the sales portfolio.
Sales is a priority, but your external audience is also crucial during a GA launch. We’ve found that events are a great way to generate excitement and show the product in action. LIKE.TG is an events-driven company, and programs like Dreamforce, LIKE.TG Live: Asia and our travelling World Tours help us scale the launches of the newest versions of the products when they become GA.
There’s another benefit. Having a large audience of customers in one place allows us to answer their questions and have meaningful conversations — not to mention celebrating everyone’s success.
Support customers with a solution launch
So you launched a new product, and it’s finally available to the public. Your job’s done, right? Not quite yet.
Solution launches showcase a relevant application of the product for a line of business or an industry.
Products often evolve with customers’ wants and needs. This may happen fast or over a longer period. After a GA launch, you may discover new applications for your product. Or maybe there was a major world event or a shift in the economy that turned everything on its head.
A solution launch is a way to tell customers, ‘here’s why this product is relevant to you,’ by showing them additional innovations and integrations that are coming.
Solution changes also help you extend your marketing reach. You can use them to craft your product message targeting a specific industry or business area. These are great ways to expand into new markets and test which solutions increase your product’s overall sales.
Now that you’re familiar with the different kinds of launches, here are three quick tips to help you plan for your next product launch.
Tip #1: Understand your product launch goal
Are you entering a new market? Are you building and keeping momentum for an existing product? Are you showcasing a new feature or capability? It takes a lot of people across many different teams to make a launch successful, so make sure everyone is clear on what the shared purpose is.
Tip #2: Know the product
Become best buddies with your product teams. No one knows the product better than the people building it, so collaborate with them early and often. Roll up your sleeves and get hands-on with product functionality, study the product roadmap, and ask questions when something is unclear. The more you understand about your product, the easier it will be to lead different teams through a launch.
Tip #3: Be nimble
Things can change fast during a launch, so you have to be flexible while staying focused on your goal. I always say that nothing is precious during a launch. In order to move the project forward, you need to accept feedback and make the right decisions, even if it means making a turnaround.
Product launches are an exciting way to bring people together across product, sales, and marketing. If done right, you’ll not only delight your customers but also bring your team together around a common goal. That will set you up for success both in the short term and over the long haul. Happy launching!
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Level up Your Data Skills With the New CRM Analytics Release
The CRM Analytics Summer ’22 Release brings a variety of exciting updates and new features. The new release from CRM Analytics (formerly known as Tableau CRM) will allow you to seamlessly access, collaborate, and share insights from anywhere.
Here are some exciting features in the Summer ’22 release:
Leverage machine learning to extract keywords from large text fields with Einstein Discovery Text Clustering.
Discover data insights using natural language search and automated recommendations with the Ask Data for LIKE.TG.
Bring data to every conversation and share insights and predictions from anywhere with the CRM Analytics app for Slack and Predictions in Slack.
With new enhancements in Data Manager, get the additional features built around recipe sharing (folders), recipe chaining, and recipe visualisation.
Let’s take a deeper look at some new features in this CRM analytics summer release.
Discover insights from your unstructured data
Today’s businesses are resting on vast amounts of data, the majority of which is unstructured. The most common type of unstructured data is text. Unstructured text data is generated in various forms, including survey responses, emails, messages, social media sites, and blog posts. To access the unused insights from the unstructured data, we are introducing Einstein Discovery Text Clustering in Summer ’22.
Unstructured data in raw form often cannot be used to input into discovery. With Text Clustering, you can discover key words from large text fields to make data-related decisions. The words that have less information are clustered together and added to a separate bucket. This way, you can focus on the important keywords to uncover hidden insights and improve decision-making by reducing unstructured data. Using Text Clustering, you can pull keywords from a raw field and input them into the discovery model and story. Not only that, you can also check the types of words driving it from the story.
Clusters of rows show the top three keywords for each cluster (2). You can uncheck clusters to filter them into an “Other” category.
Ask data a question and search insights with Ask Data for LIKE.TG
With Ask Data for LIKE.TG, you can ask questions from the data without building a dashboard. It augments natural language querying and autocomplete suggestions to help you find insights quickly and easily. You can select any data, fields, and values to map with your question.
The search insight page recommends top insights consisting of a configured visualisation or metric. It also includes recommended next best insights and related dashboards matching your search. Additionally, it gives you the chance to revise your questions on the spot. You can dive into the associated items directly, share and explore the next best insights right from the page.
Note: Ask Data for LIKE.TG is enabled by default in production orgs with 1,000 or more reports. The service becomes available 24 hours after it’s enabled. If you have fewer than 1,000 reports in production, but want to try Ask Data for LIKE.TG, contact LIKE.TG Support.
The Search Insights is an instantly configured visualisation or metric that recommends top insight (1). The Insights page includes recommended next best insights (2), asset recommendations related to the search (3), and opportunities to revise your questions on the spot.
Collaborate and share insights from anywhere with CRM Analytics for Slack
You can now leverage Slack’s collaborative competence to provide insights to a broader audience. By integrating CRM Analytics (Formerly called Tableau CRM) dashboards and Einstein predictions into Slack, you can increase collaboration and decision-making.
CRM Analytics for Slack empowers everyone with real-time insights and most important metrics right within their Slack workflows. It gives access to AI-powered recommendations and insights within Slack and allows everyone to take action to drive results.
For example, you can browse for recent and favourite dashboards, reports, and lenses, or if you want to share specific insights with your manager, browse and share the dashboard directly from Slack. Share a snapshot of the dashboards and your findings with your entire team or channels and loop in external partners, vendors, or customers with Slack connect.
Stay on top of all your data with notifications and subscriptions. Whenever your metrics meet certain thresholds, you get notified automatically, and you can also select to alert a specific team or channel. You can also get regular snapshots of reports from the CRM Analytics dashboards.
Customers can access AI-powered predictions from Einstein Discovery right within Slack and share them with their team. Predictive models can be applied to a report’s base object to obtain aggregated predictions.
Integrated CRM Analytics dashboards and Einstein predictions in Slack.
Unlock new Data Manager enhancements in the CRM analytics summer release
With our new, revamped Data Manager, you can instantly access all your data. You can view all the connections in the column list in the connection view and get clearer visibility of your data usage and limits from the new Usage view.
You will get advanced functionality with a brand new look when you open the Data Manager from the Analytic Studio home page. There is always a risk that the data volume or the processing might exceed any of the limits we specify for our product, so having a centralised view of these limits is essential. Check if a product is nearing its limit from the usage section. Switch between CRM Analytics and LIKE.TG Data Pipelines if you have the correct license to access more data.
The new Data Manager shows how you can improve execution, usability, and scalability.
The new Data Manager focuses more on Data recipes than Dataflows. With this new enhancement, we encourage all customers to use data recipes. But, Dataflows are not going away completely. You can manage your Dataflows or create live Datasets by opening the old data manager link provided at the bottom.
Level up your data skills with the new CRM Analytics release and learn how it can provide intelligent insights to your business.
WATCH DEMO
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Einstein Delivers Personalisation Throughout the Customer Lifecycle
With inputs from Vikrant Deshmukh, Senior Solution Engineer
Even if the first impression is not the last one, there is no denying that it creates an impact. Personalisation, from the very beginning, can be a differentiator between winning a loyal customer and losing a lead.
However, a lot goes behind delivering personalised experiences, such as connecting different touchpoints and functions or building a comprehensive and complete customer view. From marketing to service, businesses are constantly innovating and strategising to improve multi-channel engagement, customer profiling, and personalised service.
The most frequently asked question is — what can be done to personalise interactions that can take customers further on their brand journey?
Streamlining and personalising customer experience using AI-powered recommendations
When it comes to nurturing customers, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered tools can help any business function or team know what the next best actions are to deliver personalised experiences.
AI can help you capture large amounts of data such as customer interaction history, location, preferences, and case history, and derive accurate and actionable insights from it. You can use this information to determine what your customer wants to do next or the next logical step for them.
Withthe help of a virtual task force, you can simplify processes, improve access to information, and suggest the next ideal steps for your business. This helps marketers, sales reps, service agents, and management teams to make informed decisions that ‘wow’ customers.
LIKE.TG Einstein is our integrated AI engine that can increase team productivity, and improve customer experience at every stage of the customer journey. Einstein’s Next Best Action helps with:
Discovering hidden insights
Predicting future outcomes
Recommending the next logical step
This feature assists users by delivering the right information at the right time based on a predictive model. Imagine seeing a pop-up on your dashboard that suggests products a customer may like. With the click of a button, you can compile them into a personalised message and send it on their preferred channel. Tailored recommendations can be sent to the customer at impactful moments without delay or errors.
If you’re resolving a case related to on-premises services, you will know exactly what actions you can ask your customer to take while waiting for the field agent to arrive.
Here’s how Einstein and Einstein Next Best Action can simplify your decision-making process and help you take the right actions:
Einstein for Marketing
Ask marketers what the most important aspect of a successful campaign is, and you’ll get various answers. What goes behind a successful campaign is knowing the right time and channels to reach your customers with the right messaging. When designing a marketing campaign or customer journey, Einstein can suggest the ideal channels and instances to interact with customers at different stages of their journey.
With Einstein Marketing Cloud, recommendations based on customer preferences or intent can help you create personalised messages and content. This helps you understand your customers better to implement contextual marketing campaigns.
Einstein Next Best Action for Sales
Once the customer is convinced they want to engage with your brand, closing the deal presents a new set of challenges. A salesperson should know the offers or products that have attracted the customer. For instance, customers are unlikely to be interested in a previously purchased product. Instead, a recommendation based on supporting products can help with upselling.
LIKE.TG Einstein allows users to fetch information regarding purchase history from the customer profile with just a click. This makes upselling and cross-selling much easier.
Imagine this scenario — a customer has seen a certain product and added it to their cart. However, they don’t checkout and the cart is abandoned. An AI-enabled recommendation pops up on the salesperson’s dashboard. These recommendations could look like:
Send a custom offer that bundles the product in a cart with another ideal product for their customer segment.
Send them a reminder that their cart is waiting.
Send them more information regarding the product and the support you can promise if they complete the purchase.
Einstein Next Best Action for Service
Once a customer has purchased from a business, the best way to ensure loyalty is by providing services that stand out. This can be done by letting your customer know you care and providing them with a seamless service.Instilling a feeling of familiarity by using their name, not making them repeat grievances they have already shared, and following up on feedback they’ve given show you value their association with the brand. All of this can be greatly improved with a 360-degree view of the customer.
AI recommendations with a holistic view of the customer can enable service agents to:
Send informational content that solves customer issues with ease
Send quick replies that keep the customer engaged while a solution is being fetched
Conduct relevant surveys to ensure satisfaction
Remind customers to renew subscriptions or contracts to build long-standing relationships with your brand
Send loyalty rewards or offers to customers close to attrition
Upsell and cross-sell relevant products
LIKE.TG Einstein for customer-centric businesses
Now, if we revisit the question posed earlier — What action will be most effective in moving a customer ahead in their journey with the brand?
Einstein can tell you exactly that. It can tell users if:
Campaigns are effective
Sales goals are achieved
Customers are enjoying their interactions with the brand
Then, it makes recommendations that can help any team take the next best steps to deliver more relevant and consistent customer experiences across channels.
