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Use These 4 B2B Sales Techniques to Grow Your Business Faster
Closing B2B sales is tougher than ever. Business buyers have a proliferation of information and resources at hand to educate themselves about the purchases they’re making. That means B2B sales teams need to get smarter about how they influence and win over business buyers. Here are four useful B2B sales techniques that can help you build a powerful sales strategy in a competitive marketplace:
1. Transactional B2B sales
Transactional selling is the simplest B2B sales technique. In fact, it’s the way most people think about sales: identify a prospect, pitch them your product, and close the sale. The focus is on the short-term, usually on selling a single product — for example, in real estate. In transactional B2B sales, the prospect is aware of their needs, knows the solution, and is simply looking for an offering that best matches their requirements.
To grow your transactional B2B revenue, understanding customer needs and expanding sales through digital channels are crucial. In the latest State of Commerce report, B2B buyers are turning to digital channels now more than ever. The share of revenue coming from digital channels for B2B sellers has increased from 28% to 40% in two years. Revenue is expected to increase to 52% two years from now. Transactional selling is not just only about closing sales fast, but also providing more transactional options to close deals efficiently.
2. Solution B2B sales
Solution selling involves knowing the customer’s needs or problems and offering solutions in the form of products or services. It’s about pitching a value proposition. So, instead of simply selling the benefits or features of your offerings, you focus on the end state of the sale — how will the buyer’s organisation improve by adopting your product or service. Solution B2B sales have slightly longer purchase cycles but typically lead to deals with a better ROI and the potential for multiple repurchases.
To make sure that sales pitches are productive in solution B2B sales, you can’t just rely on experience and intuition. There is a need for data analytics to help boost your sales strategies and create a personalised, insightful solution for different customers. In the State of Connected Customer report, sales personalisation is one of the most important factors that influence B2B transactions. 89% of business buyers said they are more likely to buy if companies demonstrate an understanding of their end goals. With a clear view of the needs of your customers, you can better align your products and services with their goals to create great value.
3. Consultative B2B sales
Consultative selling is similar to solution selling; though, with the former, the buyer is aware of their problems or needs but not very proactive about finding a solution. In consultative B2B sales, the sales representative gains a deep understanding of the buyer’s problems or needs and how to fulfil them. They then advise the buyer about potential solutions, taking on a consultative role that nudges buyers towards making the purchase.
Consultative B2B sales often require the efforts of a sales representative along with a subject matter expert, so that all the buyer’s doubts and questions can be resolved. As this B2B sales method usually features larger ticket sizes, longer purchasing cycles, and a high-touch face-to-face selling environment, trust becomes more important, especially during times of change.
87% of business buyers expect sales representatives to know their business goals and work with them as a trusted advisor. However, only 62% say they generally trust sales representatives. There is still work to do in gaining customer’s trust. But this is a good opportunity for you to build trusted relationships with more personalised and customer-centric sales interactions.
4. Provocative B2B sales
In provocative B2B sales, the customer is not aware of a problem or need they might have. The sales representative executing this sales technique needs to first make the buyer aware of their problem or need, and then pitch their offerings as a solution. Provocative B2B sales are tricky to execute because the sales representative risks patronising or offending the buyer. However, if done well, this method gives the seller a first-mover advantage by offering the buyer solutions to problems they didn’t even know they had — and thus beating the competition to it.
Using data-driven insights to predict your prospect’s needs can help you close deals quicker and improve productivity in provocative B2B sales. As the primary thing being sold is guidance, followed by the product or service as a solution, a sales representative who anticipates customer needs will be able to build trust and elevate buyer satisfaction.
A B2B sales team may need to adopt different sales techniques depending on the buyer they’re interacting with. A CRM software like LIKE.TG’s Sales Cloud empowers your sales teams with a 360-degree view of prospects and customers. It unifies data from multiple sources on one shared platform, providing sales teams with all the information they need to understand customer needs and determine the best suited B2B sales techniques to deploy in any situation. With commerce, sales, and other data connected, sales representatives are becoming experts in understanding the customer’s past relationship with the company, measuring estimated revenue, and predicting the potential for add-on business.
Learn how to measure and boost productivity, and lead your sales team back to growth.
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This post originally appeared on the LIKE.TG India blog.
How to Turn Social Media into a Powerful Customer Service Tool
Trust is the connective tissue between a brand and its customers. As marketers, we play a special role in building trusted relationships with our customers. In many ways, we are the face and voice of the brand. Everything we say and do can build or destroy trust. This is why values-based marketing is important.
As customers navigate a rapidly-shifting world, values-based marketing is more crucial than ever. In Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report, we found that 74% of customers say a brand communicating honestly and transparently is more important now than before the pandemic.
Our research also finds that customers trust companies to act responsibly. Seventy-one percent of customers in Singapore and 83% of customers in Thailand trust companies to act with society’s best interest in mind.
“71% of customers in Singapore and 83% of customers in Thailand trust companies to act with society’s best interest in mind.”
Salesforce’s marketing team is now prioritising values along with products. We are communicating what we stand for and the actions we’re taking to live our values. That helps people understand who we fundamentally are as a company and what we’re like as a partner.
With that, here are five wayswe lead with valuesin our marketing. We hope you can find these strategies useful in your own communications as well.
1. We publicly hold ourselves accountable for living our values
You may have seen our high-profile Team Earth campaign featuring Matthew McConaughey. By discussing our values on big stages at Salesforce events such as Dreamforce and Salesforce Live, we invite others to hold us accountable for truly living our beliefs in trust, equality, and sustainability.
2. We strive to communicate with integrity, authenticity, and transparency
We share our values with the world because we know they are important to our stakeholders. We build trust by being honest, helpful, and relevant, providing information our customers and others need to make the right decisions for their company and community.
3. We practise inclusive marketing
That means our storytelling reflects the diverse communities that we serve. It includes people of all backgrounds, regardless their race, ethnicity, gender, ability, age, sexual orientation, or religion. We challenge stereotypes and inspire people to be the best they can be.
We use a method called counter-stereotyping that portrays people in roles that challenge prejudices. We want to dispel incorrect perceptions and showcase our belief that anyone can do anything. We keep accessibility top of mind for how our content is consumed, too. For example, all images in our content must meet accessibility standards, which include acceptable colours and fonts, plus alt text for images and closed captioning for videos.
4. We lead with sustainable marketing
Our events marketing team uses QR codes that direct to downloadable schedules and content (instead of handing out paper programs). We give eco-conscious gifts. And recipients must opt in to direct mail (less paper, more digital).
5. We’re building a safe future for consumer data
The technology world is changing at breakneck speed, and while innovation is great, sometimes it’s hard to keep up. That can turn into unfair and even risky situations. We are taking all possible steps to eliminate algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence, and we’re also protecting user privacy.
“Relationships built on values and trust benefit everyone and lead to progress toward the sustainable and fair world we all want. ”
Our values-based marketing also prepares our community for the industry and technology shifts that are happening now and coming our way. These include privacy changes, thenew era of marketing analytics that focus on consumer privacy, and more. We want our customers and partners to know what steps to take to be successful and safe.
The bottom line is that relationships built on values and trust benefit everyone and lead to progress toward the sustainable and fair world we all want. We can live our highest purpose as marketers by building trust through communicating our values with integrity and building values into everything we do.
Find out what consumers and business buyers have to say about trust and values-based marketing.
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This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the Salesforce blog.
Want Your Business to Be More Efficient? AI Can Help
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has the potential to completely transform the way you do business. You can save money on marketing, close deals more quickly, and provide better service, all without increasing your headcount.
The recent State of the Connected Customer report showed that trust is still a valued commodity. Trust in businesses is slowly growing — 52% of customers say they generally trust companies, compared to 48% two years ago.
But businesses still need to act in ways that build trust. According to the report, these are the top five actions that businesses can take to build customer trust:
Communicate honestly and transparently
Use customer information responsibly
Treat customers as people, not numbers
Resolve issues proactively
Communicate proactively
Customers now expect you have a greater understanding of their needs. They expect you to be available 24/7, and they want to be able to contact you however they like and get the same experience.
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system acting as a single source of truth, combined with the power of AI, can help you meet these expectations.
Speed up the sales process with AI
You can use AI at every step of the sales process, from prospecting to closing. By automating every step of the selling journey, you can free up your sales staff to maximise the time they spend selling, improving productivity and efficiency.
Improved sales pipeline
AI can take on the task of lead scoring, providing you with a prioritised list of leads based on previous deals. Your sales teams can address the prospects who are most likely to convert into high-value sales first.
A CRM-integrated AI can also tell you which leads are most likely to close.Sales Cloud, alongside Einstein Opportunity Insights, will automatically assess customer sentiment, competitor involvement, and prospect engagement to understand whether a prospect is likely to buy.
For your existing clients, Einstein Account Insights can keep tabs on company updates and activities, and alert your sales teams when an opportunity presents itself.LIKE.TG Geniekeeps these insights updated in real time, meaning you can act on them as they happen.
Finally, you can use AI to keep a track of all your sales activities.Two-thirds of high-performing sales teamsautomate administrative tasks, such as call logging and meeting reminders. By letting your AI manage these day-to-day tasks, you give your sales teams more time in their day for selling.
Proactive customer service with AI
The latest State of Service report contains insights from over 8,000 customer service professionals from around the world. A clear message from the research was that efficiency is becoming more important to customer service leaders:
Customer satisfaction is now measured by fewer service teams than in 2020
The proportion of organisations that consider speed to be more important than quality has doubled since 2020
Metrics measuring first contact resolution, cost per contact, customer effort, and case deflection are all increasing in popularity
Each of these efficiency measures can be boosted by AI.
Resolving issues proactively
With AI-powered chatbots, you can instantly help customers find the answers they’re looking for. Not only does this reduce the burden on your service personnel, but it also helps the customer faster.
You can also turn customer service teams into a driver for growth. With data kept up to date in real time, AI can intelligently make suggestions and in-context recommendations to customers, based on their previous activity.
You can save time for agents by using AI to complete data fields, perform case triage, and automatically route service tickets so agents can concentrate on the cases that require their attention.
Read about How SmartCost integrates Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to drive a 50% boost in revenue.
Improve marketing experiences with AI
AI gives marketers the tools to make every customer interaction effective.
Predictive insights mean that customers only ever see relevant marketing messages. Supported by LIKE.TG Genie, Marketing Cloud and Einstein assess every engagement, brand interaction, and purchase to make sure that each ad hits home. They even take into account customer conversations on social networks.
In the State of the Connected Customer report, it was revealed that 69% of customers say that they are open to the use of AI to improve their experiences. You can use it to offer personalised content and provide bespoke offers tailored to each customer, making them feel valued, improving your bottom line.
Optimisation at scale
AI can help optimise your marketing spend, offering suggestions for targeting, and flagging when campaigns aren’t hitting the mark.
All of this data can be presented in easy-to-digest formats, with automatically created visual guides accompanied by natural language descriptions. This lets you share your insights quickly and make up-to-the-minute optimisation decisions.
Read about how GeniusU provided its fans with a totally personalised experience.
Prepare your business for a digital future
Businesses of all sizes are feeling pressure, from evolving customer expectations, growing costs, and increased competition.
An AI-powered CRM will give you the tools to meet those challenges. Download the Prepare your Business for a Digital Future e-book now, to understand how a single source of truth, boosted by an always-on AI, can change the way you do business.
What Is a LIKE.TG Admin?
LIKE.TG helpsover 150,000 customersacross a myriad of businesses, nonprofits, and institutions to connect with their customers. People around the world rely on ourCustomer Relationship Management (CRM)platform to keep business running. The LIKE.TG Administrator in any of these organisations is critical for success. Read on to learn:
What is a LIKE.TG Administrator?
LIKE.TG Administratorswork with stakeholders to define system requirements and customise the platform. To put it simply, they enable users to get the most out of LIKE.TG technology.
A LIKE.TG Admin best understands how to make the platform work for their company’s goals.
Some organisations may employ just one admin; some employ many people in this role. A LIKE.TG Administrator’s colleagues can rely on them to:
Maintain the platform
Make it as easy as possible for users of any technical level to use LIKE.TG
Stay updated on the platform’s new tools, capabilities, and updates
Think of LIKE.TG Administrators as yourtrusted advisorson all things LIKE.TG. They are a vital bridge between business and technology.
What does a LIKE.TG Administrator do?
In some organisations, administrator jobs are combined with other roles. Depending on their needs, some hire for this role specifically. Because of our platform’s capabilities, having someone with an admin certification can ensure the company is using the platform to its fullest potential.
Take your sales team for example. They might use Sales Cloud to keep track of opportunities, sell smarter, and close deals faster. With the help of a LIKE.TG Admin, your salespeople can set up personalised dashboards, fields, alerts, and reports to shorten the sales cycle and track every lead in greater detail. This level of organisation can increase efficiency and productivity among salespeople and make customers happy.
That’s just one department. We have solutions for just about every team in a company, including sales, marketing, customer service, and more. Each department can learn from the LIKE.TG Admin how to use our platform most effectively.
How to become a LIKE.TG Admin?
You do not need a technical background or knowledge of LIKE.TG technology to begin. Anyone with a computer and an internet connection anywhere in the world can train on Trailhead, our free online learning platform designed to teach new students and seasoned professionals a wide variety of business skills. Best of all, learning to become a LIKE.TG Admin happens online and on your schedule.
To find work as an admin, you must prepare and study, and then pass the LIKE.TG Certified Administrator exam. Absolute beginners kick things off by learning what the LIKE.TG platform is and what it does, and then build on that knowledge in a series of engaging modules. We estimate that it takes around 115–125 hours of study and to pass.
