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4 Ways Thai SMEs Are Leading the Way in Digital Transformation
Over the last few years, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Thailand have embraced technology faster than many other countries, according to LIKE.TG’s latest research.
Thai SMEs faced a range of challenges related to customer expectations, and they adapted quickly. The determination they have shown in the face of adversity has been admirable. The rapid adoption of technology is a testament to the perseverance and creativity of SMEs and the communities in which they operate.
In the same research, Thai SMEs identified the following as the top three challenges they experienced in the past year:
Keeping up with demand
Providing a quality product
Personalising customer engagement
This year’s Small and Medium Business Trends Report provides an insightful benchmark for what’s changed and what we can expect from SMEs if they move ahead. Digital transformation has peaked in Thailand, as the research showed that 100% of Thai SMEs have shifted their operations online and most believe that the shifts they’ve made will benefit their business in the long run. We can expect to see more contactless services in Thailand as up to 99% of Thai SMEs plan to offer contactless services permanently.
Based on the data presented in the Small and Medium Business Trends Report, we have pulled out four key themes important to Thai SMEs:
Embracing the digital-first future
Prioritising customer loyalty
Meeting local employee needs
Adopting technology
Embracing the digital-first future
The circumstances of the last few years forced many businesses to reappraise the way they worked, and the ways they engaged with their customers.
Despite some new restrictions on in-person interactions, communities and customers still want to support SMEs. In response, SME leaders are prioritising moving their businesses online, so they can connect with customers from the comfort of their homes.
One hundred percent of Thai SMEs have shifted their operations online to meet customer needs. Alongside this, 96% of SMEs in Thailand have said that changes they’ve made to their operations over the last two years will have a long-term benefit to their business.
This contrasts with the same data for the rest of the world. Internationally, the number of SMEs who have moved their operations online is a little lower. Ninety-five percent report that they have moved operations onto the Internet. Interestingly, only 75% of SME owners across the world think that the changes they’ve made will benefit their business in the years to come.
Prioritising customer loyalty
As Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh, Executive Vice President, Global Customer Success and Strategy, recently said, “customer loyalty is the new currency.”
Around the world, an average of 29% of SMEs said that they are prioritising the development of ongoing relationships rather than one-time transactions. In Thailand, this number is much higher: 51%.
After more than a year of adjusting to customer demand and bringing innovations to the fore, however, SMEs still face significant hurdles. These include personalising customer engagements, responding quickly to inquiries, engaging customers on their preferred channels, and providing a connected experience. This has proven that using the right technology will be the business differentiator for sustainability, success, and growth in this fast-changing environment.
Thai SMEs have adopted new practices to meet changing customer expectations. Our research has shown that 79% have offered more flexibility for customers and 75% are more careful about their communications. In addition, 68% have expanded the number of ways customers can reach them.
Local conditions change employee expectations
While customer expectations are changing, employee expectations are also evolving.
In Thailand, we saw that local conditions made a big difference in what employees were most concerned about. Among Thai workers, widespread vaccination against COVID-19 was the number one employee expectation. This was followed by mask usage and social distancing in the workplace.
In the rest of the world, access to flexible schedules was at the top of the list. Mask usage was also important to these employees, followed by the daily sanitation of their workspace and materials.
Whilst it can be interesting to look at the differences between SMEs around the world, it can also be illuminating to look at the similarities. SMEs everywhere have identified that employee trust and engagement is important, and the ways they earn that trust seem to be universal. Collaboration, responding to personal needs, and asking for employee feedback all feature high on the list of priorities, both in Thailand and around the world.
Adoption of technology
When we look at the adoption of CRM systems, there’s a significant difference. More than 80% of Thai SMEs have implemented a CRM system to help them maintain customer relationships and win deals. That’s compared to an average of only 56% globally.
Thai businesses have stepped up their adoption of technology systems for specific roles, too:
Seventy-one percent of Thai SMEs have accelerated tech investments in customer service, compared to just 41% of global SMEs.
When it comes to both sales and marketing, 68% of Thai SMEs have adopted technology solutions, whereas only 40% of global SMEs have done the same.
For IT operations, 77% of SMEs in Thailand have adopted new tech solutions, compared to 39% of SMEs globally.
Finally, 52% of Thai SMEs have implemented human resources solutions, against only 25% of SMEs around the world.
The majority of SME leaders (62%) cite technology as the reason that they have been able to stay afloat over the last few years. We have seen SMEs across the board adopting technology to solve a range of problems, such as marketing automation or collaboration.
The full Small and Medium Business Trends Report contains even more insight from around the world to help you succeed in 2022. Download a translated version in Thai here.
3 Women in Tech Share How They #BreakTheBias & Promote Gender Equality
Addressing the challenge of gender bias in the workplace can feel overwhelming, and it’s hard to know where to begin. Gender bias is a complex issue, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. However, even small changes can have a massive impact.