This post originally appeared on the LIKE.TG India blog.
How To Build A Productive Lead Generation Strategy That Works
Our goal as marketers is to attract people to our brand. But not just any people: we want to draw prospects with a high likelihood of becoming customers. Good lead-generation tactics can help.
We define lead generation as the process of creating consumer interest for a service or product, with the end goal of turning that interest into revenue.
Leads can be generated when a consumer downloads a piece of content, signs up for a free trial, or creates an account for a free product. They come from organic channels, such as Google search, and paid channels, such as advertising campaigns.
Generating mass appeal is good for brand awareness, but here’s the thing: not all leads are created equal. Running a strong lead-generation program is not about the quantity of leads we generate. It’s about ensuring quality leads by targeting the right people, at the right time, and delivering the right content on the right channel to them in their customer journey.
Want to learn more about building a productive lead generation strategy? Here are three tips to grow more leads, using examples from how we do things here at LIKE.TG.
1. How to measure lead generation tactics
An important metric is a key indicator of business growth and can be tied to the increase in product engagement and revenue. It’s something the entire organisation can rally behind.
Our marketing team key metric is when an opportunity reaches the second stage of thesales funnel. At that point, our sales development team has vetted a prospect, and the prospect is verified and accepted by an account executive.
Our sales team will estimate the potential revenue from the opportunity, allowing the marketing team to also begin tracking a return on investment. From here, we start to build our measurement framework. We use this metric to measure the success of our lead generation tactics and improve programs.
When measuring, it’s important to gauge which sources are bringing in high-quality leads. Are they social platforms like LinkedIn, email newsletters, or ad partners like Google? Also, make sure the money spent on ads is generating high-quality users.
An example of a high-quality lead is a ‘hand raiser’ — someone who engages with the brand or asks for information (like requesting a demo or free trial). A passive lead is someone who provides contact info to download an ebook but hasn’t expressed other interest. We pay close attention to hand-raiser leads because they have a higher chance of becoming customers.
We focus on content performance from the highest-quality sources of leads. If traffic is dropping from a top-quality lead source, we react quickly because of the expected downstream effect. Possible tweaks include changing our ad design or ad copy, adjusting our paid investment or updating a call to action (CTA).
2. Develop strategies to get the right leads
There is a saying that goes ‘a lead is a lead,’ but that’s a big misconception.
Customer insight and interest is valuable, and social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn generate revenue by offering targeted advertising that uses the customer data they’ve collected. So, a more targeted campaign on LinkedIn will cost significantly more than a general banner ad.
Some leads can be less costly and have huge scale, but are low quality because they aren’t reaching people who are looking for specific products or services (and therefore less likely to convert).
Other leads are more expensive but target people who are ready to buy. And then there is everyone in between.
The various channels, targeting options, and content that we pair together to acquire leads can produce hundreds or even thousands of iterations. We have to recognise the lead generation tactics that produce quality leads and at what cost.
For example, on LinkedIn, our target is sales managers within the financial services industry who have interacted with our business once in the past. We serve them a customer story from a banking customer. These leads might be more expensive, but they’re highly likely to convert, so the cost is worth it.
3. How to test lead generation tactics
Improving the efficiency of lead generation tactics is crucial — no matter if it is a one-person team at a startup or a larger team at an enterprise.
At LIKE.TG, we improve lead quality and ROI by using Marketing Cloud Intelligence to run tests on our paid ads. We run a test by delivering two or more versions of ad copy or form pages to different segments of our audience at the same time and seeing which ones perform best.
These tests are done on our highest-trafficked content. We’ve found that even the most basic changes have driven significant returns — and then we can apply those changes to other programs to make them more efficient as well.
For example, we ran a simple test changing the layout of the several fields in a form that readers filled out to access a piece of content. It was simple — just shortening the vertical length of the form. This change increased form submission on desktop computers by 10%. We now do this on all our forms.
Again, not all tests require massive change of content. What matters the most is when we do find wins, they are used across many of our programs.
Building the right lead-generation tactics takes some work. But when it is done efficiently, these tactics will save cost and time, and bring in new revenue.
Building relationships with your customers is vital for your business growth. Learn how to get the most out of your leads and take your business from good to great from this guide.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Keep Your Data Secure and Accessible From Anywhere With Hyperforce
With inputs from Deepu Chacko, Senior Director, Solution Engineering
Businesses today must make decisions quickly to gain a competitive edge over others. Whether it is figuring out product pricing or planning customer engagement strategy, quick decision making boosts business performance. Using public cloud providers makes it easy to access data on the go for informed decision-making. But when companies run critical business functions and operations on a public cloud, they also need to consider certain key aspects such as:
Availability
Collecting relevant data, particularly first party, and providing it to authorised users when they need it. Your cloud infrastructure should support the right channels, integrations, and compute capacity to ensure a seamless exchange of information amongst business stakeholders.
Confidentiality
The encryption of both data in transit and at rest, and the availability of access control options to restrict unauthorised data usage.
Integrity
Maintaining data accuracy and real-time updates, with no tampering or modification.
Amping up cloud benefits with LIKE.TG Hyperforce
Your customer data resides on LIKE.TG Customer 360 for a holistic view of the customer. How do you ensure that it can only be accessed by people who need this access? How do you adhere to local data regulations while making data globally accessible?
Consider this:On any given day, LIKE.TG customers deliver an average of 2.6 billion marketing messages, create 4 million leads, and log 19.7 million customer service conversations. In addition,LIKE.TG Einsteindelivers more than 80 billion AI predictions.
That is a lot of data.
Realising the fluidity of today’s business environment and the massive changes sweeping across every industry, LIKE.TG has reimagined its platform architecture —Hyperforce. With Hyperforce, LIKE.TG customers get enhanced data security and privacy when they build custom applications using the LIKE.TG Platform, or use any product from the vast LIKE.TG suite.
Anshul Bhatnagar, Head of Software Engineering Architecture at M1, said Hyperforce helps with regulatory compliance. “To be compliant with Singapore regulatory requirements, Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data must be kept within Singapore. When our org was in Japan, we were having a lot of data flowing over the internet and experienced a lot of chattiness. With Hyperforce Singapore, latency has dropped and we are now planning to march the PII data back into LIKE.TG.”
What does this mean to you, as a LIKE.TG user?
Instead of having an abstract, self-service cloud infrastructure (aka public cloud providers) you now have an architecture especially designed to help you scale business faster, and more securely. Here’s how:
Centralise data control through restricted user access
Using the Zero Trust principle, all the best security practices have been standardised. This means that whenever there is a new security protocol, it’s applied automatically and consistently across the infrastructure. You don’t need to worry about defining new access rules because ‘if they aren’t verified, they don’t get access.’ After all, that’s what the Zero Trust approach to security is all about.
For instance, the senior managers of a company may have the right to access specific data and share it with external partners, while a junior associate may not have the same rights.
Comply with global regulations while enjoying local storage zones
Some highly regulated industries such as finance and healthcare have a different set of compliances that need to be followed. For instance, data needs to be locally stored.
With Hyperforce in action, customers can innovate freely and tap into new opportunities the world over, but get to choose the location for their data storage with zero worries around data security and compliance.
Scale fluidly without the hassle of reconfiguration
With the new infrastructure architecture, you can deploy LIKE.TG apps and services using the agility and scale of public clouds. Enjoy true cloud elasticity — your needs are recalibrated depending on your requirements. You don’t have to worry about making patches or changes to resources since LIKE.TG Hyperforce will replace it in a group with each updated version.
Equip your engineering teams while making your business future proof
Your engineering teams can stay focused on building features your customers want, while LIKE.TG has your back with the cloud-native architecture of Hyperforce. Your teams can provide a world class experience to customers, and simultaneously scale up LIKE.TG apps.
Accelerate business with Hyperforce
Deploy solutions at scale in more locations around the world using the public cloud. Enjoy faster in-country performance and reduced latency, while ensuring built-in compliance with global security protocols.
Signed Up for a Trailhead Account? Here Are Your Next 4 Steps
Signing up for a Trailhead account is just the beginning! Discover the steps you can take today to accelerate your LIKE.TG learning and career journey.
Step 1: Discover your ideal role Step 2: Make time for learning and plan your path Step 3: Build in-demand skills Step 4: Get support and build connections
Trailhead — LIKE.TG’s free online learning platform — helps Trailblazers worldwide skill up and prepare for success in the LIKE.TG ecosystem. It all begins with a simple first step: creating your Trailhead account. But that’s just the start of your learning adventure.
With Trailhead, you can learn more about your ideal LIKE.TG role, build in-demand skills and connections, earn badges and credentials, and accelerate your learning with expert-led classes — everything to help you prepare for a successful career in the LIKE.TG ecosystem.
Here are four next steps to help you boost your LIKE.TG learning journey.
Step 1: Discover your ideal role
A 2021 study from IDC found that the LIKE.TG ecosystem will create 9.3 million new jobs and USD$1.6 trillion in new business revenues worldwide by 2026. IDC forecasts that cloud-related technologies will account for over a third (37%) of digital transformation IT spending by 2026.
In addition to this explosive growth, careers in the ecosystem offer competitive salaries. On average, jobs with LIKE.TG skills pay around USD$80,000 per year. With this tremendous opportunity on the horizon, there’s no better time to explore LIKE.TG careers. With LIKE.TG Career Paths, you can learn more about which career is right for you.
With LIKE.TG Career Paths, you can explore:
Role descriptions: Browse roles, including LIKE.TG Administrator, Developer, Architect, Marketing, Sales, and Designer roles, and view up-to-date career information like salary averages, job growth rates, and even open positions.
Trailhead learning paths: Kick-start your career with curated learning paths — Trailhead trailmixes — including the Build Your Admin Career on LIKE.TG, Marketing Analytics Director, and the Build Your Developer Career on LIKE.TG trailmixes, to name a few.
Stories from real Trailblazers: Get inspired by actual Trailblazers in the field. Learn about their career paths and how you can follow in their footsteps to develop the skills and experience to secure a job in the LIKE.TG ecosystem.
Step 2: Make time for learning and plan your path
While you’re exploring LIKE.TG roles, Trailhead learning paths, and stories from real Trailblazers in your career of interest, you’re also blazing your unique journey to success. Of course, this journey and definition look different for every Trailblazer, so take the time to figure out what it means to you.
A great way to start exploring what success means for you is by motivating yourself to go further with Trailblazer Ranks. Unlock new ranks by challenging yourself to earn more points and badges while building in-demand skills along the way.
You can kick off your rank journey with Road to Ranger. This is a curated learning path designed to create the perfect combination of badges and points to eliminate guesswork from achieving your final rank status — Trailhead Ranger. Road to Ranger consists of three trailmixes (think of these as learning playlists):
Trailmix 1: Get started with the basics about Trailhead, LIKE.TG, and some important guiding principles.
Trailmix 2: Take a look at our technology, including learning more about how the LIKE.TG Platform supercharges customer relationship management (CRM), Marketing Cloud, and Einstein Basics.
Trailmix 3: Get hands-on and earn some points! Explore trails on everything from protecting LIKE.TG data to Admin Essentials.
Step 3: Build in-demand skills
Learning is a reward in itself. But there’s always room for some extra motivation. With Trailhead Quests, you challenge yourself by learning new skills with the added incentive of winning prizes.