Career prospects and opportunities for LIKE.TG Admins
As our Trailblazers continue to grow and impact business, LIKE.TG Admin jobs will grow, too. Our research shows a 400% annual growth rate for admins. It’s a career path for people who love to learn and for professionals who enjoy using the latest technology.
Some people earn their LIKE.TG Administrator Certificate to supplement their current role in a company – and potentially secure a higher salary. Others use it to enrich their resume and find a new position. Many companies use LIKE.TG, including retailers, nonprofits, financial services, healthcare providers, and software companies.
LIKE.TG Administrator credentials and certifications
Becoming a LIKE.TG Admin can be a valuable long-term career path, or a way to improve the career path you’re already on. The LIKE.TG Administrator role has five credentials, including:
Administrator— designed for those who have experience with LIKE.TG and continuously look for ways to help companies get additional features and capabilities
Advanced Administrator — for seasoned LIKE.TG Administrators who have mastered advanced LIKE.TG features and functionality to solve a variety of business problems
CPQ Specialist— for individuals with experience designing, building, and implementing quoting flows with LIKE.TG Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), technology used to organise sales teams
Marketing Cloud Administrator— for administrators who configure and troubleshoot configuration and user requests in Marketing Cloud, including subscriber data management and Setup navigation
Platform App Builder— for those skilled in designing, building, and implementing custom applications
You can also pick up a few Superbadges along the way to indicate extra learning concentrations in topics such as Business Administration Specialist and Security Specialist.
Examples of the concepts you’ll learn during study for the certification exam include:
Managing users, data, and security
Maintaining and customising Sales Cloud and Service Cloud apps
Building reports, dashboards, and workflows
In addition to becoming a LIKE.TG Admin, you can follow other paths of study to help you learn and demonstrate your capability with our platform. You may also want to consider certifications to become a LIKE.TG Architect, Developer, Marketer, Consultant, or Designer.
To become a certified LIKE.TG Administrator, you don’t need any other certifications. However, if you choose to become an Advanced Administrator, you’ll need to start with your Administrator Certificate. The Advanced Administrator exam builds on your LIKE.TG Admin knowledge.
Before scheduling your exam, we recommend that you have at least 6-12 months’ experience using LIKE.TG.
How to prepare for the LIKE.TG Administrator certification exam
Future admins have a few options to prepare for their credentials. To complement the Trailhead courses, Trailhead also has a community of fellow learners; members are known as Trailblazers. You can join the Trailblazer Community to learn together, find answers, and collaborate.
Administrators can also learn from the LIKE.TG Admin YouTube channel with videos that show what the role entails, as well as recorded webinars and educational videos. You can also get tips on how to pass the exam.
There are online and offline resources including blog posts, podcasts, and virtual programming and in-person events that are updated regularly.
Once you’ve gone through the courses and steps on Trailhead to study for the certification, familiarise yourself with the LIKE.TG Certified Administrator Exam Guide.
When you’re ready, it’s time to sign up for the exam. The test can be taken in-person or online. It includes 60 multiple-choice or multiple-select questions and five non-scored questions. Test takers have 105 minutes, or just over an hour and a half, and they must score 65% or higher to pass. There is a fee to take and retake the exam.
After you pass the test, you’re a certified LIKE.TG administrator, and your career opportunities have expanded. But your learning doesn’t stop there. Maintain your certification on a specific schedule to keep your knowledge, skills, and abilities current.
Get the skills you need to make an impact and launch a new career in business and technology. Learn more about kickstarting a LIKE.TG Administrator career.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
This post was updated in October 2022.
You Can Build Customer Trust With Values-Based Marketing – Here’s How
Trust is the connective tissue between a brand and its customers. As marketers, we play a special role in building trusted relationships with our customers. In many ways, we are the face and voice of the brand. Everything we say and do can build or destroy trust. This is why values-based marketing is important.
As customers navigate a rapidly-shifting world, values-based marketing is more crucial than ever. In LIKE.TG’s State of the Connected Customer report, we found that 74% of customers say a brand communicating honestly and transparently is more important now than before the pandemic.
Our research also finds that customers trust companies to act responsibly. Seventy-one percent of customers in Singapore and 83% of customers in Thailand trust companies to act with society’s best interest in mind.
LIKE.TG’s marketing team is now prioritising values along with products. We are communicating what we stand for and the actions we’re taking to live our values. That helps people understand who we fundamentally are as a company and what we’re like as a partner.
With that, here are five wayswe lead with valuesin our marketing. We hope you can find these strategies useful in your own communications as well.
1. We publicly hold ourselves accountable for living our values
You may have seen our high-profile Team Earth campaign featuring Matthew McConaughey. By discussing our values on big stages at LIKE.TG events such as Dreamforce and LIKE.TG Live, we invite others to hold us accountable for truly living our beliefs in trust, equality, and sustainability.
2. We strive to communicate with integrity, authenticity, and transparency
We share our values with the world because we know they are important to our stakeholders. We build trust by being honest, helpful, and relevant, providing information our customers and others need to make the right decisions for their company and community.
3. We practise inclusive marketing
That means our storytelling reflects the diverse communities that we serve. It includes people of all backgrounds, regardless their race, ethnicity, gender, ability, age, sexual orientation, or religion. We challenge stereotypes and inspire people to be the best they can be.
We use a method called counter-stereotyping that portrays people in roles that challenge prejudices. We want to dispel incorrect perceptions and showcase our belief that anyone can do anything. We keep accessibility top of mind for how our content is consumed, too. For example, all images in our content must meet accessibility standards, which include acceptable colours and fonts, plus alt text for images and closed captioning for videos.
4. We lead with sustainable marketing
Our events marketing team uses QR codes that direct to downloadable schedules and content (instead of handing out paper programs). We give eco-conscious gifts. And recipients must opt in to direct mail (less paper, more digital).
5. We’re building a safe future for consumer data
The technology world is changing at breakneck speed, and while innovation is great, sometimes it’s hard to keep up. That can turn into unfair and even risky situations. We are taking all possible steps to eliminate algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence, and we’re also protecting user privacy.
Our values-based marketing also prepares our community for the industry and technology shifts that are happening now and coming our way. These include privacy changes, thenew era of marketing analytics that focus on consumer privacy, and more. We want our customers and partners to know what steps to take to be successful and safe.
The bottom line is that relationships built on values and trust benefit everyone and lead to progress toward the sustainable and fair world we all want. We can live our highest purpose as marketers by building trust through communicating our values with integrity and building values into everything we do.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
3 Ways to Take Your Permission-Based Selling Strategy to the Next Level
You might have heard of permission-based selling, and it’s possible that you’re already doing it without even knowing. It’s a strategy that eliminates the old stereotype of cold-calling and pushy sales reps. Instead, you engage with prospects who have already made it clear that they want to hear from you. By gaining the permission to sell, you remove obstacles that may have stood in your way if you had used more blunt sales techniques.
The technique is similar to permission-based marketing, where a customer opts in to receiving marketing messages, by subscribing to email newsletters for example. There are many overlaps between the two techniques — permission has to be granted before the selling or marketing activity can take place, and you have to make sure you don’t lose the customer by exploiting that permission.
The benefits of permission-based selling are clear: the prospect is more open to your proposals if they have asked to hear them. Your messages are less likely to be ignored if the recipient wants to read them.
You can gain permission in a number of ways:
Approach a prospect and ask them if they’d be willing to hear your proposal, or they could express interest by contacting you first.
Request permission through your website, in your email signature, and even on your social media profiles. Just be careful that the request for permission isn’t itself too pushy.
So far, so good. But there are ways to improve your chances even further.
1. Don’t forget the human connection
All sales negotiations, even large B2B deals, are ultimately conversations between human beings. Understanding how to make connections on a personal level will improve the quality of your permission-based selling.
No-one likes to be talked ‘at’ — if you can engage your prospect in a two-way conversation, rapport will be built much quicker. In person, these conversations happen naturally, but as we move to a hybrid working environment, you may find it harder to maintain that human connection over video. There are a few things you can do to make it easier:
First, break the ice
Don’t just jump straight to business. Think about what’s important to your customer, how has their career journey been? What about outside of their job? Perhaps it’s their children, or a sports team they follow. Talk for a few minutes about these things, and the rest of the meeting will flow more easily. With experience, you will learn how to maintain the delicate balance between being too business-like and too friendly.
Understand how you appear on screen
We have all got better at meeting over video, but it’s a skill that needs to be practised. Consider putting a note near your camera to remind you to look at the camera when you are speaking — not to the screen. Make sure you have good posture, that you are seated in a well-lit place and that the area behind you is uncluttered.
Maintain your curiosity
Pause often, ask open-ended questions, and make sure to leave room for your prospect to ask their own. Get them to talk to you, rather than dominate the conversation yourself. In the end, a good sales conversation is a bit like a first date, you want them to leave feeling heard!
2. From rapport to permission
Once you’ve developed a rapport with your prospect, you can start building towards permission to sell. Think of it as a chain from rapport to permission:
Rapport > Trust > Credibility > Permission
One way to build trust with your prospect is to not waste their time — a person’s time is the most valuable commodity they have. The best gift you can give a prospect is to end a meeting early — they will remember it and consider you a reliable person.
As trust develops, you will have the opportunity to display your credibility. At this point of the conversation, you should be presenting solutions to your customer’s problems – not selling your products. This is the time when your research shows its value. The more you know about a prospect’s context before you begin, the higher your credibility becomes.
By solving problems, you will become a trusted, credible advisor in the eyes of your prospect, not simply someone trying to sell a product and move on. Naturally, permission to sell follows, and you can make your pitch. The time you spend building rapport helps to establish trust and credibility with your customers. Sales should come easier following that.
3. The power of the referral
If what you’ve read so far has made you think permission-based selling takes time, you’re right. It’s a long game.
There is one way to speed up the process, though. If you can get a referral from a trusted third party, you can gain permission to sell almost instantly.
The secret to getting a referral is to ask for one — it’s as simple as that. Many people won’t think to pick up the phone (or open up Slack) and ask to be referred, but it’s the quickest way.
If you have cultivated a reputation as a reliable person and have ensured that yourbusiness relationshipsare built on mutual trust, then people will gladly help you. Of course, the reverse is also true — if someone asks you to refer them to a customer, and you trust them, it will help everyone if you make the referral.
When someone gives you a referral to a prospect, they are placing their credibility in your hands, so it’s more important than ever that you act with integrity, and do your best to solve the customer’s problems.
More sales insights and advice
For more sales advice from LIKE.TG, Trailblazers and industry experts, download 50 Pro Sales Tips.
What Is a CDP?
The customer data platform (CDP) is one of the fastest-growing categories of marketing technology today. According to the 2020 State of Marketing Report, 86% of marketers are increasing or maintaining their use of CDPs. To understand why, you have to look at some underlying challenges in marketing related to data and personalisation.
What does a customer data platform do?
We live in an era where the customer is in control. Amazon can predict what products we will buy next, Netflix recommends the shows we like with great accuracy, and Grab lets us customise trips right down to the type of vehicle we want to travel in.
Customers want personalised experiences and fast service, and expect companies to have an intimate understanding of their preferences. Delivering seamless experiences is no longer a marketing advantage, but a necessity.
Customers expect the interactions they have on a company’s website to translate to their mobile app experiences and even in-store visits. They want everything updated in real time, so their current needs are being met on every channel. The problem is that, for most companies, those environments operate off of different datasets — even though the customer is the same.
As customers move from channel to channel, they expect their experiences to be consistent and ‘in the moment’. Most customer journeys involve three or more different channels (email, web, and mobile app), and customers tend to move seamlessly and quickly between these channels. Most companies, however, don’t have these data environments connected in real time.
The result is disconnected experiences for consumers and the lack of a single source of customer data for companies.
That’s where a CDP comes in. It combines all of that data in real time for companies, allowing them to offer hyper-personalised experiences for customers.
This is taken a step further by LIKE.TG Data Cloud, the first real-time CRM. It funnels a nearly infinite amount of dynamic data into Customer 360 instantaneously. Now, your data has been turned into real-time customer magic. It is continuously updating with new data from any of your customers touchpoints, faster than ever.
How does a customer data platform work?
The first thing CDPs do is connect all of a company’s customer data in a single place. That means not only stitching together a single customer ID from many different customer interactions, but also tying together databases that traditionally don’t share data, like marketing clouds, service software, and ecommerce engines. We call that customer resolution.
Next, CDPs match the data we have about our customers (like email and mobile numbers) to what we could find out about them (anonymous cookies and mobile device IDs, for example) to get a complete picture of each individual. This way, we can start to associate a journey that started with an email campaign and continued onto the website with the same customer. We think of this as a cross-device identity.
Once the CDP has created unified profiles of customers, the system has to make that data available in real time so companies can deliver personalised experiences. That means connecting customer data to many different types of systems, such as email-send engines, demand-side platforms, and content management systems.
As the amount of consumer data grows, companies must be aware of and respect data privacy concerns. Many consumers are willing to have some of their data used to deliver magical, personalised experiences, but they expect that companies will protect this data and use it ethically. These are the building blocks of a trusting relationship with customers, and companies need to use consumer data in the right ways.
In a nutshell, CDPs are concerned with these primary tasks: data collection, data unification, data activation, and data insights.
What are customer data platforms used for?
So, what do companies use CDPs for? Here are a few examples.
The right ads at the right time
Sometimes the best use of data in marketing isn’t used to better target consumers — but to not target them at all. We’ve all had the experience of being targeted online by ads for things we’ve already bought.