To better understand how individuals at any level of an organisation can create and influence change, we asked three professionals from beauty retailer LUXASIA for insights on how to #BreakTheBias this International Women’s Day. Avis Easteal, Tatyana Gonzaga, and Kimly Scott, who all work in different roles and regions for LUXASIA, share how they support gender equality at work and at home. Read on to learn their thoughts on the role that individuals and businesses can play in promoting gender equity.
Gender equity is good for business
Equality makes good business sense. High-performing teams that welcome diverse opinions create more innovative solutions, with more inclusive and effective workplaces. In fact, diverse groups perform better by developing ideas from myriad perspectives, solving problems with smarter outcomes.
That’s why addressing the topic of gender bias is important to ensure a fair and more cohesive workplace. Gender bias can show up in teams in the way employees are treated differently, from different pay rates to the creation of exclusive teams. Recognising and addressing this topic takes courage and action. Even small changes made at the individual level — and at every level of an organisation — can have a significant impact.
Avis Easteal: Leading with equity
Avis Easteal leads the marketing division as Regional Head of Consumer. As part of the leadership team in Singapore, Avis has pioneered many new digital innovations at LUXASIA.
During my career, the gender equality conversations have changed, and companies are adjusting their ways of working. At LUXASIA, 60% of our leadership team is female, and we have a majority of female employees. It is refreshing to be encouraged as a female leader to expand the team’s ways of working.
How to recognise gender bias
Firstly, if your meetings have only a few non-male genders and they are not contributing, you have a problem.
Within my team, the first thing I look at is parity in pay across my team. This gives a good indicator of how the organisation takes practical action.
Also, men and women promote their achievements differently. A male colleague once said that men do 80% of the job and loudly celebrate their achievement while many women are still striving to move from 97–98%. Leaders should look at results rather than just listen to the rhetoric.
We can all be part of the solution as well as the problem. How we act emboldens or diminishes the people who work with us. When all genders have a voice and equal pay, your organisation will prosper faster. Diversity of views helps you make smarter decisions.
Leaders are role models, so set your intention for equality and follow up by being bold. For example, state that gender bias is not accepted in this organisation. Then, get your HR teams to support you with the right policies, and the ability to resolve issues and live the behaviours.
Tatyana Gonzaga: Young professionals bring fresh perspectives
Tatyana Gonzaga is the Regional Digital Marketing Coordinator and runs complex customer journeys daily. Tatyana takes every opportunity to upskill with Trailhead.
In 2021, the Philippines was ranked number one in Asia for closing the gender gap. I saw how this benefitted my undergraduate studies. Even though my cohort was predominantly male, the women weren’t at any disadvantage when it came to educational opportunities.
LUXASIA ran a year-long program to cultivate emerging talent with workshops, strategic projects, and seminars. Taking part in this program, I have learned that leaders can recognise and provide opportunities for young professionals to grow and develop in their careers. This helps to cultivate a more talented and fair workforce.
I think the most important contribution of any young generation is their ideas on what type of future to build for ourselves. It’s all about fresh perspectives.
In 10 years’ time, we will be future leaders. Having a voice in the conversation allows us to shape and participate in creating this future. This includes ending gender bias and establishing a better working environment for all.
Never think the world is against you. My advice is to hone in on your own personal development. Try to embody the values you would like to make happen. Most of all, be kind, to yourself and others.
Kimly Scott: Welcoming women in tech
Kimly Scott is an Analytics Manager based in Melbourne, Australia. Kimly is a Tableau Public Ambassador, Data Queen and leads the charge on Tableau usage at LUXASIA. She is also a member of the Tableau Speaker Bureau.
When I first started working in analytics, female representation was lacking. There was no one who looked like me in senior or executive roles. As a young woman starting out my career, it was discouraging.
Now, I have two young girls and I want them to achieve anything, regardless of their gender. I always tell my girls, ‘there are no boys or girls toys.’ In that vein, I want them to grow up knowing that there are no male jobs or female jobs.
It can be hard to call out biases or inequalities when you see them. Don’t stay silent. If you feel uncomfortable starting the conversation in public, consider leaning on other women — a mentor, your manager, or a co-worker.
Over the years, we have seen a rise in educating women and girls, especially in the tech industry. There are fabulous organisations, such as She Loves Data, Data + Women, and Women in Analytics. They work to educate, elevate, and connect women. The tide is turning, but there are still many challenges.
Equality is a core value at LIKE.TG. We believe that businesses have the opportunity to make the world a more equal place for all. To learn more about how we’re doing that, visit our Equality site.
How IT Can Measure Return on Experience (ROX) Effectively
Information technology (IT) people love to measure everything. Clicks, files stored, uptime, load times, costs, error rates, and other metrics tie to our companies’ digital footprint. Why are we so obsessed with metrics? Because you cannot grow what you don’t measure. We want to capture the value gained from digital transformation, and help identify the gaps. If you’re looking to track progress, the most comprehensive measure of business value delivered by IT is return on experience (ROX). You simply can’t afford not to include it in your metrics analysis.