Whether you’re new to LIKE.TG, thinking about getting certified, or you just want to keep earning those Trailhead badges, there’s a quest for you.
Kick-off questing in three easy steps:
Choose your quest: Pick which one works best for you from the Trailhead Quests page — from beginner to expert, there’s a quest for everyone.
Complete the challenge: Follow the instructions listed on the specific quest, and make sure to complete your quest within the specific timeframe.
Be in with a chance to win: Complete your quest to receive shiny community badges that will be shown on your profile.
If you’re new to Trailhead, kick off your quest journey with the Beginner’s Quest trailmix. Quests change regularly, so join the Trailhead Quests Group to stay up-to-date on all things quests.
Step 4: Get support and build connections
The Trailblazer Community is a worldwide network — millions of Trailblazers from all walks of life inspire and support one another along the journey of learning and succeeding with LIKE.TG. The Trailblazer Community is where you can connect with fellow Trailblazers based on your location, role, and interests.
With the Trailblazer Community, you can:
Develop in-demand skills: Follow featured and trending topics and find fast answers to your questions on key topics in the Trailblazer Community Topics forum.
Connect with fellow Trailblazers: Find and join one or more of the 1,300+ Community Groups and meetings across 90 countries.
Give back: Share your knowledge and build your network by answering questions on the Trailblazer Community Feed and volunteering to help new Trailblazers skill up and find jobs through Trailblazer Mentorship and Trailblazer Workforce Partners.
Choose your adventure!
There’s something for everyone on Trailhead, no matter your learning and career goals. If you haven’t already, sign up for your free account and start blazing new trails today!
Popular Trailhead badges to get you started
LIKE.TG CRM: Learn how to use CRM software to grow your business.
LIKE.TG Platform Basics: Get introduced to the platform, navigate use cases, and build custom functionality.
Accounts Contacts for Lightning Experience: Discover how accounts and contacts work together in LIKE.TG.
Data Management: Learn how to import and export data in LIKE.TG.
Data Modeling: Give your data structure with objects, fields, and relationships.
Trailhead Playground Management: Create hands-on orgs, practice your LIKE.TG skills, and complete Trailhead challenges.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
What Is MuleSoft?
This post was updated in August 2022.
MuleSoft has been part of the LIKE.TG family for more than two years. During that time, we’ve been helping companies achieve digital transformation by easily connecting all their business systems. So, what does MuleSoft do? Let’s explore the powerful world of integration.
IT innovation takes on a new urgency
Over the last few years, organisations relied on IT to support a rapid shift to remote working. Day-to-day operational demands have always taken up too much of IT’s time, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic period. As businesses gradually move toward hybrid working, the number of systems and amount of data that companies need to manage has increased. This creates an integration barrier to automation progress which 96% of companies find it difficult to overcome.
According to the 2022 Connectivity Benchmark report, organisations asked IT, on average, to deliver on 40% more projects over the last 12 months. Organisations are increasing IT budgets (5.8% in 2021), but not in line with the growing demands from the business. This is contributing to a widening IT delivery gap for many companies.
At the same time, many organisations are accelerating digital transformation. Digital transformation is no longer seen as an option, but a necessity. Customers expect fast, digital, and on-demand experiences, or they will take their business elsewhere.
The more digital transformation initiatives that need to be implemented, the wider the delivery gap gets. It’s a balance most organisations still struggle to find. The central pillar to solve this huge challenge is to understand how integration drives digital transformation.
MuleSoft automation addresses those concerns with capabilities that allow customers to automate any process for any team. Enter MuleSoft.
So, what does MuleSoft do?
Customers expect connected experiences. They don’t want to see the seams where your systems and departments meet.
MuleSoft brings a new unified solution for automation, integration, and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that easily automates any workflow and system for your team. It helps your team to quickly adapt to constant change and business complexity. This makes it easy to consolidate data to deliver a single view of the customer to build connected experiences.
The solution now includes no-code capabilities to automate repetitive manual tasks using bots with MuleSoft RPA (robotic process automation). It can quickly connect data from any system, such as Slack with MuleSoft Composer. The new capabilities are fully integrated into LIKE.TG Flow, a comprehensive suite of automation technologies across the Customer 360 to increase efficiency and productivity and deliver unparalleled experiences.
This expanded MuleSoft capabilities facilitate co-creation and accelerate innovation across IT and business teams. Business teams such as sales can close deals more efficiently and service reps can quickly sync customer records to improve customer service interactions.
The results speak for themselves. LIKE.TG customers are creating 4.8 billion MuleSoft transactions daily and this saves over 100 billion hours of work every month with LIKE.TG Flow. Forrester found that MuleSoft customers realise an ROI of 445% within just three years and were able to free up 90% of developer time from maintaining APIs and integrations.
MuleSoft case study
Let’s use an example. One of the world’s largest consumer goods providers wanted to find more efficient solutions to deploy new products and services. Their goal was to roll out a new ecommerce initiative quickly, to engage directly with customers through both digital and in-store channels, and deliver a better customer experience. However, delivering end-to-end automation is broader than what their IT team can handle on its own.
To make this happen, IT and business teams need to work together to facilitate the change as multiple tools to its ecommerce platform, such as LIKE.TG Commerce Cloud, SAP, and NetSuite need to be integrated. Using a custom code path, the IT teams would need to:
Spend IT time, effort, and resources to build three separate integrations while also including security considerations.
Hire an employee who understood the thousands of fields in their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the various systems required for their new ecommerce platform, and was able to build each integration.
Create additional integrations if they ever change any of the systems they use.
Spend time and effort on training the other teams to use the various systems.
Instead, the company decided to adopt MuleSoft to enable the connectivity between tools and collaboration between teams. Using MuleSoft RPA, the company started by building an automation platform that connects with Anypoint Platform and Composer to eliminate manual tasks and processes. MuleSoft RPA takes only the information needed from the relevant systems, combines it, and exposes it in a simple and accessible format. That means:
Repetitive and manual tasks can be replaced with bots that can intelligently process data from any system, document, photo, or legacy user interface. These bots can also be securely shared and reused across teams.
Applications with pre-build enterprise connectors and bots can be seamlessly integrated with both MuleSoft Composer and MuleSoft RPA.
Automations can benefit from hundreds of connectors to important systems and even directly call APIs created by technical teams.
Teams can use MuleSoft RPA to automate workflows across multiple systems and apps by integrating RPA bots seamlessly with LIKE.TG Customer 360, Anypoint Platform, and MuleSoft Composer.
IT teams can govern, monitor, and secure any automation and integration built with APIs or bots with Anypoint Platform.
In other words, business teams can gain productivity instantly with no-code automation, and leadership teams can immediately start to create and reuse composable assets to transform business. Thanks to MuleSoft, the IT and business teams are now working together on one platform to deliver unparalleled customer experiences. Today, deployment for new initiatives is 3-4 times faster — dropping from months to days.
How LIKE.TG and MuleSoft can be leveraged together
MuleSoft can connect any system, application, data, and device to unleash the power of Customer 360. The combined power of MuleSoft, the #1 integration platform, and LIKE.TG, the #1 CRM, enables customers to accelerate digital transformation.
Together, MuleSoft and LIKE.TG give companies the ability to unlock data across systems, develop scalable integration frameworks, and ultimately create differentiated, connected experiences at a rapid pace. Across various integration patterns, LIKE.TG products, and third-party systems — the integration possibilities are endless. These include developing integrated applications with Lightning Platform, Heroku, Slack, and Tableau to achieve a single customer view in Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. By incorporating siloed third-party systems, and connecting LIKE.TG Customer 360 with legacy sources to synchronise order, invoice, and product information. With MuleSoft, repetitive work can be eliminated and that helps to increase employees’ productivity and reduce costs for customers.
Learn more about how MuleSoft RPA automate repetitive processes and tasks for your business.
Gain insights into the enterprise technological trends from IT leaders worldwide.
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Learn How To Innovate at the Speed of Singapore Airlines
The mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ doesn’t work in a trust-based economy where data security and data privacy are critical. Instead, businesses need to find ways to innovate fast without compromising security or building up technical debt.
Fortunately, achieving the right balance is a little easier today. DevOps and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) provide the guardrails development teams need to move quickly and safely. This includes strong governance and practices like automated testing. Businesses like Singapore Airlines have also established their own best practices to innovate without disruption.
We spoke to Srinivasan Santhanam, Senior Principal Technologist at Singapore Airlines to learn about these and hear how the business keeps up with the demand for new features and digital experiences.
Here’s what we learned.
The right mindset and technical muscle are both keys to agility
Like many businesses during the pandemic, Singapore Airlines had to move fast to reimagine its customer touchpoints. It introduced online meal selection and other mobile services to provide a contactless journey.
Technology teams relied on two key levers to deliver these solutions within a tight timeframe. The first was a change in mindset.
“We didn’t have the luxury to ideate for a long time. So what we did during that time is cultivate a mindset of build-measure-learn. That allowed us to ideate and conceptualise solutions very quickly,” said Santhanam.
The second key lever was the technical muscle to translate these concepts into real-world solutions. Singapore Airlines already had a strong set of development tools and processes. The business had also shifted to cloud and serverless computing for greater agility.
“We had already set the ball rolling on our digital transformation and were leveraging platforms like LIKE.TG to deliver faster. What we needed to do was accelerate everything to meet customers’ expectations,” said Santhanam.
Barriers to agility highlight the need for good governance
We asked Santhanam about the barriers to delivering change faster. Using the iceberg analogy, he pointed out the visible or common barriers first. The largest barrier is not having the right tools and that’s followed by unsuitable processes.
“Incorrectly modelled processes create a lot of bottlenecks. Also, people are often too eager to automate and automation just makes a bad process worse,” said Santhanam. “People should first take a look at their processes — how they ideate, conceptualise, and deliver. They can then identify what they need to tighten before they automate.”
Other visible barriers include a lack of collaboration and transparency. For teams to move fast, they need to communicate and have visibility into the work created by their colleagues.
The invisible barrier Santhanam pointed out is technical debt. Application development projects often start with a minimum viable product. Then, when developers should be refactoring or restructuring code, they get tasked with new requirements and keep building.
“What happens over time is that a small system change requires significant effort because there are so many undocumented dependencies and much more that you need to test,” said Santhanam.
That’s why applying goodgovernancefrom the start of application development is so important. On top of that, businesses need a robust DevOps process with high levels of test automation to reduce production defects and downtime. The DevOps process should include an effective branching strategy that allows multiple teams to build and test in parallel using isolatedSandboxenvironments. In addition, data in these Sandboxes should be anonymised and protected using a solution like LIKE.TGData Mask. This will prevent any data leaks and ensure regulatory requirements are met.
New platforms and processes needed for seamless collaboration
While remote and hybrid working is now the norm, Singapore Airlines had to reimagine its ways of working early on in the pandemic. For example, it had to find a way for developers to collaborate and develop solutions in parallel without stepping on one another’s toes.
Sharing their learnings, Santhanam said teams needed secured platforms where they can collaborate and share visibility of their work. They also need training on how best to use these platforms.
“IT teams also need to organise their development processes in a way that makes it easier to collaborate. For example, they need to think about how they manage their source code and how they conduct code reviews,” said Santhanam.