The reason companies have a hard time stopping ads for the sneakers (or car) we have already purchased is disconnected data. A unified profile that connects marketing and purchase data enables marketers to be smarter with their budgets by suppressing consumers that have already made a purchase and redirecting those dollars toward prospective customers, or recommending other products.
Personalisation
A consumer comes to your website, browses a particular product — say, a new red convertible — and leaves. Wouldn’t it be great if you could tie everything you’ve learned about that customer to a personalised offer via email or push notification? For example: “test drive this red convertible today, and get $500 off MSRP!” You can only do that by connecting that consumer’s identity to your marketing engine.
CDPs solve this problem. Customers who see content tailored to their interests (test drive this red convertible today!) are more likely to engage with a brand.
Insights
What drives better marketing? The answer has always been better customer insights, but most analytics systems operate in silos.
Email engagement data is separate from website analytics data, which is separate from display advertising data. Stitching that data together, and tying all of those interactions with the same consumer can take a lot of effort when you are using legacy systems.
What if an outdoor retailer had a customer’s marketing interactions (email and advertising engagement) tied together with their ecommerce data (purchase history) and website interaction data (products viewed multiple times) — and made that information available to a service representative in the call centre?
A bit of data science (customers who purchased this tent online, and opened email promotions for these hiking boots, and spent between $250 and $1000 annually, usually buy this backpack) can reveal the right product recommendations to the call centre agent, who can make a personalised, relevant offer on the spot. This type of personalisation can turn a $15/hour call centre representative into a $100,000 a year salesperson. That’s the power of a CDP.
What is LIKE.TG Genie?
What is LIKE.TG Customer 360?
What Is MuleSoft?
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
AI Is Everywhere — But Are You Building It Responsibly?
Artificial intelligence (AI) touches billions of people daily. It suggests recommended content on your favourite streaming service and helps you avoid traffic while you drive. AI can also help businesses predict how likely someone is to repay a loan or determine the most efficient routes for distributors to ship goods quickly and reliably.
There is no doubt the predictive capabilities brought about by these AI have helped businesses to scale rapidly. With applications in fields from retail services to logistics and personal finance, the global AI industry is projected to reach annual revenue of US$291.5 billion by 2026. In Asia Pacific, the size of the AI market is also growing. It is estimated to be worth around US$450 million by 2025. But for all the good AI has contributed to the world, the technology isn’t perfect. AI algorithms can cause many business and societal pitfalls if not kept in check.
AI is trained on a large amount of data that has been collected over time. If that data collected shows bias, or is not representative of the people the system will impact, it can amplify those biases. For example, the recently launched BlenderBot 3, a conversational AI, perpetuated negative bias by generating unsafe and offensive remarks during a public demo. Research has also shown that many popular open-source benchmark training datasets — ones that many new machine learning models are measured against — are either not valid for the context in which they have been widely reused or contain data that is inaccurate or mislabeled.
Ways to combat bias in AI
As a result, governments around the world have begun drafting and implementing AI regulations. Singapore has a law focused on accountable and responsible development of AI, while Thailand has most AI initiatives embedded within policies and strategies to strengthen the development of AI-related technologies.
Regulation, when well-crafted and appropriately applied, ensures an ethical AI system that is inclusive and unbiased.
In the meantime, business leaders need to pave the way to a more equitable AI infrastructure. Here’s how:
Be transparent
To increase trustworthiness, many regulations require businesses to be transparent about how they trained their AI model (a program trained on a set of data to recognise certain types of patterns), the factors used in the model, its intended and unintended uses, and any known bias. Policymakers usually request this in the form of data sheets or model cards, which act like nutrition labels for AI models. LIKE.TG, for example, publishes its model cards so customers and prospects can learn how the models were trained to make predictions.
Make your AI interpretable
Why does an AI system make the recommendation or prediction it does? You might shrug when AI recommends you watch a new movie, but you’ll definitely want to know how AI weighed the pros and cons of your loan application. Those explanations need to be understood by the person receiving the information — such as a lender or loan officer — who then must decide how to act upon the recommendation an AI system is making.
That said, one study conducted by researchers at IBM Research AI, Cornell University, and Georgia Institute of Technology found that even people well versed in AI systems often over-relied on and misinterpreted the system’s results. Misunderstanding how the AI systems work can result in disastrous consequences in situations that require more human attention. The bottom line? More real-life testing needs to occur with the people using the AI to ensure they understand the explanations.
Keep a human in the loop
Some regulations call for a human to make the final decision about anything with legal or similarly significant effects, such as hiring, loans, school acceptance, and criminal justice recommendations. By requiring human review rather than automating the decision, regulators expect bias and harm to be more easily caught and mitigated.
In some cases, humans may defer to AI recommendations rather than rely on their own judgment. Combine this tendency with the difficulty of grasping the rationale behind an AI decision, humans don’t actually provide that safety mechanism against bias.
That doesn’t mean high-risk, critical decisions should simply be automated. It means we need to ensure that people can interpret AI explanations and are incentivised to flag a decision for bias or harm. For instance, the AI governance framework in Singapore, along with its personal protection data policy, allows AI to make recommendations for decisions with legal impact (for example, a loan approval or rejection) but requires a human to make the final decision. This not only promotes AI adoption, but also builds customer confidence and trust.
How to add ethical AI practices to your business
It’s understandable, then, that some executives may be reluctant to collect sensitive data — age, race, and gender, for example — to begin with. Some worry about inadvertently biasing their models or being unable to properly comply with privacy regulations. However, you cannot achieve fairness through inaction. Companies need to collect this data in order to analyse if there is disparate impact for different subpopulations. This sensitive data can be stored in a separate system where ethicists or auditors can access it for the purpose of bias and fairness analysis.
In a perfect world, AI systems would be built without bias, but this is not a perfect world. While some guardrails can minimise the effects of AI bias on society, no dataset or model can ever be truly bias free. Statistically speaking, bias means “error,” so a bias-free model must make perfect predictions or recommendations every time — and that just isn’t possible.
There is a lot to understand to ensure companies are creating and implementing AI responsibly and in compliance with regulations. This requires business leaders to build ethical AI practices.
Executives can start by hiring a diverse group of experts from many backgrounds in ethics, psychology, ethnography, critical race theory, and computer science. They can build on that by creating a company culture that rewards employees for flagging risks — empowering them to not only ask, “Can we do this?” but also, “Should we do this?” — and by implementing consequences when harms are ignored.
Prepare for the future of AI. Find out how.
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This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
M1 Proves Customer and Employee Experience Go Hand-in-Hand
While Singapore’s M1 may have started out as a traditional telco, the experience it provides rivals that of the industry’s digital natives. Innovation is in M1’s DNA and its digital transformation has uplifted service and resulted in an incredible Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 60.
LIKE.TG is a partner in M1’s ongoing transformation to become a digital-first telco, and we recently met with Stamford Low, Director, Customer Experience Retail, to learn more about how his team is progressing and the lessons learned along the way. Here are key takeaways showing that exceptional customer experiences start with engaged employees.
Drive adoption with friction-free experiences
M1 operates in a digitally-savvy society, but old habits can be hard to change. For customers to self-serve or purchase a new phone and contract online, the process must be as convenient as dropping into a local store. That’s why M1 continues to streamline its digital journeys and remove any points of friction.
“If we provide frictionless digital journeys, customers won’t have a need to use legacy assisted channels,” said Stamford.
The same logic applies to new tools and processes for employees. M1’s employees have embraced robotic process automation (RPA) and new applications because they can see the value they provide. These technologies eliminate repetitive and mundane tasks, making it easier to serve customers.
“Our employees love the agent and sales consoles in LIKE.TG because of the user experience. Thanks to our agile way of building things, they’ve also been able to provide input into how we cluster and display information on screens,” said Stamford.
Customer experience and productivity are inextricably linked
Call deflection is a common measure of success for service-focused organisations. However, for M1, it is secondary. Its primary goal is to provide a better digital experience.
“The starting point for us is not call deflection or call avoidance because that’s inward-looking. We want to focus on making the customer journey so proactive that there’s no need for the customer to call,” said Stamford. “If we know that there is something wrong with your mobile service, for example, why should we wait for you to call us? We should be reaching out first, either through our app or an outbound call.”
When customers do reach out, M1 wants to ensure an efficient response — whether it is from an agent or the telco’s chatbot Mindy. Einstein Next Best Action and continued enhancements to the agent and sales consoles will help increase the speed of customer service and improve the telco’s already high NPS.
“Our NPS is at a level that makes it difficult to keep improving and we have already harvested all the low-hanging fruit. That’s why we are challenging ourselves and using Einstein Next Best Action to be more proactive,” said Stamford.
The telco also plans to reorganise the information in its agent and sales consoles so that it is more aligned with the customer journey. For example, if a customer calls about a billing dispute, M1 wants to provide agents with everything they need to manage that dispute on a single screen.
“Data shows that first contact resolution (FCR) is the number one driver for transactional NPS. So the best way to improve FCR is to equip employees with the best tools to resolve customer queries,” said Stamford. “I believe that also translates into empowered employees and thus a better employee NPS.”
Transformation is a journey, not a sprint
We asked Stamford for tips on how to manage internal change and shift employee mindsets. He said that digital transformation is a journey. It is important for leaders to be aligned and to provide clear direction on where the journey is headed.
“Digitalisation is sometimes viewed as a threat to certain departments and certain roles. For example, there were concerns within our business that we would go 100% digital and close all our stores. However, management alleviated these concerns by making it clear that’s not our focus right now.”
“Some people still struggle with digital, so to cater to Singapore’s whole population we will still need stores. The question is how do we upskill our store staff and provide them with the knowledge in their tablets to sell in a personalised way,” said Stamford.
Upskilling is an essential element of M1’s transformation and the business has made this as easy and efficient as possible for employees. When processes change, for example, employees only need to learn what’s new rather than sit through training on what they already know. They can also find information on new processes and features in a library of articles built on LIKE.TG Knowledge.
Training time is 50% faster for new sales and service employees. Stamford attributes that partly to how easy the service agent and sales consoles are to use.
Commenting on the broader efficiencies offered by new digital capabilities, Stamford indicated that the need for efficiency and productivity was a given. What’s most important to him, though, is the impact on the customer.
“People always look for efficiency and productivity gains in operations because it leads to cost optimisation. However, I think about efficiency more from the perspective of how it can help us to provide a better customer experience,” said Stamford.
Consumers Are Budget Conscious This Shopping Season — Use Data To Turn Browsing Into Buying
Would you be surprised to learn that companies with a strong retail data strategy grow revenue up to 2.9 times faster than companies without one? Or that 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations — a 7-point rise in just two years? Keep those numbers in mind this shopping season because they could affect your revenue and growth.
Creating personaliszed experiences based on collected customer data, also known as first-party data, is an increasingly critical part of retail data strategy. Despite this, only 32% of retail executives say they can turn profile information, purchase history, and service interactions into tailored experiences that make shoppers feel like VIPs. To stay profitable in this changing market, retailers need to meet the demands of must inspire budget-conscious customers. To do that, they need to prove they understand their customers’ needs and expectations.
Here’s how to acquire and engage customers this shopping season.
Use customer data to personalise every interaction
First-party data helps you tailor offers and messages to your customers’ specific interests. The payoff is huge: 78% of consumers say personalised email and other messages make them more likely to repurchase in the future. However, simply accumulating huge quantities of data isn’t enough. You also need to know what to collect, when to collect it, and how to use it. The challenge is to not drive customers away by asking for everything at once.
To level-up your retail data strategy:
Avoid intrusive demands
During the shopping season, customers’ patience tends to wear thin. Their interest in completing a long customer profile is probably low, so be strategic about what you ask. Focus on data collection that will enable you to follow up with them after the purchase to learn more. Use a multi-pronged approach that balances frequency with relevancy, and stay away from sending mass email and generic communication when possible. The more you know about your customers, the more opportunity you have to tailor your messaging to inspire participation. With a personalised approach, you can collect more valuable information, like product preferences, later as you build trust.
Keep your loyalty program ready for the shopping season
Not only are loyalty programs an effective way to gather zero- and first-party data, its members are often your most valuable customers. But with consumers likely to shop less and from fewer retailers this shopping season, your job is to make sure your members think of you first when they’re making shopping lists. How? By ensuring your loyalty program delivers the best value exchange possible.
While traditional rewards-for-transactions arrangements will remain important as consumers get more budget-conscious, don’t overlook the intrinsic value of the VIP experience. That’s especially important for millennial and Gen Z shoppers who value exclusive access to limited-edition products and experiences nearly two times more than Gen Xers and baby boomers. So, from priority sale access to complimentary gift wrap, ensure your members feel the data-for-rewards exchange is worth the effort.
Connect data across the full customer lifecycle
Busy shoppers don’t have time to waste. They don’t want to repeat themselves on the phone, explain an online promotion to a store associate, or make an extra trip to the post office because they can’t return a purchase in person. The bottom line? Your customers expect you to bridgephysical and digital interactions. By elevating data from sales, service, marketing, and commerce to a shared customer data platform, you’ll gain the 360-degree view you need to ensure every interaction stays personalised, consistent, and on-brand.
Segment audience data to automate relevant communications
Shoppers are inundated with emails, texts, app notifications, and social media advertising. Your retail data strategy needs to stand out from the crowd and capture their attention with intelligent messaging that’s tailored to their specific needs and interests. But how?
By organising your customer data based on shared attributes, you can target the audiences most likely to respond to customiszed messaging. For example, imagine you’ve created a segment of customers in a certain region who are on the waiting list for gaming equipment. You’ve recently restocked that region’s store shelves with popular consoles, headsets, and controllers. Segmentation and automated messaging enable you to alert interested customers that the items they want are back in stock. But even better, you can also send communications to lookalike audiences who have purchased gaming equipment from you in the past — and that’s the kind of personalised experience that drives revenue.
Make online experiences intuitive, wallet-friendly, and fast
To grow margin in a challenging economy, you need to do more than tailor communications to customer preferences. Your retail data strategy needs to capture the attention of your first-time shoppers at the right moments and then make it easy for them to buy.
Use data from existing customers to create:
Intelligent product displays. Offer relevant recommendations on the pages where customers are shopping, like athletic socks alongside sneakers. But don’t display just anything. Deliver a good customer experience by ensuring the products are in stock (or at least available for on-time shopping season delivery).
Money-saving promotional bundles. Budget-conscious shoppers don’t want to waste money or time. Reduce taps to discovery and increase average order volume by combining closely related products into wallet-friendly bundles. For example, offer a treadmill alongside a fitness tracker, workout wear, and hand weights.
Personalised (and fast) checkout. With 71% of traffic coming from mobile devices in the second quarter, it’s never been more important to optimisze commerce experiences for smaller screens. Invite new customers to create a profile with their payment preference and enable “buy it now” on mobile product pages to ensure they can breeze through checkout.
What’s next for your retail data strategy?
A difficult economy and shifting consumer sentiment are creating yet another year of unprecedented challenges in retail. You’ll need to use every tool you have to acquire new customers and keep loyal shoppers coming back for more.
With the right retail data strategy and streamlined digital experiences that address busy shoppers’ needs, you can keep your customers happy from double-digit shopping festivals to Black Friday and beyond.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Automation and Efficiency Are at the Heart of Customer Service Trends
How is the role of service changing? Findings from the latest State of Service, Fifth Edition report show that customer service has evolved. Instead of a department that handles customer complaints, it is now a cornerstone of any successful organisation.
The last few years have seen a major shift in the way that customers interact with the businesses they buy from. In turn, businesses are changing the way they approach customer service.
Telephone calls and email once dominated customer service interactions. But in recent years, they have dropped in popularity, with channels such as video support and chatbots becoming more widely available.
As more customers are choosing to communicate using more than one channel, service teams’ priorities are changing. New metrics, designed to allow managers to make meaningful change, are now being measured.
This has led to organisations everywhere choosing to automate their processes to improve productivity. Nearly three fifths of service organisations worldwide have some form of automation assisting their customer service teams.
Service managers are starting to measure different metrics
As the saying goes, you should measure what matters most. The State of Service report reveals that service managers around the world are changing what they measure to match business priorities.
Customer satisfaction is still the most popular metric among service teams, but its popularity is dropping. In 2020, 87% of organisations tracked customer satisfaction, but the number decreases to 74% in 2022.
Customer retention, revenue, and average response time have also dropped. In their place, service-level agreement (SLA) performance, first-contact resolution, and cost per contact have become part of service organisations’ reporting.
The biggest increase was in the number of organisations measuring case deflection — a process often achieved through self-service portals or automated processes. Since 2018, the proportion of organisations measuring this metric has grown from 36% to 67%. This goes hand in hand with what we’ve heard from customers. Eighty-three percent of customers expect to interact with someone immediately when they contact a company, according to the State of the Connected Customer report.
Automation and efficiency go hand in hand
Companies can find it difficult to balance speed and quality in service. Since 2020, the number of service decision makers who say that speed and quality are equally important has dropped by 9%. At the same time, The number of decision makers who say speed is more important has more than doubled.
To increase speed without compromising quality, many companies are turning to automation for answers.
58% of businesses around the world are using automation processes/workflows. The research shows that organisations across the region are ahead of the curve in implementing automation. In Indonesia and Taiwan, 70% of service organisations are using automation processes, and in the Philippines that number is 71% — much higher than the global average.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) — a tool that often powers automation — is also popular across the region. Companies in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan use AI more than the global average. For instance, Fulbright University in Vietnam is using AI to make students’ lives easier. AI may even be able to flag potential problems for students before they occur.
Self-service digital options
Our research also shows that 57% of global customers prefer to engage with companies through digital channels, and 59% prefer self-service for simple questions. More than half of customers have used chatbots, and nearly two-thirds have used a self-service portal.
Insights from the State of Service reveal that the mix of channels that customers like to use is changing. In 2020, 96% of organisations around the world used the telephone for customer service interactions. Now, in 2022, that figure is down to 77%. For ASEAN organisations, that figure goes as low as 74% in Thailand.
The numbers for email have dropped in a similar way. Only 76% of global organisations use email for customer service, compared to 92% in 2020.
In their place, digital channels such as video support, and online communities have become more widely adopted.
The cost savings and efficiency benefits, as well as swift resolutions for customers, mean that automated service through bots is likely to become even more popular in the years to come.
Shared tools make customer service work easier
There is also a greater emphasis on agent experience. As the report states, 85% of decision makers around the world agree that there is a direct link between employee experience and customer experience.
There are several things an organisation can do to improve the experience of their workers. Service organisations around the world have offered flexible schedules, wellness benefits, and improved career progression opportunities, in an attempt to enhance employee experience.
Another way to improve the day-to-day experience of your service teams is to ensure that they have theright tools and resources they need to carry out their tasks efficiently. This becomes especially important when it comes to customer data, so that service teams can provide effective service without having to consult colleagues from other teams.
In the report, teams were asked whether they had access to the same customer relationship management (CRM) tool as other departments in their organisation. Sixty-two percent of organisations around the world reported that they did. Across the region the picture was slightly different. Some countries have fewer organisations sharing the same CRM technology than others:
Percentage of service professionals who say all departments use the same CRM software:
Indonesia: 68%
Malaysia: 58%
Philippines: 65%
Singapore: 49%
Taiwan: 70%
Thailand: 70%
Vietnam: 64%
Shared tools can lead to other benefits too — 95% of organisations that use more than oneCustomer 360 appreport that they see improvements in efficiency and productivity, and 96% say that they have met or exceeded their return on investment (ROI) targets.
Accelerating the Path To Net Zero — What You Can Do
The trail to net zero is a shared journey explains Boon Poh Mok, Director of Government Affairs Public Policy, Southeast Asia Greater China, LIKE.TG. When the public sector, private businesses, and people come together, they can accelerate sustainable outcomes for business and the planet.
Businesses in Asia Pacific are increasingly committing to net zero. By the end of 2021, 86% of companies across the region were already setting net zero targets or intended to do so over the next 12 months.
ASEAN countries in particular are forging ahead on the path to net zero. In March 2021, the Singapore government announced The Singapore Green Plan to advance the nation’s agenda on sustainable development. Committed action is also being taken by other countries in the region — Malaysia is implementing the Green Technology Master Plan 2017-2030 to create a low-carbon and resource efficient economy. Vietnam’s government has issued the country’s National Climate Change Strategy to 2050 to implement its COP26 commitments.
In 2022, LIKE.TG commissioned Access Partnership to prepare the Trail to Net Zero for Singapore report to investigate the sustainability efforts in the nation. The report also provides recommendations to accelerate the path to net zero. While it examines Singapore’s net zero journey, its recommendations are also useful to policymakers and business decision-makers across the ASEAN region. Here are some of the key findings and recommendations:
Sustainability requires a public-private-people approach
Climate change is a global challenge. Being a low-lying city-state, Singapore is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events and rising temperatures. The Singapore Green Plan charts ambitious targets over the next 10 years to enable the nation to achieve its net zero aspirations with committed actions.
Singapore’s climate initiatives focus on lowering emissions through efficient power generation and energy demand, and boosting green spaces. A successful trail to net zero for Singapore will need the public sector, private sector, and people to work together. The public sector has taken the lead by setting the climate policy for achieving net zero. It is also partnering with the private sector in developing and implementing cutting-edge climate technologies. It provides incentives and grants to promote startups and ecopreneurs who build innovative solutions that merge business with positive social impact. It is equally important for the people to take advantage of opportunities to upskill themselves on sustainability initiatives. This can help them appreciate the importance of committed climate action and align their decision making with larger sustainability goals.
The business opportunity in net zero
YouGov surveys commissioned by LIKE.TG found that Singapore businesses strongly support action on climate change. The government’s net zero commitments resonated well in the business community — with 81% of managers supporting Singapore setting net zero emissions target by 2050. When asked whether enough is being done to address climate change, 54% of managers believed the government should be doing more, while 66% believed businesses should do more.
Businesses also had a sound understanding of the potential for growth opportunities in the transition to net zero. Singapore managers were three times more likely to think that achieving a net zero economy by 2050 will result in more jobs than less jobs (39% compared to 13%). The Singapore Green Plan 2030 projects a green economy will create 55,000 new jobs in Singapore over the next 10 years, with at least 4,000 created to date.
Businesses are also more conscious of emissions across their value chain. Almost two-thirds (61%) of Singaporean managers are more likely to purchase products or services from a supplier business with a net zero target.
Technology has an important role to play
On the trail to net zero, it is critical to adopt technologies that help reduce emissions and increase energy efficiency. Technology can open up opportunities for business innovation and growth, while helping to switch to more sustainable solutions. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers many use cases to achieve sustainability outcomes. It is already being used in Singapore to monitor pollution levels and mitigate extreme rainfall events. Other potential uses include smarter decision making for decarbonisation and efficient allocation of renewable energy.
Adoption of cloud computing can also enable businesses to lower their environmental impact, while offering greater flexibility, cost efficiency, speed, and business continuity. A study by SP Global Market Intelligence has shown significant energy savings of 79% from moving business applications and IT workloads to the cloud.
Trail to Net Zero for Singapore reveals that a reduction of one million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions can be achieved in 2022 by migrating to the cloud. Emissions reductions can be further boosted if cloud operators begin sourcing 100% renewable energy for their operations.
Walking the talk on net zero
While many businesses today talk about sustainability, it is critical to take actions and track progress to build credibility with customers and stakeholders. One of the ways to do this is to have a third party audit of your sustainability initiatives and provide recommended actions to achieve net zero.
Public and private organisations can also adopt a shared digital platform to forecast and track emissions. This can provide a single source of truth to ensure better decision making across an organisation’s operations, including its supply chain.
Sustainability is one of LIKE.TG’s core values, and we continually put it into action. For over a decade now, LIKE.TG has been on a sustainability transformation journey. We are a net zero company, and have achieved net zero emissions across our value chain, and are sourcing 100% renewable energy for our operations. We have funded more than 40 million trees as part of our 100 million trees goal. Our commitment to sustainability transformation has helped inform our Climate Action Plan and forms the basis of the Net Zero Cloud platform to help businesses go carbon neutral faster.
Sustainability is a shared journey. We walk the talk and walk together with businesses on their trail to net zero.
Learn more about Singapore’s sustainability mission in Trail to Net Zero for Singapore
Go carbon-neutral faster with Net Zero Cloud.
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Infographic: 7 Ways to Drive Digitalisation With Low-Code Development
The growing need for rapid digital transformation and the shortage of skilled developers to deploy projects at pace is creating a new phenomenon — an industry-wide demand for cost-efficient low-code development platforms. Low-code platforms can help businesses meet their digital transformation goals and increase speed to market.
Companies not only need to address the urgency of digitising workflows but also increase the efficiency of their sales and operation teams. How? By equipping the average business user with the ability to create the apps needed to work better, without waiting on the IT department. Low-code platforms help you create customer-facing apps as well as internal ones for employees; these highly customisable apps with popular features deliver the ideal user experience.
As companies look to turn more of their employees into citizen developers, more IT leaders and businesses are leveraging the potential of low-code tools. According to Gartner, the use of low-code software development platforms is increasing at a rate of over 20% annually. By 2023, more than 50% of medium-sized to large businesses are expected to implement low-code development platforms.
So why is low-code touted as the future of software development?
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Time is money when it comes to developing apps. A dynamic low-code platform like LIKE.TG can speed up the app-development process, letting you save on cost, time, and effort. With the help of the LIKE.TG suite of low-code tools, users can create apps, monitor and manage changes easily and reimagine business processes with visual workflows and point-and-click tools.
This post originally appeared on the I.N.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Meet Chloe Chua: A Purpose Driven Change-Maker
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 Chloe Catherine Chua, CRM Data Insights, Outreach Partnerships at NVPC. Chloe has spearheaded the use of LIKE.TG with no prior IT experience, and is proving people with mental health challenges can contribute immense value to supportive organisations.
Chloe Catherine Chua is an inspirational change-maker. Professionally, she has spearheaded the use of LIKE.TG at Singapore’s National Volunteer Philanthropy Centre (NVPC) with no prior IT experience. Personally, she is using her journey with anxiety and depression to inspire change in how mental health is viewed in Singapore’s fast-paced professional world.
Chloe’s mission is to make peoples’ lives easier — both at work and in the mental health space. She joined NVPC from the logistics industry and began work with the nonprofit organisation in an administrative role. Despite having no prior IT experience, it wasn’t long before Chloe started thinking about how to use technology to make positive change.
“When I started at NVPC, we had LIKE.TG but it wasn’t being used well,” she says. “LIKE.TG is such a powerful tool, but if you don’t know how to use it, you’re not going to get the value it can deliver. When we started testing LIKE.TG after I came in, we saw how it could make our lives so much easier.”
Building a LIKE.TG ecosystem
Chloe took the development lead. She self-learned LIKE.TG via YouTube videos and articles on the LIKE.TG website. Then she began to build an organisation-wide LIKE.TG ecosystem, with teams that automated workflows and achieved significant efficiency improvements and productivity gains across departments.