Solving these human challenges is just as important as overcoming the technical barriers to innovating fast.
For more tips on how you can navigate both, watch the webinar ‘Success Anywhere: Innovate Fast. Scale with Confidence. Empower Everyone’.
4 Ways Financial Services Drive Growth With Personalised Experiences
Our research reveals firms must wrangle data better and track the entire customer journey to meet rising expectations. Prakash Thomas, Regional Vice President; Financial Services Health, LIKE.TG Industries; ASEAN, shares four ways financial services institutions (FSIs) can drive growth through great digital experiences.
Financial services customers have a message for their providers: they like doing business online — and they aren’t going back to pre-pandemic habits.
That’s the good news from LIKE.TG research on financial services trends and the state of banking, insurance, and wealth management. The not-so-good news is that globally, customers are often dissatisfied with the digital experiences being offered by financial services institutions.
In the past year, digital adoption has increased in varying degrees across banking, insurance, and wealth management. It has shown steady growth during a challenging time — continuing pandemic, growing inflation, and increasing economic and geopolitical uncertainty.
Against this backdrop, digital adoption is proving to be not just resilient but unstoppable. In Asia, high rates of smartphone usage are driving growth in e-commerce and creating more opportunities for businesses to offer embedded financial services. According to a McKinsey study “Future of Asia” (Oct 2021), many financial consumers across Asia are taking this “mobile-first” approach. This leads to a rise of digital ecosystems, including highly integrated super apps that offer a one-stop-shop for a range of services.
Banks are also introducing innovations like embedded finance and banking as-a-service platforms to participate in digital ecosystems. DBS Bank in Singapore, for example, is pursuing such digital ecosystem-based opportunities. It runs marketplaces in travel, mobility, and property, and an application programming interface (API) developer platform.
So how can FSIs improve the digital experiences of their customers? To help answer that question, LIKE.TG conducted a survey of 2,250 customers in nine countries in April. We also interviewed six senior financial services executives in strategy, business development, and innovation to help understand how to improve service where it matters.
Based on the responses we collected in The Future of Financial Services: Better Customer Experiences Start with Automation, here are our top insights:
1. Provide experiences that are easy and transparent
The pandemic has forced financial services to focus on constantly evolving their digital experience. Both B2C and B2B financial service players needed to quickly enhance their technical capabilities to deliver more value to customers on their digital channels. The first expectation from today’s customers is, ‘I want to be able to access things digitally. I want to have a really clean website or a login page where I can access all the right features. I want a really great app.’
If you don’t have these capabilities yet, that’s a risk. Financial service institutions are losing customers to competitors because the online experience isn’t easy or intuitive. The appeal of “easy” is driving customers to digital-first financial services. In our survey, nearly half of respondents said easy and fast setup, verification, onboarding, and first-time use of the app were pushing them to try out the newer financial apps. 41% cited an easy and intuitive user interface and navigation as reasons to test out these newcomers.
Transparency is another one of the financial services trends driving customers to newcomers. More than one in three survey respondents said they switched providers — whether banking, insurance, or wealth management — because of hidden fees and fine print. Then there’s the general category of unsatisfactory experiences that prompt customers to switch providers. More than one-third of insurance policyholders left their current provider for that reason.
2. Anticipate customer needs and show you care about their financial health
Customers don’t just want products. They want to work with financial services that care about their financial health and personalise recommendations. Based on the insights from our survey participants, the industry is still falling short of customer expectations. Only 16% of banking customers, 15% of insurance customers, and 25% of wealth management consumers strongly agree that their vendors are invested in their financial wellbeing. To win customer trust and loyalty, financial services institutions should offer differentiated and value added services.
Customers want you to anticipate their needs, similar to the way product companies know what customers want next or media companies anticipate which movies customers want to watch next. Only 11% of banking, 11% of insurance, and 18% of wealth management consumers agree that companies anticipate their financial needs. LIKE.TG research suggests FSIs can improve their ability to do this by using predictive personalisation based on each customer’s unique journey.
According to a McKinsey 2021 personal financial survey, Asia’s share of active digital banking users increased to 88% compared to 65% four years ago. This is driving financial services to innovate to drive additional online sales. The study notes that consumer adoption of digital channels was initially strongest for transactional services. However in 2020, even high-touch products like mortgages have started to move to online channels. Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) in Singapore launched a 60-minutes mortgage approval service for Singaporeans in May 2020 leveraging automation and straight-through processing of mortgages online. OCBC executed 30% of loans through this platform.
Another example is RCBC, a retail bank in the Philippines which has made significant progress in transforming customer engagement via intelligent automation. With Marketing Cloud, the bank was able to leverage customer transaction history and demographics data to establish behavioural patterns. This helped build more personalised, automated campaigns and journeys. The collective efforts of automation enabled ₱4.5 billion incremental deposits from the term deposit campaign. Delivering this successfully requires a strong tech foundation that enables end-to-end visibility of individual custom journeys.
3. Use automation behind the scenes to create great customer experiences
Creating simple automated workflows with customer data can enable delivering quick and efficient customer service. FSIs don’t need to change the entire systems or replace the whole infrastructure, according to the experts interviewed for the research. End-to-end automation can be complicated, expensive, and uncertain. Instead, they should strategically choose their specific problem spots and selectively apply automation for immediate ROI.
Wealth managers are using automation to improve onboarding and lay the groundwork for more profitable relationships. Insurers are also using automation and other technology to help significantly reduce underwriting time. Automation can have a major positive impact on B2B services, where paperwork is more complex and time-consuming than in B2C services.
4. Get creative with metrics to get a complete picture of customers
It can be especially hard for financial services institutions to create a holistic view of their customers. They don’t often have the same access to first-party data that retail businesses do. Plus, many large financial services companies are a combination of multiple smaller companies, which means customer data is scattered across different parts of the organisation.
The experts interviewed for The Future of Financial Services also recommend several ways to approach this challenge:
Forge partnerships with external data providers who can supplement customer insights.
Think more creatively about the types of data needed and track every step of the customer journey to identify pain points. This means going beyond tallying accounts and diving into types of accounts (whether or not they’re primary) and the ratio of low-margin and high-margin engagements.
Invite design partners to assess the customer journey and raise the quality of interactions.
Leverage digital distribution channels to create a platform for driving product innovations enriched by broader data sets from across the value chain.
Financial services trends point to a digital future
This post was localised based on the original atthe A.U. LIKE.TG blog.
How ACFC’s Vision for Customer Engagement Leads To Sustainable Growth
ACFC has been delighting Vietnamese fashionistas since 2009. The luxury fashion retailer is a member of the Imex Pan Pacific Group (IPPG), and markets more than 22 international fashion brands through a nationwide network of around 250 stores.
Despite building an impressive base of more than 2 million VIP customers, ACFC is striving to deliver even better customer experiences — both in-store and across digital channels.
Louis Nguyen, CEO of ACFC, says the company is facing the same challenges most retailers are contending with in the digital era, particularly when it comes to connecting with digital-native Millenials and Gen Zers.
“Young customers interact with brands not only through traditional channels like media and stores, but via multiple channels across physical and virtual spaces — from traditional e-commerce to live streaming and social commerce,” he says.
“Customer needs and preferences change rapidly, and brands have to catch up with these changes as quickly as possible,” he explains. “We must use customer insights to understand customer needs, so we can offer them personalised products and services that are relevant to their needs in real time.”
Delivering a total customer experience
Smart brands are using digital transformation to put their customers at the heart of everything they do. Louis says ACFC’s digital transformation vision aims to empower sustainable growth as an omni-channel retailer with a customer-centric mindset.
“Technology solutions help bring more value to our customers, and bind them to the company,” he explains. “Technology also transforms our business from a traditional retailer into a new digital retailer with more revenue streams than ever thought possible.”
Louis believes successful customer engagement is the source of sustainable growth, but effective engagement must extend beyond product or service offerings and marketing communications.
“We must deliver a total customer experience,” he says. “That means considering the feelings our customers have when visiting our bricks-and-mortar stores, ecommerce website and mobile app. They need to feel comfortable, at home with our brand, and that their specific needs and interests are understood.”
Chinh Dinh, CIO at ACFC who is directly responsible for the digital transformation of the business also shares the same vision as his CEO. Chinh works closely with executive directors and mid-level managers at ACFC to understand business needs and provide the technology initiatives that support business growth. He believes that for retailers to grow, they must be able to deliver personalised customer experiences.
Creating a 360-degree customer view
To achieve that, Chinh and his team have turned to LIKE.TG. They plan to use Customer 360 to build customer personas and deliver personalised customer experiences in real time.
“ACFC aims to use Customer 360 to collect customer-related information, gaining insights that we can then use to serve our customers better through real-time personalised offerings,” he says.
ACFC will draw on Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Interaction Studio and Datorama to build and deploy an integrated solution, with help from implementation partner Gimasys.
However, digital transformation doesn’t come without growing pains. Careful change management is often required to unify processes and people.
“Digital transformation is our motivating force for change,” says Chinh. “However, with new technology adoption, business processes change. People also need to change to align with the new way of doing business.”
Managing change for success
Chinh says training the ACFC team on LIKE.TG via Trailhead is helping to ease that transition, and initial employee feedback has been positive.
The critical element of a successful digital transformation, however, is a clear understanding of the reason for change.
“Be clear when you communicate why you are doing the transformation. Have a clear strategy and roadmap, but be ready to employ the change management process,” Chinh explains. “Then you will need partners to support and help you through the long, difficult but interesting journey of digital transformation.”
Customer engagement is the new currency of success in the digital era, and customer-centric technologies are putting more personalisation power in the hands of brands. ACFC is using LIKE.TG to develop a customer-centric mindset and deliver complete customer experiences across all online and offline channels.
To learn more about creating connected customer experiences, download The Secret to Seamless Service: Connected Channels ebook.
Find out how Customer 360 can help your brand deliver personalised customer experiences.
The 5G Opportunity in ASEAN: How To Unlock Value For Your Business
It’s a pivotal time for ASEAN’s telecommunications industry with growing momentum behind 5G. Today, 5G is commercially available in several ASEAN countries, including Singapore, Thailand, Philippines, and Malaysia. What’s more, adoption is growing with 5G connections predicted to reach 430 million by 2025 across the broader Asia-Pacific region.
The opportunities for communication service providers (CSPs) and other businesses are huge. The high bandwidth, low latency, and massive scale enabled by 5G unlocks new possibilities in areas such as manufacturing, healthcare, and transportation.
Of course realising these opportunities takes work. This is why the recent conversations around 5G have shifted from network rollouts to monetisation models and user experiences. Here, we shine a light on those conversations and where 5G is headed.
5G adoption driven by business need rather than speed
5G is potentially up to 100 times faster than its predecessor, 4G/LTE. However, speed alone is not enough to drive widespread adoption.
Manoj Prasanna Kumar, Head, Technology, Enterprise 5G IOT at Singtel, says businesses will adopt 5G for the same reason they adopt most technologies — to solve specific challenges.
“Businesses will not upgrade to 5G just for a faster network. That’s why any discussion with the customer should start with the challenge they are trying to solve,” said Manoj.