From consolidating volunteer and donor data into a centralised single source of truth, to creating an interactive events calendar in Tableau, Chloe proved herself to be a one-person digital transformation change-maker.
The results she has achieved are impressive. NVPC now has a 360-degree view of stakeholder interactions and data-based insights into program performance. This has led to greater efficiency across teams and improved external communications. It has also relieved a lot of the burden from administration on NVPC employees. And migrating the events calendar to Tableau has improved event scheduling and resource allocation.
Making lives easier
These would be impressive achievements for any experienced IT head. But the fact Chloe has added this much value to the organisation without prior IT experience makes her contribution even more remarkable.
“I’m thankful that LIKE.TG doesn’t require heavy coding,” she says. “It helps me think a lot more in terms of process and what the different possibilities are, rather than having to focus on how to code it. Whatever ideas I have, LIKE.TG can definitely do it. It’s just a matter of knowing the LIKE.TG functions.
“I’m also grateful that NVPC trusted me enough to take over LIKE.TG and revamp the whole system with zero IT knowledge,” she says. “Once I understood what NVPC was trying to achieve, I could apply what I had learned about LIKE.TG and build up the automation step-by-step from there.
“I would like to make things easier for everyone, so when people tell me I’m making their lives so much easier, that’s a huge achievement for me.
Chloe’s experience with LIKE.TG has opened up her love of data analytics and systems design. Systems design has helped her think outside the box and approach problems from multiple angles. Data analytics empowers her to provide leadership teams with accurate and concise reporting on organisational performance.
“It excites me to see how I can challenge myself and come up with creative solutions to solve different issues. These skills have given me the focus and direction to further my career development,” she says.
Support is a two-way street
Chloe is clearly a rising star in the LIKE.TG community. She has the talent — and now experience — to continue to create positive organisational change. However, her immense potential has not always been recognised.
“I suffer from anxiety and depression, and my last employer actually let me go,” she says. “But NVPC understands that support is a two-way street. They offer counselling, and if I’m having a difficult period, I can say I need some time to myself and they are very supportive of that. It’s a wonderful thing when employers don’t question you, they trust you.”
NVPC’s trust in Chloe has certainly paid off for the organisation. But it’s a concept she says many employers still struggle with.
“There’s definitely a long way to go in Singapore,” she says. “There is a stigma that people with mental health challenges can’t work efficiently and can’t help the organisation — that they are just a burden. But we are definitely not.”
“It’s difficult to find the right company and the right people to support you, but it’s good to believe that you will find them. So don’t give up. It took me a long time to find an employer that supports me personally, but now, with the right support, I have finally found myself again. And I’m curious and optimistic about what the future holds.”
How Coffee Reignited the LIKE.TG Singapore Office Experience
When is a cup of coffee more than a cup of coffee? The Singapore Workplace Services team has been pleasantly surprised by the positive response they have received to the office coffee perk. Many Singapore employees have been greatly enjoying the reimagined coffee break experience as they come together to connect with their peers. Travis Lim, Senior Manager of Workplace Services, and his team decided to focus on transforming a very common — and historically mundane — office moment: a cup of coffee. We sat down with Travis to learn more.
What was the motivation for your team to create a moment of connection from the typical coffee experience?
We knew that a lot of employees start their day with a cup of coffee, so we started thinking about what that experience was like.Every time I go somewhere to get coffee, I don’t get a welcoming feeling. It’s transactional. I wanted to make this experience transformative: an experience that could completely change how the employee was feeling. I wanted them to love the experience so much that the coffee moment alone was good enough to make them come back the next day. Part of making that experience great is focusing on how it can help the employee connect to their peers.
The Singapore office’s coffee cart features latte art with familiar faces!
You didn’t just bring in a coffee cart, you took your team to a barista training course to learn about the brewing process and create a truly custom experience. Why was that important to you?
Everything we did to prepare for the coffee cart’s opening was to understand what would make it a memorable experience. The barista training course gave us the knowledge to collaborate closely with our coffee vendor: we adjusted the roast on the coffee beans for a better flavour and let our employees taste it and give us their feedback. We learned that our employees preferred plant-based milk, so we brought in three different options. When there is a holiday or an executive visitor, we add custom designs to the latte art.Not only is it a positive moment in someone’s day, it creates a natural moment of socialisation that people have been missing. We knew the employee could take time to chat with their colleagues while their drinks were brewing. The cart became a moment of community.
Jasmine Xu (L) and Bonnie Chin (R) creating specialty coffee drinks during the Lunar New Year event
What has been the employee response to the reimagined coffee experience?
We are always trying to get ahead of the experience that employees want so they are excited about what’s next. And it’s working! Employees have told us that the coffee cart is one of the best parts of their day. It’s even working on me; I never used to drink coffee, but now I can’t go the day without stopping by the cart. The baristas know I like cinnamon, so they always add some to my drink. It’s that customised experience — the feeling that we know who you are and we care about the kind of day you have — that we want to give to everyone.
Your team’s curated experiences have been very well-received. What’s the secret to getting them right?
Our strategy is to listen to what our employees want, collaborate closely with our partners, and experiment. Most of all, at every event, we want to turn something transactional into a transformative experience.This is also not something we achieve alone. We couldn’t do it without the support of our leadership, who fully trusts us to create an environment that is best for employees. The Singapore Culture Guides- employees who volunteer their time to support culture events- and Employee Engagement partners also work hard to deliver many exciting events with us. We are very fortunate to have such supportive partnerships working together to bring the LIKE.TG culture to life.
L-R: Jasmine Xu, Bonnie Chin, Travis Lim, Tammy Ang, and Brenda Rodrigues of the Singapore Workplace Services Team
LIKE.TG was named Singapore’s #1 Best Workplace in Technology 2022 (large category) as well as one of Singapore’s Best Workplaces. Both awards are credited to a high rating of employee trust and engagement. The Singapore Workplace Services team’s dedication to building trust and engagement is a testament to the LIKE.TG culture. We asked Travis’ colleagues about their experience:
What did it feel like when you realised your team had created such a well-received employee experience?
“Ecstatic — it was pure joy to see our employees so happy to see their colleagues in person! You could really see it in their smiles and body language. The catch-up moments everyone was having were really special in those first few weeks. Also, I felt relieved. [It was] a relief to see everyone happy back at their workstations and enjoying the space.” – Brenda Rodrigues, Supervisor, Workplace Services “Welcoming our colleagues back to work after lockdown was a huge transition…With more and more employees returning to office to connect and socialise, seeing their smiles and faces give us the reason to keep curating and improving employee experiences in office.” –Tammy Ang, Lead Coordinator, Workplace Services
Your team goes above and beyond to focus on the employee’s experiences at the office. Why is that?
“It is the culture that makes it different here. Employees are writing their own inspiring chapters and we [live] by our values daily. There is a sense of purpose in doing meaningful work and it is a safe environment where we can bring our authentic selves to work daily. [Because of this,] our team is never afraid to try and change things along the way. And of course, not forgetting about social connection, to listen and understand what the employees really want. Seeing employees’ smiles across their faces is worth going above and beyond!” – Jasmine Xu, Workplace Services Associate“Do it from love, not for love!’ – This is how we started together as one team and built our foundation from there. It goes beyond ticking a to-do list. It’s not just about fulfilling just a task, it’s the love of connecting our people together. Passion is the word and it keeps us burning. ” – Bonnie Chin, Office Service/Administration Manager
Volunteer Time Off Is the Perk Your Company Needs Now
Employees have made it loud and clear they want more than a paycheck from their jobs. Among the biggest contributors to a great employee experience, according to new LIKE.TG research, is a sense of purpose. Many businesses have responded by focusing more on purpose and impact on society. But there’s an often overlooked element of that new focus: paid volunteering, or volunteer time off programs.
From the Corporate Giving Study 2021 conducted by NVPC, 42.3% of the companies surveyed in Singapore include corporate giving in their business policies. Within this percentage, only 11% allocate paid volunteer time off (VTO) benefit, despite the fact that companies with a culture of volunteerism have better morale, retention, employee engagement, and brand perception.
Many companies offer employees some kind of volunteer opportunity, but it’s often a single day of volunteering or raising money for charities.
Make volunteer time off a core part of employee engagement
LIKE.TG was founded on the principle that businesses can have great social impact. The company offers employees an above-average VTO benefit of 56 hours, or 7 business days, each year. They can use that time to volunteer for one of the nonprofits LIKE.TG formally supports — the company has pledged millions of dollars to support education, workforce development, and climate justice initiatives — or one of their own choosing.
We’ve learned a lot over the years about how VTO impacts our workforce and the community. We’re happy to share our expertise and best practices here.
According to Jamie Olsen, senior director of Citizen Philanthropy at LIKE.TG, about 75% of the company’s 73,000-person global workforce participates in the VTO program, with about 25% using the whole 56-hour allotment.
“These are the types of programs that people want and that are attracting them to companies right now,” she said. “They better the community. They improve people’s happiness. They make them feel more engaged when they are sitting at their desk.”
The recent global research by Deloitte found that the younger generation workers are seeking balance and sustained change. Many are concerned about the state of the world and how companies can make work more purpose-driven.
Companies that create aspirational workplaces foster a culture of inclusion, purpose, listening, caring, and empathy.
How to establish your own VTO program
LIKE.TG has donated more than $530 million and 7.3 million hours since our founding. The company might be an outlier in the resources it devotes to VTO programs — Olsen’s team, for example, has 25 people dedicated to it — but there are steps that you can take to establish your own VTO initiatives. Here are some tips:
Self-service digital options
Build volunteer engagement programs that align with your strategic focus areas or what your business focuses on. While employees should be free to volunteer however they choose, try to steer them toward opportunities where you’re already making a financial commitment. Try to pair employees with organisations that support them.
Focus on important goals
Think about your specific goals rather than spending time or money on any problems. What change do you want to affect, and where can you have the biggest impact? Formalise your goals in writing, and make sure all employees are aware of them and how they can participate. Doing so will give everyone something to rally around.
Plan with scale in mind, but within the budget you have
Think several steps ahead, considering all the different factors that might come into play. For example, LIKE.TG used to award employees who hit certain VTO milestones with donations to their cause, with no cap. When that became unsustainable, we reworked the programs while still recognising the employee’s efforts.
Track activity
Use tools that help employees find opportunities that align with organisational initiatives. LIKE.TG built its own digital tool, Volunteerforce, that lets employees log their VTO hours, organise team volunteer activities, and search for opportunities by skill, project type, duration, and location.
“I think a lot of companies start managing this with Excel spreadsheets, or with someone in HR managing this off to the side, but that quickly becomes unscalable and unsustainable,” said Olsen. There are several companies that provide volunteer tracking apps.
Incentivise employees by creating impact milestones
At LIKE.TG, employees who hit at least 7 milestones — repeat volunteer engagements, donating skills, joining a board, organising a team event, etc. — are entered into a lottery for a grant to an eligible organisation of their choice. That’s in addition to standard company matches to eligible organisations.
Volunteer time off is the evolution of employee engagement
It’s easier to measure the impact of corporate giving for the recipients than it is to measure the impact of VTO on employee engagement and morale. How does LIKE.TG measure employee impact? Olsen’s team collects survey data to better understand how employees are inspired to connect with the community in meaningful and sustainable ways.
“We also look at participation in our programs, and how many people are hitting each of the impact milestones,” Olsen said.
She said 13,500 employees have hit at least seven impact milestones.
Over the last few years, much has been made about the importance of purpose-driven employment. Lately, quiet quitting, where workers collect a paycheck by doing the minimum and no more, has made headlines. But here’s the thing — is quiet quitting really about slacking off at work, or about employers giving employees the freedom to lead a more purposeful, fuller life outside their jobs?
In an age when businesses are expected to engage in social issues in bigger and more visible ways, the next step is giving employees the tools, support, and time they need to do just that.
Prioritise employee engagement to boost morale, productivity, and retention.
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This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
4 Steps To Building a Successful Partnership Strategy
You want to get your product or service into the hands of more customers. Other companies might want to get your product out there, too — if it helps generate revenue for themselves. And that can form the foundation of a successful channel partnership strategy.
As a channel partner or Cloud Reseller, you can increase your value to new and existing customers — and, in turn, grow your profits. We’ve seen this happen time and again over the last six years at LIKE.TG. And along the way, we’ve learned a number of important tips from successful partners, including how you can get your solutions to market faster.
A key word we hear when we talk to our current partners is “scale.” They want to go big. And their main question is: What is the key to scale our sales efforts and maximise revenue?
Let’s start thinking through the four steps to help you define your partnership strategy:
1. Understand where you win
Identify your best, high-growth products, market, and segments.
Start by gathering your facts, sales data, recent information about closed deals, and success stories. Where are you trending in regards to market segments and verticals? Which product combinations are selling the best in each region?
Action: From your wins, define what can complement your solution to your end customer. Talk to your customers and get feedback by asking the following questions:
What makes their decision making easier?
What helps the sales process go smoother?
What do they believe creates better alignment?
What makes your solution more attractive compared to your competition in the market?
2. Establish the business goals for your partnership strategy
Understanding where you win — what regions and verticals — will help you target areas that you want to invest in. Sharing this information will also make it easier for partners to recognise an opportunity where they can partner with you to get to market faster.
Questions to ask yourself:
Are you looking to co-market/co-sponsor events?
Are you looking at expanding into new markets and regions? New market segments and verticals?
Are you looking to work with other LIKE.TG partners who complement your technology?