It is the resulting applications that will drive the need for 5G. Drones are a great example. They are increasingly popular in areas like facilities management, often used to inspect hard-to-reach areas and perform maintenance. To safely operate drones, the transfer of information between devices and operators must be as close to real-time as possible. This is where the need arises for high-speed, low latency, and reliability of 5G.
MEC extends possibilities for 5G and mission-critical applications
As businesses look to harness the full potential of 5G, they need to optimise other aspects of their infrastructure. For example, those wanting to deploy drones and other mission-critical applications may need to transform their network architecture and adopt multi-access edge computing (MEC).
MEC provides cloud-computing capabilities that allow data to be processed as close as possible to the source. This ultimately reduces latency and speeds up data processing, both of which are important for applications like drones and autonomous vehicles.
“What customers are most concerned about is scaling and securing their applications while knowing that their infrastructure and connectivity will not be an issue,” said Manoj.
“What the market then needs is seamless infrastructure that extends from the customers’ edge to the cloud and can be accessed through any means of connectivity. This will provide a bedrock on which customers can confidently run their mission-critical applications.”
5G monetisation will require service providers to rethink business models
5G is still relatively new and CSPs are forming plans to monetise their 5G investments. Manoj suggests partnerships and revenue sharing will be key.
“5G is not just about a higher order of connectivity. It represents a new global economy. I say this because as customers adopt 5G, they are looking forward to new business models from CSPs like pay-for-use and revenue sharing. They want to ensure that CSPs have skin in the game to solve the business challenges they are trying to solve,” said Manoj.
On a more practical level, CSPs need to modernise their business support systems (BSS) for 5G. A recent survey from Nokia indicated that only 11% of CSPs who responded had sufficient BSS capabilities to support 5G monetisation.
There is a need for CSPs to extend and revamp their BSS and IT stacks to enable rapid launch of new 5G offers and support new charging models. It is also important for BSS to support the growth of solution partnerships and ecosystems to deliver new digital customer experiences.
That’s why LIKE.TG and Nokia have partnered to provide CSPs with the capabilities they need to launch and monetise 5G services faster. This offering builds on LIKE.TG’s Communications Cloud with integrated solutions from Nokia for service orchestration and monetisation, leveraging Nokia’s Digital Operations Center and Converged Charging platforms.
“CSPs need to invest in systems that will give them the flexibility to charge customers based on different parameters. At the same time, there is a whole new ecosystem of developers creating apps and pre-integrated solutions CSPs should be tapping into. Through our partnership with LIKE.TG, we are helping CSPs capture every revenue opportunity from the 5G economy,” said Gustavo Duarte, Global Vice President, Presales and GTM Business Applications, at Nokia CNS.
How 5G drives new use cases
In terms of industry verticals, 5G will drive new use cases and applications, and promising verticals include Industry 4.0. These encompass factory floors, logistics, warehouses, smart city, and public safety use cases. From a horizontal perspective, video analytics, and AR/VR and Metaverse are areas where 5G capabilities are key to driving adoption. For example, on the factory floor, customers are exploring how video analytics can be used to detect faulty products as they emerge from the assembly line.
Singtel’s Manoj also sees many use cases when video cameras become mobile, for example when mounted on automated guided vehicles (AGVs). “A typical AGV has about 8-10 cameras to offer 360 degree views to the pilot or the driver, likewise drones, robots which carry cameras…This is a key use case that may require low latency communications to back-end systems and video recording systems.”
Manoj also sees strong potential in virtual reality and mixed reality use cases, including Metaverse use cases. “The enterprises we are speaking to are exploring how they can use Metaverse in their day to day operations,” said Manoj. As more rich and immersive content requiring low latency and edge computing resources are developed, the demand for 5G and MEC will increase.
In summary, there is a huge potential for 5G across a wide range of use cases in Asia. 5G leaders such as Singtel are taking great strides in making these leading edge 5G applications a reality. At the same time, LIKE.TG and Nokia are enabling CSPs to deliver new customer experiences, and offering new charging and monetisation models that are integral to unlocking the potential for 5G.
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 CRMprovides 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.
5 Simple Steps To Delivering More Efficient Product Demos
A product demo is the most important part of a marketing strategy. It’s a chance to put your product’s best qualities in the spotlight, answer questions, and turn naysayers into believers.
Often, presenters are tempted to just reuse marketing positioning language. But at this stage in the marketing journey, your audience has probably already heard it before in a launch presentation or online content.
Perhaps they still have questions, or they’re sceptical about a product’s capabilities. It’s your job to change their minds, or they’re going to bounce to a competitor. Imagine the pressure!
Product demos should answer questions like, “How does this product work?” and “How will it benefit my business?”
These questions are often rooted in confusion and doubt. The goal of a product demo is to build confidence and enthusiasm by showing audiences exactly what they will be getting. If you do this job really well, you will also make them feel great about the opportunities this product makes possible.
You can improve your demos by honing a few simple but important steps. Here are five practical tips for creating product demos that audiences love.
1. Plan a big question that your product demo will answer
It’s easier to ask a question than to write an answer at the beginning stages of a project. A great question will inspire a great answer. This question will continue to be useful throughout the whole process, from planning to presentation.
As you collaborate with new internal stakeholders, you can start by saying, “Here’s the question we’re trying to answer in this product demo.”
Talented teams don’t need to be told what to do; they just need to understand what you want to achieve. A great question can succinctly express your objective and spark the team’s imagination. It will also grab your audience’s attention.
So what makes a question great? Great questions are thought-provoking. They inspire the listener to wonder or imagine.
Here are a few examples of thought-provoking questions:
What if your most common business process took half as many steps to complete?
What if you were sent a warning just prior to making a mistake?
What if it cost $5 to switch to a new browser tab?
These questions make the audience think about how their jobs — and lives — could be improved.
From there, they can begin to see a story with solutions. This is why these questions are so useful in the first few minutes of the demo.
2. Identify the purpose of your product demo
Great demos deliver clear takeaways, but doing this requires focus. First, we need to resist the temptation to show everything. Check out the overload in this example:
“In this demo, I’m going to show you how the LIKE.TG Platform enables you to build, automate, and secure using low code.”
There are actually three takeaways here: build, automate, and secure.
Remember, the product demo’s job is to address doubt and confusion. It’s going to be very challenging to do this if you have three different takeaways.
So let’s try being more focused. For example:
In this demo, I will show you how LIKE.TG Flow helps you use automation to make your business processes more efficient.Now we are focusing on automation, which makes it easier for the audience to digest and appreciate.
Set yourself and your audience up for success by focusing on the takeaways.
3. Visually introduce the use case for your product demo
Your audience needs to see how the product works. But how do we get them to connect the talk track and visuals? To emphasise important points in your demo, phrases such as , “Here you’re looking at…” could be used. For instance:
Here you’re looking at a mortgage application that one of our customers just submitted.Notice in this example, what the audience is seeing has been clearly pointed out. Visualisation is used to set the context and use case that the demo will dig into.
4. Identify the challenge your product addresses and the outcome it makes possible
Now it’s time to take the audience on a journey. There can be no journey without contrast. We need to go from nowhere to somewhere.
This means we need to envision life without our products and then show the improvement our products make possible.
So let’s return to our example:
Here you’re looking at a mortgage application that one of our customers just submitted. It involves a lot of manual steps. As a result of this inefficiency, our customer satisfaction scores were plummeting.
Finally, we cut the number of steps involved in processing one of these applications in half. As you can see, our satisfaction scores have never been higher.
Notice the contrast between these two points. This is important because we introduce challenges at the start and end with a solution to the problems.
5. Show how your product enables the journey from challenge to solution
Imagine showing someone a picture of a dilapidated house. Then imagine showing a picture of an immaculate house and saying, “We help you make this happen!” Their natural question will be, “How?”
It’s not enough to show your audience the before and the after. To have credibility, you must show the journey between those two points.
Every great demo shows its audience how the product helps them get from challenge to solution. But how do we bridge these two points?
Use these three magic words to get from problem to solution: Because, Therefore, and But.
What makes these words so special? They force presenters to acknowledge what just happened before showing the next step.
For example:
Our business process is inefficient. Because of that, our satisfaction scores are plummeting. Therefore, we will use LIKE.TG Flow to create a new workflow. Because of that, we’ve eliminated many of these steps with automation.You don’t have to literally say these words repeatedly in your talk track. Just be mindful of the philosophy to connect each step in your demo. This connectivity helps your audience follow the story.
You want your audience to experience what’s possible with your product. They should leave the demo feeling inspired. Even if your audience doesn’t remember every detail of your presentation, they will remember what the experience felt like. They will feel that life will be better with your product.
Those are the five tips for memorable live product demos. Remember, have fun during your presentation. If the audience senses that you believe in your product and are excited about it, they will believe in it and be excited, too. And your customer relationships will be better for it.
Build process automation into your business to improve productivity.
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This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
What Your Financial Services Business Can Do To Inspire Customer Trust
The last few years have seen a rapid change in customer expectations. Amid all the uncertainty in life and business, trust is now a valued commodity for customers. According to the State of the Connected Customer report, 88% of customers believe trust becomes more important in times of change.
Financial services customers in particular place great value on trust – they need to know their investments are secure and expect a transparent experience from their service providers. According to recent LIKE.TG research, 83% of customers reported a concern over their long-term financial security. This makes it critical for financial services institutions (FSIs) to show their customers that they understand their concerns and can address their needs in a transparent manner.
So how can your financial services business think and act like your customers? What can you do to win trust and turn your customers into loyal advocates for your business?
1. Build a connected customer experience
“The quality of customer experience is directly proportional to customers’ perception of transparency and trust ,” says Prakash Thomas, Regional Vice President; Financial Services Health, LIKE.TG Industries; ASEAN. “If a customer’s interaction with a business across their channels is fragmented, it is difficult to meet customer expectations. Having the right data at the right point of the customer journey helps understand their real needs and enables meeting client needs and expectations in a consistent manner.”
To gain a deep understanding of customer needs, a business needs to have a single shared view of its customers across channels and teams. As customer journeys are increasingly shifting to multiple channels, it is critical to have this shared view across digital and in-person touchpoints. Cloud-based platforms like Customer 360 and Financial Services Cloud can provide a comprehensive customer view for business teams to access from anywhere and at any time. This helps to build a business understanding your customer needs with improved process efficiency to deliver a seamless and connected customer experience.
2. Invest in technology to deliver a personal touch
Globally, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. But customers are also clearly indicating that FSIs are falling short in this regard. Only 11% of banking customers, 11% of insurance customers, and 18% of wealth management customers say their service providers anticipate their needs.
To deliver an experience that meets growing customer expectations, FSIs can invest in automation to personalise the experience based on each customer’s unique journey. Customers are increasingly shifting to a digital-first user journey, with Asia’s share of active digital banking users increasing to 88% compared to 65% four years ago. This is driving businesses to invest in a strong tech foundation to gain 360-degree visibility of customer journeys. Banks like RCBC in the Philippines are using Marketing Cloud to leverage customer transaction history and demographics information to build more personalised and automated journeys.
3. Communicate honestly and transparently
74% of customers say communicating honestly and transparently is more important
now than before the pandemic. To win customer trust, a business needs to interact with a customer in clear, transparent, and meaningful ways. According to Prakash, customer trust in financial services can be varied.