Are you looking for other LIKE.TG partners who can support your implementations and provide professional services?
Are you looking to leverage existing networks and expand your coverage through your partner channel?
Look at your competitors’ partner programs, including the type of partners they target, the events they sponsor, and how they are incentivising and creating value.
Action: Answer the above questions, and identify the top two reasons you are looking to partner. Write down your business goals for the partnership strategy. Now, define the three benefits you can accomplish by developing partnerships in the ecosystem.
3. Develop measurable objectives
Here are some questions to answer in order to set revenue targets for your partner program:
What is your predicted partner-led revenue as a percentage of your total revenue?
If you have worked with partners to drive revenue in the past, what was the dollar amount your partners generated over the last two years?
Consider joint marketing efforts with your partners, and the amount your partners will contribute to that program. Below are some potential scenarios:
Is it more cost-effective to embed a partner solution instead of building it in house? If yes, have you evaluated potential partners? If no, perform a cost analysis to develop, maintain, and upgrade the solution.
If you are looking to get more leads and referrals through an extended network, is there a software company that has many of the same customers? Reach out to develop joint marketing plans. What about a partner who is already in your target vertical or market?
To build a better brand and create awareness, consider the partners that have done a great job in this area. Can you brainstorm together?
Partnerships are there to help you with all of the above, but prioritise your business goals, and have clear objectives so that you can pick the right partners. Then, put a partnership strategy together and drive toward success.
What you can do now
Getting started is half the challenge. Begin with these four activities on your journey.
Measure and know your business metrics and your customer profile
Define your goals and business needs
Determine the amount you are going to spend on your defined objectives
Determine the amount you are expecting your potential partner to drive
4. Set yourself up for success with LIKE.TG Partner Program
The LIKE.TG Partner Program enables our partners to build and grow successful businesses while delivering ongoing and meaningful customer success. The Program has been designed with a fair and transparent partnership model to create a thriving and connected ecosystem where it is easier for partners to collaborate and do business with LIKE.TG.
Under the program, partners are given access to premium tools and resources they can leverage to supercharge their sales and marketing strategy, and take their solutions to the next level.
Some resources you can look forward to:
Pardot Plus
Premier Success Plan
Accelerate Program
Platform Experts AppExchange
Performance Incentive Referral fees
Access to Marketing Development Fund and many other Partner Marketing assets/resources
Find out more about LIKE.TG Partner Program Overview here.
Learn how marketers can drive growth with innovation.
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This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Dreamforce 2022: Inspiration and Action To Get To Net Zero
With sustainability unveiled as a core value for LIKE.TG earlier this year, sustainable transformation was a key theme at Dreamforce 2022.
Packed with sessions featuring environmental experts and thought leaders, Dreamforce 2022 inspired the LIKE.TG community to take action for a more sustainable future. Attendees were empowered with practical tools and strategies to help them go net zero.
This was also the most sustainable Dreamforce ever, with many steps taken to reduce our carbon footprint:
Dreamforce was 100% beefless and porkless for the attendee lunch. This helped conserve millions of gallons of water.
The lunch program offered 100% compostable packaging with containers, napkins, and utensils that could be tossed in the green bin.
Once Dreamforce was over, attendees could drop their conference badges and lanyards in designated bins for recycling.
Instead of receiving backpacks and other giveaways, LIKE.TG is giving all attendees the opportunity to offset their travel-related emissions to Dreamforce – by supporting carbon offset projects and reducing greenhouse gases.Carbon projects at Dreamforce Net Zero Vista contributed to LIKE.TG’s commitment in growing 100,000,000 trees by 2030. 3,000 LIKE.TG employees also planted 5,000 native seedlings in partnership with not-for-profit organisations Literacy for Environmental Justice and Golden Gate Audubon Society.
Rather than providing packaged water, water stations were available throughout the campus for attendees to refill their own bottles.
Net Zero Treehouse located in the Net Zero Vista at Dreamforce.
Change-makers inspire sustainable transformation
Net Zero keynote with Dr Jane Goodall
World-renowned environmental advocate Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE spoke with Marc Benioff to kick off the Net Zero Summit at Dreamforce. Jane declared that it is ‘a new day for our environment’ and that it is critical for us to use innovative thinking to go net zero. She shared her own journey and experiences as a primatologist and anthropologist leading to her efforts in environmental leadership today.
“We are part of the natural world, and not separate from it,” Jane said. “But today, we feel separated from it.”
This feeling of separation has led many people to think they can have unlimited economic development on a planet with finite natural resources. According to Jane, business has an important role to play in climate action by being a platform for change and an essential source of innovation.
“Business must drive and support the ‘ecopreneurial’ thinking our planet so desperately needs,” shared Jane. “Through innovation, education, and mobilisation, we will continue to thrive together, as a planet, as a species, as people.”
During the conversation, Marc revealed that Jane influenced him to focus on forests, and was the inspiration for the 1t.org platform to grow, restore and conserve one trillion trees. Jane also shared that her dream of empowering young people to take climate action inspired her to establish the community action programme Roots Shoots.Today, the program’s participants include young people from kindergarten to university age in countries across the world. The participants in Roots Shoots are empowered to help people, animals and the environment. These projects enable them to make impactful change and inspire others to do so too.
Watch ‘A New Day for the Environment’ — Net Zero keynote here.
ASEAN Business Spotlight: PETRONAS
Energy and utilities companies have a unique role to play in the transition to a clean and equitable energy future.
With sustainability embedded in their business over the last two decades, PETRONAS has committed to achieving net zero by 2050. The company has embraced technology-driven innovation to help it become more agile and meet its sustainability goals. In partnership with LIKE.TG, it deployed PETRONAS360 to enable all partners, customers, and executives to access a single source of truth. This helped their teams to pivot, be agile, fail and recover quickly on their digital transformation journey.
Aadrin Azly, Chief Digital Officer, PETRONAS spoke about the company’s sustainability vision and its evolving partnership with LIKE.TG. According to Aadrin, PETRONAS began with a focus on nation-building and then international growth, but today it is increasingly focused on the transition to clean energy.
“The energy transition has to happen in a fair, equitable and measured manner — so we focus not only on delivering clean energy, but also to those who need it the most and in an affordable way,” said Aadrin.
“Sustainability solutions, like carbon tracking and methane tracking are of interest to us. We’re also working with LIKE.TG to meet our target of deploying 90% of our applications on the cloud.”
In ‘The Energy Utilities Future: Agile Energy Transition’ session, Azureen Azita Abdullah, Head of Downstream Digital Innovation, at PETRONAS, shared how the Malaysian energy provider is making the transition to net zero.
“Now we have a clear roadmap for energy transition, and we are escalating this whole ecosystem to our nation and hopefully catalysing it for the whole region,” said Azureen.
Sustainable Transformation is Everyone’s Job
While businesses have an important role to play in conserving the environment, they can also do this in a financially sustainable manner. In the very insightful discussion, ‘Sustainable to the Core‘,a global panel of thought leaders examined how organisations can embed sustainability into their business model.
According to Kathy Varol, Purpose Strategy Expert and Consultant for CSR ESG, businesses should realise they can’t have unlimited growth on a finite planet. Her advice to companies embarking on their sustainability journey was — “Identify a purpose for your company and use environmental, social, and governance as a framework to bring that purpose to life — holistically across the organisation with accountability, control and metrics.”
David Reynolds, CEO, Department for Trade and Investment, South Australia, shared how his state has pursued sustainability goals and facilitated the transition to renewable energy. This enabled the Department, a public sector organisation, to show private corporations that sustainability can be used for economic development and turned into a business advantage. Orlando Ferreira, CFO, IDB Invest shared his views on sustainability from a development banking perspective.
“Nine out of ten projects that fail do so not because of credit issues, but because ESG criteria were not put into place,” said Orlando. “Sustainability is not just the right thing to do, but the right thing for business itself.”
Paul Polman, Business Leader, former CEO of Unilever, and co-author of “Net Positive” concluded that sustainability is a story of hope.
“There are the right demand signals from the market today, especially from Gen Z and the millennials on sustainability. But we need to move faster, and everyone has a place and role to play.”
Watch ‘Sustainable to the Core’ here.
Climate action, here and now
To empower businesses to take climate action, LIKE.TG introduced the first-of-its-kind Net Zero Marketplace at Dreamforce. The platform makes carbon credit purchases simple and transparent, allowing any organisation to accelerate climate positive impact at scale. Attendees were able to offset their travel-related emissions to Dreamforce and learn more about the Net Zero Marketplace.
Net Zero Marketplace, built onCommerce Cloud, connects buyers andecopreneurs— environmentally-focused entrepreneurs who lead and drive climate action worldwide.
It is this type of environmental focus and commitment that is drivingBrowzwear, a 3D apparel design company, to reduce waste in the fashion industry. Supported byCustomer 360, Browzwear has scaled its operations to help more than 1000 fashion companies on their sustainability journey.
Dreamforce was a great opportunity for the LIKE.TG community to come together and be inspired by Trailblazers, thought leaders, environmental experts, and activists. It showed how each of us has a role to play in going net zero, and showcased tools and strategies to help us get there — together.
Watch all the Dreamforce episodes on Sustainabilityon-demand here.
Catch all the magic fromDreamforce 2022 on-demandon LIKE.TG+
3 Ways to Elevate Your Financial Services Customer Experience
The latest Future of Financial Services Report – a window into global customer preferences and behaviour – sheds light on what ASEAN customers today expect from financial service providers. Customer experiences of banking, insurance, and wealth management services are falling short of expectations. This is prompting customers to switch service providers. But for financial services institutions (FSIs) willing to make changes, these trends present an opportunity to inspire new loyalty, trust, and business growth.
LIKE.TG ASEAN’s Prakash Thomas believes that customer behaviour has significantly shifted in the region. In an era of economic uncertainty with the lingering effects of the pandemic, customers today prefer digital-first experiences in almost every aspect of daily life. As Regional Vice President of Financial Services Health, Thomas notes FSIs are having to rethink customer journeys, and make them digital-first to meet customer expectations.
“Financial services are making the shift to digital-first experiences,” said Thomas. “Yet customers aren’t satisfied and aren’t afraid to switch providers. Over one-third of customers across banking, insurance, and wealth management switched providers in the last 12 months — for an easier, better experience. Today, FSIs have an opportunity through digital transformation to anticipate customers’ needs just like Spotify and Tiktok anticipate what their users want next.”
As interest rates and costs of living rise, the report shows consumers are more willing than before to look for better alternatives that meet their needs. Global customer churn rates are substantial at 22% for banking, 33% for insurance, and 33% for wealth.
In Singapore, the churn is high especially in wealth management services with 46% of surveyed customers switching providers – 13% higher than the global churn rate.
This can be partially explained from the reasons for switching providers.
A common trend is the lack of trust ASEAN customers have in their providers. The biggest driver for switching providers was ‘hidden fees and fine print’ (40% in Singapore).
With customers expecting digital-first experiences even after pandemic-related social restrictions have eased, FSIs need to invest in technology to lift their digital capabilities. The report highlights three key trends in the future of financial services. To retain and delight customers in a post-pandemic economy, successful FSIs of the next decade will need to excel in the following areas.
1. Offer seamless digital services and customer journeys
As businesses shut and call centres were overwhelmed with customer calls during the pandemic, digital channels emerged as the preferred option to engage customers. This trend continues now for ASEAN customers, who are ready to change providers for a better digital experience. Customers highlighted ‘Easy to use digital interface and user experience (website, app, chat function)’ as another key reason for switching providers (39% in Singapore).
Andrew Taggart, Partner (Clients Markets Leader), PwC South East Asia Consulting, says FSIs are trying to make the customer experience seamless and easy.
“We have seen FSIs trying to move beyond creating good customer service through easy and efficient customer transactions,” said Taggart. “They are now trying to create more customer value by providing more contextualised and personalised insights, and advice at interactions across all channels, human and digital. This requires a shift away from the mindset that digital channels are only good for efficient transactions and that human interactions are better suited for handling enquiries, to an omnichannel customer journey that bridges the two.”
The report also reflects a consumer trend of switching to fintech platforms for their simplicity. When asked why they didn’t use a traditional provider, Singapore customers highlighted ‘easy and fast setup, verification, onboarding, and first time use of the app’ and ‘easy and intuitive user interface/user experience and navigation of the app’. Percentages for both were well above global averages.
Gary Teh, Managing Director (Group IT) at Great Eastern, a Singapore-based insurance provider, believes FSIs can implement service automation to deliver better customer experiences. But they should have a strategic approach to automation.
“We are guided by the value to the customer,” said Teh. “Ultimately, automation needs to enable customers to get service faster and more comprehensively in one click. If it doesn’t help the customer get quick service, then I’d say don’t do it.”
Great Eastern has successfully implemented many ‘one-click’ services – enabled by integrations with multiple platforms like digital IDs and instant payment transfer services. Its customers can fill in their application form with SingPass and pay via PayNow almost instantly. Products such as travel insurance, home content cover, and dengue cover can also be purchased at the point of need in one click, without having to go through an agent.
2. Make every interaction personal
From online searches to advertisements to Netflix choices, consumers are being delivered personalised experiences across industries like never before. Non-curated experiences are impacting customer satisfaction in a significant way. ‘Attentive and personalised customer service’ was the next highest driver for switching providers (31% in Singapore).
This is an area where traditional banks are still trying to improve their capabilities. Many are still using legacy systems with data silos across the business and no centralised source of truth. This makes it difficult to have a 360-degree customer view. When asked ‘does your provider anticipate your financial needs?’ only 13% of Singapore customers said they agree.