“Traditionally, customers have not been high on trust with insurance companies. This is due to the perception that there isn’t a high level of transparency in insurance products when compared to say retail banking due to complexity in their product offering,” explains Prakash. “But I think insurers have improved drastically in the last few years in regards to simplifying communication around product offerings , and regulators have also had a big role to play in improving transparency.”
Using a single source of truth can help business teams create cohesive experiences for customers and improve transparency in product communication. With a full view of purchase history, you can make tailored recommendations that genuinely address customer needs. Your service teams can also have the right information to solve customer problems faster and build trust.
4. Take data security and regulatory compliance seriously
“If I’m a customer, the security of my data is my biggest concern. As a financial services business, you’re basically only as good as your last security breach,” says Prakash.
To maintain customer trust, FSIs need to invest in the right data security solutions. According to Prakash, there are three essential steps a business can take to ensure security.
“First, ensure you have sufficient security measures in place to address regulatory compliance issues. The second is technology upgrades — you have to ensure you are operating on the latest version of your systems. Every upgrade comes with newer protection against emerging security threats. And lastly, you need to keep raising security awareness amongst your teams and customers so they are aware of on-going threats in the marketplace and practise a culture of security in their day to day operations. It is important that even a simple advice of not clicking on malicious links needs to be reinforced regularly to clients and internal staff.
A secure platform like Financial Services Cloud can help keep customer profiles and data secure, while helping drive regulatory compliance. With the right tools and knowledge at your disposal, your teams can fully focus on meeting customer needs in a secure manner.
5. Be clear about your values, and stick to them
For many customers today, it’s not enough for companies to deliver a great product or service. They prefer businesses which demonstrate values like commitment to environmental practices, sustainability, diversity and inclusion. 66% of customers have stopped buying from a company whose values didn’t align with theirs — up from 62% in 2020.
“Customers want to interact with businesses that are committed to doing the right thing. That means acting not just from your own corporate values but aligning with shareholder, community and philanthropic values,” says Prakash. “And when your personal values are aligned to your corporate values, it blends into an organisational culture of doing right by your customers and the community at large.”
Building customer trust requires keeping your customers at the centre of all your business actions and service delivery. Financial services have a big opportunity to align their systems, people, and processes to be fully customer centric and win trust.
To find out more on how ASEAN financial services brands can increase efficiency with automation and win a share of the mind, time and trust of customers, download our e-book Winning Customer Minds, Time and Trust
What is LIKE.TG Customer 360?
According to our State of the Connected Customer report, 85% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. However, 60% say it generally feels like they’re communicating with separate departments, not one company.
LIKE.TG Customer 360 is an integrated CRM platform that solves this challenge by connecting your departments and customer data. Everyone gets a single, shared view of your customers. Think of it as a circle of information about the customer, with the customer in the centre.
Connect your teams on one platform
With LIKE.TG Customer 360, customer data from every step of their journey is captured in one place. This shared view enables teams to work together to deliver personalised experiences and trusted relationships with customers.
Sales teams can be more efficient
Make every customer interaction count, with a complete view of your leads. Sales Cloud lets you control your whole sales pipeline, from prospecting to sale. You can also automate everyday tasks to allow your sales team to concentrate on selling. Customer 360 is also a truly mobile platform, allowing your teams to achieve success from anywhere.
Marketing teams can be more cost-effective
With Marketing Cloud, you can treat your customers as if you’ve known them for years. And with live campaign data, you can see which marketing assets customers are engaging with, and optimise your campaign budgets in real time. This saves you money, and makes your marketing more effective.
Service teams can provide personalised service
If a customer calls your service team about a product issue, there’s no need for service to ask the customer for their purchase details. With Service Cloud, the agent can easily look up the information that the sales team captured when the customer made their purchase. They can then quickly respond to your customer’s needs.
More than a CRM
Customer 360 goes beyond just sales, service and marketing. It includes the full range of LIKE.TG technology – uniting commerce, IT, and analytics – in one connected system. Every employee has access to customer data, so they can make more informed decisions, respond faster to customer needs, and predict new opportunities.
Add more apps and the benefits multiply
Customer 360 can be tailored to suit your specific business needs, with apps dedicated to different business functions and industries.
Adding more than one app to your Customer 360 solution has measurable benefits:
72% of customers with more than one app report an improved time to ROI
95% of customers with two or more apps report improved efficiency and productivity
96% of customers with more than one app say they have met or exceeded ROI expectations
You can take it even further than that. With MuleSoft you can integrate data from a range of sources into your CRM, and with Tableau you can get real-time analytics and visualisations.
Customer 360 makes collaboration easier
Teams are empowered to work as one from anywhere because Customer 360 lives in the cloud. And with Slack, your teams can collaborate and communicate more effectively in your organisation’s ‘digital HQ‘.
Slack for sales
Sales teams can work faster, communicate more efficiently, and onboard new team members more effectively, all with Slack. And with Slack Connect, you can even invite your customers to engage on Slack.
Sales teams using Slack have seen:
15% faster sales cycles
13% more deals closed
Saved an average of 31 minutes a day per user on daily tasks
Slack for marketing
Marketing teams can react to data in real time, without having to use inefficient emails. And with total integration with Customer 360, teams can run their campaigns all from inside Slack.
Marketing teams using Slack have seen:
16% faster execution of marketing campaigns
Improved cross-company sharing of information
Slack for service
With rapid internal communications all happening in Slack, your service teams can respond quicker to customer enquiries and take advantage of automated workflows to handle day-to-day tasks.
Service teams using Slack have seen:
9% faster ticket resolution
11% improved customer satisfaction scores
Source: Creating Your Digital HQ for a Digital-First World ebook
Read the infographic below to learn more about the benefits of usingLIKE.TG Customer 360.
Start uniting your teams around your customer with LIKE.TG Customer 360.
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This post originally appeared on the A.U.-version ofthe LIKE.TG blog.
This post was updated in September 2022.
Meet Daisy Hoang: From Start-up Success to Global Growth Strategist
At LIKE.TG, Nichola Palmer works with customers to bring their stories of innovation and transformation to life. In this blog series featuring Trailblazers, Nichola introduces Daisy Hoang, Senior Vice President of Sales and Success at Katalon in Vietnam. Daisy brings a growth mindset to the fast-moving tech industry, and has supported ambitious growth in a revenue-generating role.
Daisy Hoang is a start-up star. From beginning her career in Chicago to scaling the heights of Ho Chi Minh City in her current role as Senior Vice President of Sales and Success at Katalon, Daisy knows what it takes to achieve ambitious growth in the fast-moving tech industry.
Much of her success comes down to her strong growth mindset and customer-focused sales philosophy. Daisy says she’s in the solutions business, and being willing to learn from prospects is more important than a slick sales pitch.
“The sales call shouldn’t be about forcing prospects to listen to our pitch. Rather, selling is about guiding prospects through the whole buying experience,” she says. “As salespeople, we shouldn’t be trying to outsmart the prospect, but trying to make their experience of discovery and negotiation as smooth and seamless as possible.”
“That’s why I think client-facing roles are so interesting. You learn as much from the prospects and clients as they are learning from your product.”
Finding her feet
Daisy grew up in Vietnam, and left to study in the US when she was 18. She graduated from top-tier Augustana College with a Bachelor of Arts (International Business, Marketing, and Communication), then won a full-ride scholarship to study for a Master of Science (Marketing and Communication) at Illinois State University.
Her first taste of the professional world came via an internship with UnityPoint Health. It was during this time that Daisy began to lay out a blueprint for her career.
“During one of my internships, my mentor told me that whatever I do in the future to make sure I’m in a revenue-generating function,” she says. “When times are good you don’t have to worry, and when times are bad often the revenue-generating function continues to be in high demand.”
“I also knew that I wanted to be in a very high-growth environment that would push me to continue to learn and develop. Those two guiding principles have always been my north star.”
Daisy’s path led to a position as Sales Strategy Lead for Chicago-based online reputation management platform, SIM Partners — that later got acquired by Reputation.com. Working out of the company’s Chicago office, Daisy had a front seat for the platform’s rapid growth.
“It was my first time being exposed to scaling across geographic locations and verticals, and they had a very mature go-to-market strategy,” she says. “It was good for me to start out at a small startup and then see how that business could potentially become so large and diversified.”
All roads led to Katalon
That start-up energy was part of what attracted Daisy back to Vietnam, where investment was booming, and to a role with SaaS solutions provider, Katalon.
“I knew before I joined Katalon that I was looking for three things: an experienced senior leadership team, a very strong product that truly adds value to the organisations that use it, and a product that could scale across geographic locations, verticals and customer size.”
Daisy found that in Katalon, where she continues to thrive in a fast-paced environment with a global growth vision.
“We are serving clients from more than 160 countries, so at any time of the day and night there are members of our team out discovering prospects, pitching and closing. It’s a very dynamic part of the organisation,” she says.
“As a very high-growth SaaS startup, we’re also aiming for ambitious growth, and because of that, the challenges are never the same from one day to the other.”
A single source of truth
One of those challenges was replacing the company’s legacy CRM to create a single source of truth with LIKE.TG. Daisy says LIKE.TG has provided the visibility the organisation needed to build accountability into the sales culture, and more accurately forecast revenue.
“I don’t think my job is possible without LIKE.TG,” she says. “I spend a lot of my day living in LIKE.TG. We started out just using LIKE.TG for the sales team, but gradually we expanded it to the customer success team, and now to the customer support team. It’s really good to have that visibility across all teams directly within LIKE.TG.”
Daisy says that after a successful growth phase, Katalon is now at a turning point. And she’s excited to take the next step in her career with the company.
“I’ve been fortunate at Katalon to build a very high-growth revenue engine, but we’re at a benchmark where playbooks have to change because growing from point A to point B is very different from growing from point B to point C,” she explains. “The next step in my career is building the playbook for the next phase of up-scaling.”
Daisy is also optimistic for the future of Vietnam, and is keen to inspire the next generation of home-grown talent.
“When I first came back to Vietnam, the tech start-ups were very much focused around solving a local problem. But I’m starting to see more start-ups coming out of Vietnam with a global mindset. It is a young environment that’s heavily dominated by Gen-Z and Millennials, and it’s really good to see bigger dreams.” As a mentor to others now starting on their career path, Daisy finds being a part of those dreams energising, “It’s exciting to share visions of the future with others who are equally passionate about the opportunities ahead.”
Check out these other posts from our Inspired Trailblazers series:
Meet Joey Chan: How an Entrepreneur Found Success in the LIKE.TG Ecosystem
Meet Trần Việt Thắng: Helping People Work Smarter
Meet Joanna Teo: Customer-Focused Data Evangelist
4 Tips for Retailers to Make Customers Come Back for More
The rising cost of living means retailers need to work harder to attract new shoppers and keep existing customers coming back for more. How do you balance the online and in-store retail shopping experience? How do you improve the buying process? How do you keep customers satisfied while they spend?
The simple answer is to create a seamless retail shopping experience that connects digital and physical touchpoints to make your customers come back for more. For companies, it starts with creating agility across online and mobile commerce channels. This also means giving customers greater flexibility when browsing and buying, no matter how they choose to shop.
Here’s what you can do to get your online and brick-and-mortar channels ready for the shopping season.