Delivering the relevant and personalised experiences that customers expect requires customer data to be readily accessible and easily managed. A cloud-based CRM like Customer 360 can provide a single, shared view of the customer journey across a service provider’s teams. It can enable teams to work together to deliver connected customer experiences and build strong relationships.
While data and digital capabilities are important, it is also equally important to deliver service with a human touch. Teh explains how Great Eastern relies on its network of agents to deliver personalised customer experiences.
“Nothing can beat personalised service with a human touch. If you had a butler, would you not call? So, our focus has been to empower our agents with the tools to deliver personalised service to customers. When we design our customer journey, we always have our agents in mind. Today, our agents can help our customers perform financial and non-financial transactions digitally. Customers don’t need to step out of the comfort of their home or office.”
3. Build credibility and trust with customers
A key theme of the global report is a continued lack of customer trust in financial providers. For the Singapore market this is particularly clear, with less than 18% agreeing with the statement ‘I trust that my provider is invested in my financial wellbeing.’
According to Taggart, customers are questioning service providers’ ability to use their data to provide proactive service and increase trust
“The customer experience of privacy today is clicking on long, never read, legalistic terms and conditions and then clicking through cookie acceptances,” said Taggart. “They are really left hoping service providers will do the right thing on data sharing, that the laws they don’t understand are sufficient to protect them, and providers have sufficient cyber defences to protect their data.
“I think more is required to educate customers and ultimately allow them to participate in the data sharing market, i.e. if FSIs share customer data with an organisation, they will get benefits and in turn pass on benefits to the customer, like discounts, points, gifts, or upgrades.”
Customers want providers to care more about their financial wellbeing and the insights from the report outline some key areas for improvement. To start, financial providers can regularly highlight how they protect and use customer data, remain compliant to industry regulations and make terms and conditions easily understandable.
This post originally appeared on the A.U.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Building Resilience in Financial Services – How LIKE.TG Can Help
The uncertainty businesses felt at the start of the pandemic has re-emerged with many anticipating a global slowdown. The Straits Times reports that almost three-quarters of the World Economic Forum’s Community of Chief Economists believe that a global recession is at least somewhat likely.
There are a number of factors driving this uncertainty and market volatility, including supply and demand shocks, intense measures to tame inflation, and a lack of funding for new initiatives. These impact the flow of capital and influence investment behaviours, particularly when it comes to technology.
As a result, financial services firms are adopting different methods to adapt to the changing landscape. These include platformification and digitalisation of the front office to manage operational costs while providing new digital services. Firms are also creating value and competitive advantage with new offerings such as sustainable finance.
In short, firms have both an opportunity and challenge to reimagine their business models and customer experience.
Forging new pathways to success in financial services
LIKE.TG Customer 360 can help firms navigate the challenges ahead and unlock new opportunities. LIKE.TG’s Financial Services Cloud provides the platform for financial services institutions to build trust. It unifies the customer experience across channels, geographies, and lines of business for both consumer and commercial businesses.
With purpose-built industry functionality and all the capabilities of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, financial services firms can increase employee productivity, accelerate time to value, and deepen customer trust with every interaction. More importantly, they can be there in the moment for their customers who rely on them and trust them with their financial wellbeing.
At the same time, MuleSoft, helps firms easily automate any process to drive efficiency and productivity. MuleSoft also connects multiple systems to streamline the customer experience.
Slack supports faster resolution of issues for higher levels of customer satisfaction. The powerful collaboration tool also enables seamless communication with partners and customers, leading to less friction, more innovation, and faster decision-making.
New business models are underpinned by embedded experiences and ecosystems seamlessly integrated into the journey of customers, employees, and partners. With LIKE.TG’s innovative solutions, financial services can drive cost savings and build better business resilience.
Building resilience and customer engagement with data
During the pandemic, data-driven organisations proved to be more confident and resilient. To navigate this next phase of uncertainty, it makes sense for firms to turn to their data.
Tableau empowers teams with real-time insights and analytics to make informed decisions. They can make more accurate predictions about where business is heading. They can also identify opportunities to fine-tune operations and increase productivity.
With LIKE.TG Genie, firms can integrate data from every step in the customer experience to create a real-time customer profile. This profile enables all teams — across sales, service, marketing, and more — to tailor the experiences they provide in real time.
According to our Future of Financial Services report, three out of customers’ top five pain points in their digital experiences tie back to poor personalisation. So for those wanting to grow and engage their customer base, it is more important than ever to provide experiences tailored to each individual’s needs.
Balancing corporate responsibility and profitability
The need to build more resilient business models and drive sustainable growth will be highlighted at the Singapore FinTech Festival this week. The festival will also examine how organisations balance corporate responsibility and profitability in order to achieve greater stakeholder engagement and satisfaction.
LIKE.TG is a passionate proponent of stakeholder capitalism and committed to doing well by all our stakeholders — our customers, employees, partners, communities, the planet, and society as a whole. And we believe that data and technology can support more resilient and inclusive business models that serve the needs of all stakeholders in the financial services industry.
Just look at Bank Mandiri, one of the leading financial institutions in Indonesia. At the height of the pandemic, when many of its customers faced cash flow problems, Bank Mandiri leveraged its data to increase flexibility in its operations and assess customers’ suitability for a new loan restructuring program. Customers could still carry out their financial transactions and receive support with their financial and loan repayment needs.
Investing in sustainable growth
In the current climate, many firms may be feeling pressure to reduce their technology spend. However, investments in technologies like automation software can help drive efficiency and sustainable growth.
Additionally, Software-as-a-Service-based solutions that LIKE.TG provides reduce the upfront costs of new technology investments. Firms can pay only for what they need or, in other words, pay as they grow.
Visit us in person at the Singapore FinTech Festival to learn more about how LIKE.TG can help you build business resilience and customer engagement. Find us at booth #2H29 in Hall 2 at Singapore Expo from 2 – 4 November 2022.
How Customer Centricity Unlocks Profitable Growth and Success for SMEs
What is customer centricity? How can growing startups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) prioritise customer centricity to fuel growth and drive success? Customer centricity is about providing personalised, connected customer experiences across all channels — before, during, and after every transaction. Customer-centric businesses deliver more empathetic experiences to win over customers and build more highly valued customer relationships that return real business value.
Having a customer-centric mindset is more important than ever in a digital-first world. Whether you are a digital-native organisation or a traditional structured company, putting the customer at the centre of everything you do is critical to a successful digital transformation.
The problem is that many SMEs try to solve one problem at a time and lose focus on the big picture. That tends to create a disconnected ecosystem of siloed platforms, which can result in disjointed customer journeys and cause a customer success gap.
Prioritising customer centricity is one of the key factors to SMEs’ success and growth. Focusing on putting your customers at the centre of everything you do as your big-picture goal will help to close the customer success gap, support your customer journeys, attract investor interest, and scale your business. Here’s how.
1. Close the customer success gap with a single source of truth
Customers’ expectations and behaviours have shifted as we continue our transition to a digital-first world. According to LIKE.TG’s latest State of the Connected Customer report, 73% of customers now expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
That means customers no longer want to be categorised. Customers want personalised communication on any — and all — channels they choose. A few years ago, we started with the concept of 1:many. It then moved to a 1:1 model, thanks to the evolution of the Marketing solutions. Now, it has evolved into what we call the 1:U, where customers want the brands they love to know them on a personal level.
To close the customer success gap, you must put the customer at the centre of everything you do. That requires the right structure and technology to unify your data and create a single source of truth.
2. Choose technology that supports your customer journeys
To prioritise customer centricity, the technologies you choose should support your customer journeys. The right technology can help achieve this in three key ways.
First, it drives automations to add efficiency and consistency across your customer journey ecosystem. Second, it creates a single source of truth with customer data accessible to everyone, from anywhere. Third, it enables you to make data-backed decisions, and provides the agility you need to react to situations quickly.
Take Zenyum, for example. The Singapore-based smile cosmetics company deployed Sales Cloud to allow their team to analyse data by country within the markets efficiently. At the same time, Service Cloudand Experience Cloud help them create a sophisticated personalisation pipeline that delivers deep data insights, including a 360-view of each customer interaction. It is also used to connect different teams on a single platform, increasing efficiency, and reducing turnaround times by 40-50%. As a result, Zenyum has achieved 8x improvement in lead activation rate.
3. Attract investors and get funding for your business
How do you secure funding for your growing business? Securing business funding can be a difficult challenge to overcome. Investors, venture capitalists, incubators, and accelerators take customer success seriously when assigning value to your business. In a recent discussion with James Watson, Director of Investments at Catcha Group, we talked about what SMEs need to do to attract investor interest.
“We always look for companies that have relatively low cost to acquire customers, and have a platform that can retain them successfully with minimal churn,” he said. “You need to continue to show growth in obtaining new customers and make sure they are retained successfully without spending too much to retain them. Being able to innovate quickly, pivot your business, and directly serve your consumers is the key differentiator we look for in companies.”
Customer-centric companies are able to achieve this by leveraging data to understand customer behaviour and make insightful decisions to best serve their customers.
4. Scale your business with a digital-first mindset
At LIKE.TG, we define scalability as increasing revenue without substantially increasing resources. Achieving that is about using a digital-first mindset to create better efficiency and ensure that any additional resources are reflected in your return on investment (ROI).
This digital-first mindset has to be fused into your company culture. You need to identify the prime areas for automation, hire the right people ahead of the curve, and don’t become over-dependent on one person or isolated knowledge. Building your business with scalability in mind and taking a customer-centric mindset are the keys to growth and success.
Vietnam-based test automation platform provider, Katalon, is putting this concept into practice. The company has doubled in size in less than 12 months, and credits LIKE.TG as a catalyst for their growth.
To scale into the enterprise segment, the company uses automation through Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Platform and Inbox to enable the customer success team to touch every customer account while maximising efficiency and cost effectiveness. These solutions have reduced manual processes by 70%, improved conversion rate, and increased accurate forecasts by 50%.
The company is also using LIKE.TG to streamline the entire sales funnel and divide tasks between sales and customer success teams, while maintaining a seamless experience across the entire customer journey.
LIKE.TG enables Katalon to hire in any country and optimise serving their customers globally, while keeping a culture of accountability through their remote sales, service and finance teams. This capability has contributed to a four-fold increase in revenue team growth.
5. Innovate and grow your business with a customer-centric vision
This is more evidence why the SME’s roadmap for sustainable growth should be centred around a 360 customer-centric vision that puts the customer at the core of the experience.
Building your business with scalability and customer centricity in mind is critical to growth and success. Learn how to create a winning strategy that can help you stay competitive and innovative in this fast-changing environment. Take your business to the next level and be the game changer for your business.
Watch our customer centricity video now to learn how to unlock profitable growth and success for your business.
No One Understands Your Charts — Here’s How To Change That
Charts are the language of business, used every day at all levels to convey information. But too often, they consist of incomprehensible pies, bars, gauges, dots, and lines, leaving the reader no more informed about the topic at hand. The good news is it’s almost certainly not your fault — it’s the charts themselves.
I’ve been helping people build better charts for 15 years, through my book, The Big Book of Dashboards, on Chart Chat (a video series about the good and bad of data visualisation), and at conferences around the world. I’m a senior data evangelist at LIKE.TG’s analytics platform Tableau, and here’s what I know: data visualisation is a language as expressive as the written word, a language that needs to be understood by all but often is not.
I’m endlessly fascinated by the power of data to persuade or inform. Seemingly trivial choices such as colour or orientation can completely transform a chart’s message. Check out this two-minute video for a perfect example of how a simple bar chart can be manipulated to tell two completely different stories.
In this post, I’ll share my top tips that will help you improve any chart. Each one represents a core aspect of data literacy skills. This list could also form a checklist you can use when creating charts to ensure you’ve made something that will work for your audience and help you communicate your message more efficiently. I’ll show the tips by making incremental changes to a typical chart you might find on any dashboard. Below is our starting point, an everyday pie chart:
Tip #1 – Avoid the pies!
Pie charts are everywhere. Humans love circles, but pie charts are rarely useful. Consider our example above. Who has the biggest sales? It’s hard to answer the question. Let’s apply our first incremental improvement and switch to a bar chart:
It’s not only easier when the data is shown in bars, your brain efficiently processes the bar chart on the right before you even consciously think about the data.
How can that be? Data visualisation takes advantage of “preattentive attributes.” These are environmental signals that we process subconsciously, and they’re super-useful. Length, colour, size, and angle are all examples of preattentive attributes. However, we process some more efficiently than others. Our brain is terrible at efficiently comparing sizes of slices in pies, but wonderfully efficient at perceiving even the smallest differences in lengths.
A chart should deliver its message in the most accurate way possible. Choosing the right preattentive attribute is a critical skill. Don’t just click the button that makes the most “attractive” chart. You should always think about whether the chart actually conveys the message you want it to.
Tip #2 – Avoid distractions (aka, “don’t make me tilt my head!”)
Your goal when making charts is to reduce the cognitive load on the audience as much as possible. How many times have you seen a chart with the labels rotated vertically? I see it all the time, most often on bar charts. Why not simply rotate the chart so the bar is horizontal?
Making these incremental changes helps people get to the insight more quickly because they can focus on data, not formatting. Other distractions that often clutter charts are excessive gridlines, intrusive axes or borders, or the use of three dimensional charts.
Tip #3 – Use colour with intent
Avoid the temptation to use too many colours in your visualisations. In all analytics software, colours are just a click away, and it’s easy to feel productive by sprinkling some into your charts.