Tip #1: Offer faster mobile commerce experiences
Put yourself in the shoes of a customer who is waiting to get the best shopping deals during Singles’ Day. Would you rather travel to the malls, pull out your laptop, or grab your phone to shop?
With ecommerce shopping events — double-digit days, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday, becoming increasingly common and popular every year, it has never been more important to optimise your mobile commerce experience. In fact, in the second quarter of 2022, mobile accounted for 81% of traffic share and 66% of total order share in ASEAN. It’s time to make phone and tablet shopping seamless and more efficient with:
Mobile-specific marketing: Does your mobile app send push notifications when an out-of-stock product returns to inventory in time for delivery? Do you send well-timed text messages to your best customers when a flash sale starts? If not, it’s time to add that to your retail strategy and boost engagement with an integrated experience across every touchpoint.
Hassle-free browsing and checkout: Opt for simple designs that load fast and add bigger “buy now” buttons that are easy to find on a mobile device. Consider enabling one-step purchases right from the product page, and don’t forget to add convenience-focused payment options. Mobile wallets, for example, ensure customers won’t have to scramble at the point of purchase to find their credit card.
An optimised post-purchase experience: Consider that 41% of digital leaders are prioritising experiences like returns optimisation over the next two years. Ensure your self-service channels are optimised for mobile so customers can accomplish routine tasks easily and efficiently from their phones.
Tip #2: Make social selling part of the retail shopping experience
How can you help your customers find the right products when so much depends on Instagram images on a small screen? By enabling associates (or even influencers) to interact with your customers on a live stream, you can turn virtual retail shopping into a personalised and engaging experience.
Your customers will be able to see the product from different angles, ask about flexible fulfilment options like same day delivery or in-store pickup, and inquire about return policies in real-time. That process helps customers avoid buying items that won’t work and has the potential to reduce online return rates.
Leading retailers are already capturing customers’ attention on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. That’s not just for show: All signs indicate that social commerce is just getting started. In fact, it’s predicted to grow three times faster than traditional ecommerce over the next four years.
“Consumers live on their phones, and pushing your brand experience and checkout to these social networks helps remove the friction that a consumer encounters between discovery and purchase,” Rob Garf, LIKE.TG’s vice president and general manager, retail, said.
Tip #3: Prioritise fulfilment and inventory optimisation
Imagine the disappointment when finding out the product you ordered online is out of stock or stuck somewhere on a congested supply chain. As retailers face inventory and shipment challenges, digital leaders are solving the problem by prioritising fulfillment and inventory optimisation. What does that mean in simple terms? It means it’s time to solve the “where is my order” problem once and for all:
Prioritise transparency: Does an offer for a comparable product mean your customers won’t mind if a shipment is delayed or unavailable? No. But at least you can be honest and transparent —74% of customers say that trust is important. And by keeping an open line of communication, you can be the retail hero that shows up with potential solutions.
Empower your customers: Ensure your customers can access their order history, track delivery, and use self-service to arrange a return or exchange. Enable flexible fulfilment options, like buy-online-pick-up-in-store (BOPIS), a choice that’s popular with customers and that’s been adopted by 85% of retailers.
Rethink order management: The right order management system gives your online and in-store associates access to real-time inventory and fulfilment data. When your employees can follow customer orders from the point of purchase through delivery, they can stay proactive if there’s a problem — like offering a similar product that’s available for on-time shipment. This ensures effective and efficient communication with customers, and at the same time, frees up employees’ time to handle more important tasks.
Tip #4: Add flexible payment options
As inflation lingers, flexible payment options are bound to grow in popularity.Programs like buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) may make an important difference in the retail shopping experience and to retailers’ profitability. Digital leaders are twice as likely as digital laggards to prioritise investments in flexible payments. 61% digital leaders say they’re already offering BNPL as a payment option, while another 32% plan to add it in the next two years.
Delaying payments or offering instalment options aren’t the only ways retailers are rethinking transaction flexibility. Apple Pay, for example, is increasing in popularity: While 54% already accept Apple Pay, another 34% plan to add the option within two years. Not only do mobile wallet options streamline transactions with one-click payments, they also expand the number of payment options customers have at checkout.
Find out how to give shoppers the gift of convenience this year by removing friction from their retail shopping experience.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Is Your Enterprise Ready for the Future? Here are 6 Ways to Prepare
New technology can be exciting, but it can also be difficult to know where you should focus. This is especially true if you are leading transformation for your enterprise. Legacy systems, organisational changes, and return on investment all need to be considered.
As the pace of change accelerates, every industry is facing disruption, both from new technology and from competitors. Add rapidly evolving customer expectations, and you may find you’re having a hard time keeping up.
Customers care about more than just your products and services, too. For example,85% of customers say that their purchasing decisions are influenced by how an organisation treats its employees.
With these things in mind, here are six ways you can prepare for the future of work, starting today.
Create flexible and supportive working arrangements
Businesses that are flexible about work options appear more attractive to job-seekers. In the long run, these enterprises will incur lower costs with fewer overheads and salary demands.
According to the EY 2021 Work Reimagined Employee Survey, more than half of all respondents in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines said they would quit their jobs if their employer did not provide flexibility in where they could work. However, 60% of Singaporean respondents to our Employee Engagement Report said their employers have limited or no technology to support flexible work.
Having the means to collaborate and communicate with colleagues around the world can make all the difference for your employees. It will make them more productive, too — teams using collaboration platform Slack are able to close more deals, resolve issues faster, and improve customer satisfaction.
Focus on results
Businesses that measure employee productivity through good results and customer feedback, rather than the hours they put in, are well-placed for the future of work. Gone are the days of clocking in and out to measure employee effectiveness — today we have much more sophisticated options available to us.
Establishing KPIs for your employees helps your teams focus on what’s important. The right tools are needed for proper measurement to get quality data. Only with an established data culture, you can derive deep insights that help your enterprise prepare for the future of work.
Ultimately, the best measure of employee effectiveness is customer satisfaction. There are established metrics that are still useful for day-to-day operation, but with modern solutions you can start to measure metrics such as Return on Experience to make sure that you are delivering the service that your customers expect.
Adapt business models to meet customer expectations
As technology advances, customers expect businesses to move forward too. According to the latest State of the Connected Customer Report, customers expect to communicate with companies online more than 60% of the time. Fifty-seven percent of customers prefer to deal with businesses online, and that number gets higher for younger audiences. If you don’t have the means to provide a smooth online experience, you could be missing out on business.
Customers are interested in more than just products and services — 88% of customers expect companies to clearly state their values. Two thirds of customers have stopped buying from a company whose values didn’t align with theirs — up from 62% in 2020. Issues such as climate change, social issues and community involvement are top of mind.
Improve employee experience
There are many factors that contribute to a good employee experience (EX), and it’s been shown that poor EX can have an impact on your bottom line. In Singapore, 71% of employees say struggling with outdated and inefficient technology has a direct impact on their work.
By modernising the tools that your employees use every day, you can streamline their experience, leading to higher satisfaction and higher efficiency. When we surveyed workers in Singapore, more than half said that software to help them communicate and collaborate with colleagues would improve their workplace experience.
Every business’s culture is unique — make sure yours is working for you and your teams.
Keep customer communications transparent
It’s more important than ever to maintain customer trust. Out-of-stock products,
delayed deliveries, and poor customer service can cause significant damage to a business’s reputation. Use all your available communication channels to let your customers know if your business isn’t running as usual.
Of course, this relies on having the right tools to understand when the service you provide to your customers isn’t working as intended. Solutions such as Commerce Cloud help you automate your operations, while also empowering you with cutting-edge AI to improve your customer experience.
Scale as your business grows
With improved security and flexibility, cloud-based storage and applications give businesses a long-term competitive advantage in a changing world. However, not all cloud-based services are created equal. Make sure that the solution you choose has best-in-class security certification, integrations with all your other software, and has the power to scale with your business as it grows.
Ready for Dreamforce 2022? Here’s How You Can Experience the Magic
Every year, our flagship event Dreamforce brings the LIKE.TG community together to inspire with insights from thought leaders and Trailblazers.
This year, as Dreamforce celebrates its 20th anniversary, the magic of this event will be streamed live and available on-demand on LIKE.TG+ from September 21-23 (Asia Pacific Timezones). At the Dreamforce campus, there will be 1,000+ sessions and workshops on a variety of topics — from sustainability and the journey to net zero, mindfulness, wellness and customer success.
Dreamforce 2022 will attract tens of thousands of Trailblazers from around the world to the Moscone Center in San Francisco. There will also be plenty of innovation, inspiration, and customer stories from across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region. So get ready to experience the magic of Dreamforce on LIKE.TG+ anytime, anywhere.
The Dreamforce 2022 experience on LIKE.TG+
Register for our immersive LIKE.TG+ experience that brings the best of Dreamforce to you, for free. This reimagined virtual experience is a full three days that includes two channels, 72 hours of live broadcast, 200+ on-demand sessions, and many exclusive, digital-only moments. It’s your perfect opportunity to connect, learn, and have fun at our LIKE.TG family reunion — Dreamforce.
Be inspired by Marc Benioff, change-makers Matthew McConaughey, Bono, Jane Goodall DBE and Al Gore, and a whole host of Trailblazers, customers, partners, actors, activists, world-class athletes, and thought leaders.
Sessions you don’t want to miss
Dreamforce Main Keynote
Co-CEOs Marc Benioff and Bret Taylor will kick off Dreamforce by sharing the vision for the future of LIKE.TG. Hear customer success stories and find out about our latest innovations.
APAC Encore: Dreamforce Main Keynote 12:00 p.m. SGT, 21 September 2022
Presenting the Dreamforce Main Keynote — but with an APAC twist! Catch up with LIKE.TG executives Pip Marlow, CEO, ANZ ASEAN; Arundhati Bhattacharya, CEO, India; Leandro Perez, VP CMO, APAC, and some very special guests, to hear their insights on the exciting future of the Asia Pacific region.
ASEAN Customers Share Insights
Azureen Azita Abdullah, Head of Downstream Digital Innovation, PETRONAS will be featured in the Energy and Utilities main session. Catch it on-demand on LIKE.TG+ from 21 September.
Erville Magtubo, Head of Customer Care, Meralco; Atiporn Jaroensri, Chief Information Officer, CP Lotus Corporation, and Aadrin Azly, Chief Digital Officer, PETRONAS will also be speaking at Dreamforce.
What you can learn from thought leaders
Find these sessions and more on the Dreamforce schedule and get ready to sit back and enjoy the show!
Digital Transformation for an Evolving Future
Learn how to lay the foundation that empowers you to support technologies that will be prevalent for many years to come.
Building a Human and Humane Future of Work
Learn how to prepare for the next era of technological innovation to ensure your workers are equipped with the right digital literacy skills.
Leading in a Flexible Work World
Understand how organisations are navigating an evolving digital environment where employees need to succeed from anywhere.
Using Business as a Platform for Change
Learn how business leaders are helping promote social justice, prioritising diversity and leading with empathy and responsibility.
Are you a LIKE.TG Partner? Don’t miss Dreamforce!
Dreamforce is a fantastic opportunity for LIKE.TG Partners to connect with current customers and prospects, and nurture relationships.