Take a step back. Is the purpose of your analytics to make pretty rainbows, or to share insights?
Some of the most powerful and effective charts use only one colour. In the below example, the multi colours used on the left serve no purpose. Readers might be confused as to what the different colours even signify. The example on the right is more effective in highlighting the intent, which is identifying the top two sellers.
Tip #4 – Choose a good title
After choosing an appropriate chart, orienting it correctly, and using colour to highlight, you need to stop and think: what is this chart actually showing? What conclusion do I want people to draw from this chart?
The first thing people look at on your chart, and the most likely thing they’ll remember, is the title. It’s the one chance you get to tell them what they’re going to see and suggest the insight you want them to take away. A good title should describe the insight the chart shows — this could be in the form of a short phrase or question. Getting in the habit of making good titles also forces you to be sure you know why you are making the chart in the first place.
In this example, I’ve created an effective 2-level title on the right. This allows a clear intro (“Who are our top 2 sellers?”) with a sub-heading for added context.
Tip #5 – Show the right number
My final tip is possibly the one you should consider first. Are you even showing the correct number to your audience? So far, we’ve been looking at sales by Account Executive. It looks like Christine and Andrea are our leaders. However, sales success is measured against a quota, not the actual sales value themselves. Have we been charting the wrong number all this time? Let’s take a look at the data:
We can see Christine and Andrea ranking top, but look across to the target and percent of target values: they’re behind their quota! Perhaps, then, we’ve been visualising the wrong value all along. Let’s take a look at the account execs ranked by percent of target. It turns out that Dan, Allie, and Wanda are the superstars who are above quota. Dan’s way ahead, even though his actual sales value is the lowest in the team.
These tips will help improve your charts, but they are just the starting point. You can accelerate your learning by joining thousands of other data-inspired people in our Tableau Community.
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This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
*Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
How PETRONAS Wows Its Customers With Digital Transformation
How do you turn a staple purchase like petrol into a positive customer experience? That’s one of many challenges PETRONAS has overcome while shifting from a product-centric business to one that’s customer focused.
Established in Malaysia in 1974, the progressive energy and solutions provider is now one of the world’s most recognised brands. It has a presence in over 100 countries and a global workforce totalling more than 46,000 employees.
Aadrin Azly, Chief Digital Officer at PETRONAS, joined us at Dreamforce to share how the business is transforming for the future with LIKE.TG Customer 360. Here are highlights from Aadrin’s session, including best practices on how to move from vision to value.
Kick-start your transformation journey with early wins
PETRONAS’s journey with LIKE.TG began with a project to improve the experience of retail customers. The project included the implementation of Service Cloud to manage the resolution of equipment failures within petrol stations.
With support from LIKE.TG Professional Services, PETRONAS completed the project 100% on time and on budget. This was in spite of the project kicking off just weeks before the pandemic and everyone pivoting to work virtually.
“LIKE.TG sent in their A team and stuck by our side. They were there with us for every call and every stand-up and we navigated every challenge together,” said Aadrin. “We are now reaping the benefits, including reduced downtimes and an increase in resolutions from 76% to 94%.”
Put customers at the centre of your business
The success of the retail project led PETRONAS to think about what to do next. PETRONAS’s customer interactions inside petrol stations represent one of many touch points it has with its wider customer base. In fact, the diversity of its portfolio means that some business customers interact with many people and departments.
“I once visited a customer who told me that they couldn’t see me until 4pm because they were too busy. It turns out they were busy with PETRONAS. They had a total of four meetings with us that day which is something that should not have happened,” said Aadrin.
PETRONAS realised it needed to stop looking at the business from a supplier point of view and start seeing things from a customer point of view. This gave rise to the PETRONAS360 vision which puts the customer at the centre of the business.
PETRONAS360 brings together customers, partners and employees across the enterprise to provide a single source of truth to deliver innovative and sustainable solutions and grow new markets that create exponential value at scale.
Aadrin shared the process PETRONAS and LIKE.TG went through to co-create the vision for its digital transformation and secure internal alignment.
“Digital transformation is not easy. You need a seat at the table or sponsorship from management to drive it through. At the same time, you need people on the ground who will feel the program hits their pain points. So we spent the first part of our journey speaking with stakeholders and staff to co-create our vision,” said Aadrin.
Stay on track with clear and measurable goals
PETRONAS wanted to avoid a never-ending transformation. So once the business had clarity on its vision, it set very granular and measurable KPIs. These included a US$43M increase in revenue over five years, a 15% reduction in customer churn, and a 33% uplift in productivity.
Aadrin shared that the clear KPIs acted as a North Star for PETRONAS’s digital transformation, helping everyone to stay focused on what they needed to achieve.
“Breaking things into bite-sized pieces meant we could quickly pivot when things went wrong and celebrate when things went right. And celebrating those small wins created unstoppable momentum to drive our transformation.”
Take a data-driven approach
PETRONAS has applied a data-driven approach to its entire transformation and tracked results every step of the way. This has involved breaking KPIs down into more tangible and measurable goals.
“You sometimes see big value goals like $16B or 42x and they are impossible to track. I think it’s more important to identify the enablers behind the value you want to create and track those religiously,” said Aadrin.
The focus on measurement is reflective of PETRONAS’s wider commitment to becoming a more data-driven organisation. Work is beginning with MuleSoft to help PETRONAS unlock data from various on-premise and cloud-based systems, including LIKE.TG. The data will be orchestrated into functional data hubs with APIs to enable easy reuse and consumption. Data will also be protected from vulnerabilities with standard security policies and governance across all APIs.
On top of this, PETRONAS has started to train teams on no-code and low-code data visualisation with the goal of democratising data science.
Drive digital adoption with human-centred design
PETRONAS’s digital transformation is ongoing. Since launching Service Cloud, the business has deployed a dealer portal on Experience Cloud and adopted Sales Cloud for management of accounts and opportunities. It is also set to go live with a number of other LIKE.TG solutions, including Energy Utilities Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, Tableau, and Marketing Cloud.
Asked how PETRONAS drives adoption of new technologies across its diverse range of businesses, Aadrin highlighted the importance of human-centred design.
“You need to start by identifying who will use the solution and understanding their pain points. And you can’t just ask them about their pain points as they will provide a list of a thousand things and the solution will become too expensive. So observe and understand their pain points because the moment you understand those pain points, driving adoption becomes easy.”
PETRONAS service transformation with LIKE.TG has heightened customer experience and productivity.Chief Digital Officer Aadrin Azly demonstrates how PETRONAS is executing on its vision to deliver in this video. WATCH NOW Learn more about how LIKE.TG Professional Services helps customers move from vision to value and deliver proven ROI. Download “The Total Economic Impact™ Of LIKE.TG Professional Services”, a 2022 Forrester Consulting study commissioned by LIKE.TG.
Your First-Party Data Strategy Matters — Especially During Tough Times
As budgets tighten, marketing departments may shift their focus toward efficiency. Here’s how a smart customer data-led strategy can hit both targets.
When businesses see signs of economic uncertainty, the natural reaction is to cut costs and try to do more with less. However, there’s one area where your marketing team shouldn’t look to trim: harnessing the first-party data you collect directly from customers.
This information gained through call center interactions, mobile app behaviour, and loyalty programs, among others, can be very helpful during lean times.
Let’s take a look at three areas where these data assets offer a boost:
1. You can reduce cost per acquisition (CPA) economic uncertainty
With an unpredictable economic future, limiting the CPA for new customers only becomes more important. Focusing on marketing campaigns fuelled by that first-party data can reduce your CPA — improving cost efficiency and growth.
CPA is calculated by dividing the cost of your marketing campaign by the number of customers (or conversion events) that you can attribute to that spending. But for many organisations, optimising this formula has felt like a never-ending quest.
So what does first-party data have to do with reducing a company’s overall CPA? A lot. When you have a better understanding of your current customers — with data, you’ll know how to speak to future ones. This first-party data comes directly from your customers, going right into channels you own.
Tapping into this data means understanding which channels, campaigns, and offers work for your customer base as a whole and across key segments.
And in the (almost) post-cookie age of limited online tracking, these insights are even more valuable. Anyone who has unlocked the power of lookalike audiences within advertising platforms can attest to the value of first-party data.
The improved performance on your advertising campaigns can be dramatic. But even a small increase in the number of customers acquired per dollar spent is a powerful way to drive efficiency during economic uncertainty.
2. You can increase customer lifetime value
Many times the quickest path to greater overall growth and efficiency is deepening the relationship with your current customers. Facing slowing economic growth, CFOs and investors focus on maintaining current levels of profit or operating margin. This means keeping costs in line with slower revenue growth.
But an effective way to maintain cost discipline without sacrificing growth is enticing your current customers to spend more.
The additional revenue generated from increasing the lifetime value and average order value of your current customers costs less than acquiring new customers. That’s because you’ve already paid to acquire these customers.
Look for ways to offer greater value to your current customers, such as targeted messages and interactive email forms to provide real-time feedback. Engaging customers you already have a relationship with — and using personalisation to give them exactly what they want — is the ultimate efficiency. And you’ll likely get more business from them in the short and long term.
3. You have an always-on focus group
There’s one more important benefit of focusing on first-party customer data assets: the ability to test and learn from your customers efficiently.
The marketing examples around things like message testing and discount offers might be obvious, but there’s also a giant opportunity for the entire organisation to learn and improve.
For example, imagine allowing your product team to A/B test versions of a new concept with your customers before a launch. They could gain valuable feedback on things like pricing, packaging, and design. And this can also give your marketing team a better view into how campaigns might perform.
Just because you’re facing economic uncertainty doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice growth for efficiency. If your organisation pushes for cuts because the economy starts to slow, know that investments in customer data capabilities are not at odds with discipline and efficiency. They are indeed a big part of it.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Automate Your Customer Data and Help Your Commerce Business Grow
The latest State of Commerce report shows that high-performing commerce organisations around the world are seven times more confident in their preparedness to use data to personalise the commerce experience.
They’re also 1.6x more likely to rate themselves as effective at automating processes. Customers who have used LIKE.TG Customer 360 have seen automation of business processes speed up by 27%.
When you have your customer data on one trusted platform, with automated processes handling your day-to-day operations, you can focus on your customer and grow your business.
Automation is critical in the drive for efficiency
Automation allows you to create a more efficient and productive workforce.
In a recent LIKE.TG Success Metrics study, companies across industries and regions reported seeing, on average, a 26% increase in employee productivity* using LIKE.TG automation, plus an estimated 25% savings on IT costs*.
Other benefits of automation are described in the State of Service report — top of the list is time saving, with 98% of those surveyed describing it as a benefit, and 50% saying that it’s a major benefit to their business.
The report also includes benefits such as connection with other departments, reduction of errors, and time for new projects. All of these factors contribute to a more productive organisation — and that’s not all. Forty-seven percent of service professionals also said that automation helped them focus on their customers.
Lower your ordering costs
To meet new challenges and keep customer satisfaction at the forefront, businesses need to streamline operations to reduce costs, improve customer experience, and earn loyalty. That means streamlining order management and automating repetitive and tedious processes.
Order management system in Commerce Cloud Genie enables businesses to grow revenue with intelligent insights and build trusted relationships with real-time data. We’ve seen companies achieve a reduction of 26% in ordering costs* and boost productivity with Einstein AI within the Commerce Cloud. With commerce automation, 89% of LIKE.TG customers achieve positive ROI in only nine months.*
Customers demand personalised digital experiences
Your customers are more online than ever. As reported in our State of the Connected Customer report, customers worldwide expect more than 60% of their interactions with companies to be online this year.
The report also highlights three important considerations:
88% of consumers say that the experience a company provides is just as important as the product or service it provides
73% of customers also say that they expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations
56% of customers still think that companies treat them as a number, rather than an individual.
The State of Commerce report told us that, after revenue growth and expanded customer base, the greatest concern for most industries is deepening customer relationships.
Leaders in the world of commerce are nearly 1.7x more likely to rate themselves as ‘effective’ when it comes to personalised experiences. They’re also 1.5x more likely to be effective when it comes to understanding customer behaviour.
For your business to thrive, you need to create smoother journeys with highly personalised and intelligent shopping moments that make your customers feel truly understood. These insights present an opportunity for any company to offer a personalised digital service to wow your customers with great experiences and drive business growth. And this can be done with a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ needs – which comes from a complete set of customer data.
New channels = more opportunities
One of the keys to digital success is expanding into new channels. As shown in the State of Commerce report, 69% of digital commerce leaders are already investing in new digital channels. These new channels include mobile apps, online marketplaces, and social media platforms like TikTok.
Fifty-seven percent of customers prefer to engage with companies through digital channels — that number rises to 65% for younger generations. Online comes out on top even when it comes to the final purchase — 63% of millennials and 58% of Gen Z prefer buying online over going into a store.
The time to start automating is now
The stakes for not automating the way you handle data are high — even among leaders. In fact, leaders who report that they aren’t effective at using their data are 37% more likely to report not being prepared to handle rising inflation.
More than 60% of customers are already telling us that the majority of their interactions with companies will be online in the coming years. From LIKE.TG Cyber Week 2022 shopping insights, global online sales and digital traffic broke records. The numbers hit an all-time high of USD$281 billion, up 2% compared to 2021, and USD$68 billion, up 9% compared to 2021. If the trend continues, that number will only get higher.
Prepare your automation strategy now, and you’ll be ready to grow in the future. The second edition of the State of Commerce contains analysis of buying data from over 1 billion customers worldwide. Download the report today to find out how you can handle your data to grow your commerce business more efficiently.
*Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across Singapore, the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