“I look forward to the opportunity to welcome our APAC Partners at Dreamforce. Whether it’s in person or online, Dreamforce is a great way to help Partners connect with customers. The sessions will be very helpful in demonstrating our Partners’ expertise through success stories, and the innovations they leverage in delivering customer success with LIKE.TG,” said Latika Minocha, VP of Alliances and Channels, ASEAN.
We have put together a handy Dreamforce Watch Party Kit to help Partners organise watch parties with their customers and teams.
Sustainability at Dreamforce 2022
At Dreamforce, we’re committed to accelerating the world’s journey to net zero. Each year, we make every effort to have a more sustainable Dreamforce. This year, along with carbon-friendly and eco-friendly measures, we also have expert speakers educating and enabling us to take climate action.
Learn how to get to net zero across your entire organisation and also how ‘ecopreneurs’ benefit people and the planet through innovative sustainability businesses.
The details — with more to come
Watch Dreamforce Today for the latest news and special guests, Global Programming for all the sessions designed for you, and the nightly show Dreamforce Tonight – all available on-demand, so you don’t miss any session! You can also search for sessions by topic, industry and role on LIKE.TG+.
Main channels:
Prime Time: The channel for the best of Dreamforce from around the world featuring LIKE.TG executives, global leaders, and changemakers (including the APAC Encore: Dreamforce Main Keynote).
Trailblazer: Hear from Trailblazing pioneers, innovators, and lifelong learners on this channel. Discover how to use LIKE.TG to do well and do good in your career, company, and community.
When: September 21–23, 2022. Join us as we count down to the APAC Encore: Dreamforce Main Keynote from 8 a.m. SGT, 21 September 2022
Where: Wherever you are!
CRMs vs. Manual Spreadsheets: How Automating Processes Help SMBs Grow
Are the fundamental building blocks of your business kept in spreadsheets? Fast insights into sales pipeline and dashboards, revenue forecasting, customer information, and lead management are crucial to a sustainable business. Learn why it may be time to move beyond spreadsheets to position your small to medium-sized business (SMB) for growth.
There comes a point in the growth of a SMB when the business owner will look at the vast amount of spreadsheets that contain critical data and think: there must be a better way.
This reality check comes quicker to leaders during times of change as they’re forced to juggle competing priorities. According to LIKE.TG’s latest Small and Medium Business Trends Report, leaders say the shift in customer expectations for online transactions have driven 63% of SMBs to now manage an ecommerce presence. Investing in digital capabilities has become the keyfocus for many SMBs — 71% of SMB leaders say their business survived the pandemic because of digitisation. Their top motivators to focus on digital transformation are increasing productivity, improving business agility, and enhancing data security. The use of technology not only helps them establish a foundation for growth but also build better relationships with their customers and stakeholders. For businesses that are still using spreadsheets such as Excel to host important data, it is now time to move beyond manual processes and choose automation. Here’s why.
CRMs give SMBs what matters — time and efficiency
Creating one-to-one relationships with customers is what sets a SMB apart from its competitors.
Without a customer relationship management (CRM) system that efficiently manages business data, SMB leaders will often go to bed feeling anxious about customers and prospects they haven’t responded to. For any interactions that day, they’ll need to manually add details to the right spreadsheet on what was covered and when to follow up.
The change from spreadsheets to a CRM software is when business leaders can step out from working within the business and find the time to work on the business. With intelligent automation processes, they will have the ability to build a diverse and comprehensive customer reference database that supports marketing, sales, and service. Unlike spreadsheets, a CRM makes it easy to automate certain tasks so your team can focus on high-value business.
All those hours of manual data entry and the stress of remembering previous customer conversations will be taken away, giving business leaders back the resource that matters — time.
The costs of using spreadsheets over CRM systems
To put this into perspective, how much does one hour cost to a business leader who is working with a customer? Think about the hours per week spent updating, collating, and organising spreadsheets. Is the reliance on spreadsheets and monotonous data entry detrimental to revenue and growth? What if all these manual tasks could be integrated in one system? How would that change the cost of one hour?
CRM 101: The Small Medium Business’s Guide to build your business strategy and maximise ROI
LIKE.TG’s small business CRM gives leaders the tools to capture new leads and effectively manage their prospects, right through the sales cycle to becoming an active customer. The personalised email templates provide consistent messaging and intuitive activity tracking ensures that no conversation is lost or forgotten. Combined with CRM analytics, it allows SMBs to seamlessly access, collaborate, and share insights from anywhere. As such, businesses can win deals and keep their customers happy in one unified 360 platform.
With these features easily accessible on desktop, laptop or mobile devices, LIKE.TG enables small to medium-sized business leaders to focus time and energy on marketing their brand, strengthening relationships with key customers, and looking at future growth opportunities for the business.
Don’t hold back your business with manual data processing and disconnected spreadsheets. It’s time to reassess whether your processes are driving growth or holding you back. Level-up with a CRM software that gives you back time to work on what matters most.
This post was based on the original at the A.U. LIKE.TG blog.
Want to Stand Out in Financial Services? Transform the Front Office Through Digitalisation
Fintech firms have raised the bar when it comes to convenience. There are now 1230 fintech apps in Asia Pacific alone that make it easier than ever for consumers to borrow, make payments, save, and invest.
Some innovation in fintech is driven by back office teams responsible for the manufacturing of products and services. However, what sets many fintechs apart from one another and traditional financial services firms is their front office innovation.
The front office in finance is responsible for the complete distribution of products and services. It comprises customer-facing functions like sales, marketing, and customer service. These functions are all critical for winning and maintaining customer loyalty.
So for fintechs, banks, and other financial services firms to succeed, creating an effective front office is a good place to start. Here are tips on where to focus and how LIKE.TG can help.
Transforming the front office through digitalisation
First and foremost, front office teams need the data and tools to provide an exceptional customer experience. They also need the right technology to streamline service delivery and minimise costs.
Digitalisation provides a solution to all these challenges. More to the point, a truly digital front office enables a seamless and connected customer experience. It also effectively closes the personalisation gap in financial services. This means customers can enjoy personalised experiences, across whatever channel they choose to interact.
In addition, digitalisation and automation often go hand-in-hand. And the experts interviewed for our Future of Financial Services report agree that automation plays a critical role in the delivery of fast and accurate service. Automation also enables the easy and transparent experiences that customers seek. For example, automating manual, repetitive tasks speeds up processes like customer onboarding.
Combined with technologies like artificial intelligence, automation can also help financial services firms engage with customers at the right time, on the right channel and offer them the right set of products and services.
How LIKE.TG supports front office innovation
LIKE.TG Customer 360 can help financial services firms to transform their front office. It unites sales, service, marketing, and other front office teams around a shared view of the customer. They can then work together to personalise every step of the customer journey.
For instance, using Customer Data Platform marketers can hyper-personalise communication. They can also tailor product offers and recommendations based on customers’ goals or pivotal life events. With Tableau and CRM Analytics, advisors or relationship managers can better understand the customer journey. They can then contextualise engagement and take data-driven actions to minimise customer churn.
Slack keeps teams aligned and speeds up decision-making, ultimately helping them work more efficiently and deliver more value to customers.
MuleSoft can further help to create an effective, digital front office. By integrating multiple systems, for example, MuleSoft can support a more automated and connected customer experience.
The integration platform can also help the industry to collaborate on the distribution of products and services. For example, fintechs can use application programming interfaces (APIs) to securely connect to a bank’s systems and data. They can then distribute the bank’s products while layering innovative, personalised services on top. They can also use experience APIs to expose specific data to mobile apps where it can be securely consumed by customers.
We are seeing similar movements in the industry already with the rise ofbanking-as-a-service(BaaS) in ASEAN. With BaaS, banks allow their products or services to be embedded into the offerings of fintechs. The fintechs then market and sell the services as their own, effectively acting as the front office or distribution layer of banks.
This creates new streams of revenue for both companies and, more importantly, provides customers with more meaningful products and experiences.
For further insights on how digitalisation can transform the front office, download our e-bookUnleashing Fintech’s Potential.
How To Improve Customer Lifetime Value With Connected Sales & Service
Running and growing a business requires your focus on a lot of different things. You have to hire the right people, make sure you’re managing cash in and cash out, and ensuring you’re providing the right product or service to your customers.
The problem with this is that we tend to forget the one thing that drives growth is customers. Without customers, there is no business.
So, for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to succeed today, leadership must be laser-focused on transforming the customer’s experience for the better.
But our world has changed. We are dealing with new channels, skills, regulations, stakeholders, and expectations. This is making it harder than ever to connect with our customers.
This isn’t just a new chapter for business. It requires a whole new playbook built around:
Enhancing sales productivity throughout the pipeline to drive faster sales.
Retaining customers and building loyalty with end-to-end visibility.
Enabling seamless collaboration across your entire business.
Cross-team alignment delivers connected customer experiences
To achieve those three critical goals, SMBs need better cross-team connections to deliver more personalised customer experiences. A truly connected experience requires you to break down the walls between sales, service, and marketing.
When departments work together, it creates a circle of success that delivers the connected experiences that drive customer lifetime value, satisfaction, and retention. It also improves process efficiency, and boosts sales and service productivity to increase cost effectiveness.
To make that possible, you need one customer command centre that connects departments with shared access to a 360-degree customer view on a single, scalable platform.
This allows the marketing team to leverage service data to find and focus on more high-value customers. They will also know of a customer’s recent service enquiries, so they will not reach out with promotions while a customer is experiencing technical issues.
At the same time, your sales team will also be aware of recent purchases on your commerce platform and can tailor their outreach accordingly. And your customer support team can use sales-related data to assist customers in their pre-sales journey, and provide personalised service to drive better conversion and retention.
Increasing customer lifetime value with Customer 360
If you want to increase customer lifetime value, you need to better deliver the connected, personalised experiences customers crave. According to the fifth edition of the LIKE.TG State of the Connected Customer report, 56% of customers expect all offers to be personalised, and 85% expect consistent interactions across departments.
Customer 360 empowers companies to use a data-driven process to deliver personalised customer experiences. It helps businesses to better understand customers’ individual needs, and therefore level-up personalisation strategies to increase customer lifetime value.
It achieves this by creating a single source of truth for connected customer experiences — across sales, service, marketing, and commerce. So whether customers are meeting you in-person, answering your emails, or chatting on the phone, you have one platform connecting every touchpoint.
That’s how you drive personalisation and deliver consistent customer experiences that are connected across your organisation.
Connection is the secret to customer loyalty
Singapore-based smile cosmetics company, Zenyum, is putting this concept into practice. Zenyum’s success is based largely on the company’s ability to connect with tech-savvy millennials and deliver connected customer experiences that combine digital convenience with deep data-driven personalisation. This has been made possible through Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Experience Cloud.
“Having the right information in the right stages is key,” says Chief Product Officer at Zenyum, Anupama Hoon. “Now we follow a single sales dashboard to track the metrics for the company. We have a clear overview of the sales funnel, and the data is available in real-time.”
Data-driven selling has a strong competitive advantage over intuitive selling. Data-driven organisations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers compared to their competition, and nine times more likely to surpass them in customer loyalty.
Zenyum’s success underlines the point that disconnected systems lead to unreliable data, reduced productivity and unknown customer needs. But with the use of technology, SMBs can adapt to evolving customer needs, build meaningful connections, and accelerate growth.