IT leaders carry huge responsibility for return on experience
Every digital experience is a path to customer, partner, and employee success. It’s up to IT leaders to deliver digital experiences that move the company forward on time and on budget. Measuring ROX as you go keeps projects on track and makes them far more successful in the end.
ROX captures the results of your investments in digital experiences. In many cases, it’s the justification and rationale for these investments. These experiences include everything from blogs, mobile commerce, online customer service, HR portals, and novel uses of connected devices. To measure ROX, you need to proactively track and measure key metrics related to the experience and your organisation’s overall vision.
To measure ROX for IT, use a combination of these metrics:
One or two relevant speed and cost metrics, like how long it takes a person to fill out a registration form.
A customer-focused metric, like net promoter score or customer satisfaction.
Include a metric or two from the business leader driving the experience, such as seamlessness to implement across teams.
For instance, on a website, make IT metrics and other success metrics part of experience planning from the beginning. IT may be focused on 100% uptime, 20% cost reduction, and simple integrations with existing systems. A marketer might care more about conversion rates or otherkey marketing metrics.
Key metrics for evaluating ROX for IT
Here are a few sample metrics you can use to get started:
1. Speed
You’re probably already tracking speed performance metrics for your digital experiences, such as commerce, service, and mobile. Keep it up — no one will stick around for a digital experience that takes too long to load. You can also measure and track time to task completion for key user experiences, such as subscribing to your newsletter, updating account information, or making a purchase. A good experience will be faster for users without increasing bounce or abandon rates. Consider PUMA, whichtransformed and relaunchedits mobile sites, and gained speed in the process. Its mobile sites render 35% faster and load 69% faster.
2. Time to market
This metric measures the total time required to develop and launch a product or feature. Consider it a key IT success metric for digital experiences.
3. Cost to maintain
Track the impact of digital experience investments in both technology and resource use. Moving to better digital experiences will likely involve an upfront IT investment. But very often, that investment involves removing a dated technology that drains resources. Take content management systems (CMS) as an example. Traditional CMS can turn content management ideas into IT projects. In contrast,some approaches to CMSempower content creators to do more without requiring IT resources other thangovernance. More importantly, they also support better digital experiences.
4. Cost to implement
Upfront costs impact ROX, too. Add up all the costs of the technology, professional services, and training needed to support the experience. Consider budgeted costs as well as actual costs. Delivering at or below budget is appreciated by any organisation, large or small.
5. Engagement
Successful digital experiences engage an audience. You can measure the ROX of virtually any experience simply by tracking engagement rates for the intended audience.
6. Customer satisfaction
Calculate this metric by asking customers to rate their satisfaction with an experience or specific interaction on a 10-point scale and average the results.Customer satisfactionprovides you with an idea of how successful a digital experience is overall. This is a good metric to consider along with costs. A digital experience that positively shifts costs but lowers overall satisfaction is incomplete.
7. Net promoter score (NPS)
Like customer satisfaction, you capture data for this metric by surveying customers. NPS measures the likelihood of customers to recommend your brand. Ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand using a 10-point scale. Scores of 9s and 10s are promoters, 7s and 8s are satisfied, and lower scores come from detractors. Subtract your percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. That’s your NPS.
Learn how you can connect and build with Slack and the LIKE.TG Platform.Watch demos or take a tour to create and ship anywhere — no heavy coding required.
This post was originally published on the U.S-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Meet Trần Việt Thắng: Helping People Work Smarter
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 Trần Việt Thắng, a LIKE.TG Specialist at VinGroup in Vietnam. Thắng leads the LIKE.TG deployment across VinGroup’s B2B and B2C subsidiaries, and has a passion for helping others.
Trần Việt Thắng has always wanted to help people. His vision was to be a caring person. As a young boy, he dreamed of becoming a doctor. His motivation was simple — he wanted to make people feel better. But studying medicine at university was expensive. So, he chose another path.
“I had a good teacher who convinced me to study IT,” Thắng says. “I was very lucky to meet him. He taught me that, as a developer, I could help many people.”
Thắng moved from his hometown to attend university in Hanoi. During his studies, he helped to develop patient admissions software for a local hospital. He quickly discovered that the scalable nature of software development enabled him to help many more people than he could as a doctor.
“There were long queues at the hospital and people had to wait a long time to see a doctor,” he explains. “We made a back-end program the admissions office could use to quickly check-in new patients, collect information about their symptoms, and share that information with the doctor with one click.”
Thắng’s program significantly increased admissions efficiency and reduced patient wait times. The young developer saw the positive impact his program had on the patient experience at the hospital, and he was hooked.
“It was amazing,” he says. “It was a simple program but it helped so many people. I could see how technology can be used to help hundreds of people — maybe even thousands or millions of people. The program made doctors happy too because they could help more people every day. I was inspired by how one program could help doctors and patients together.”
Building better solutions
Thắng took those learnings into his early career as a developer. He understood that he was in the solutions business. He was passionate about developing software that helped solve problems — and made life better — for businesses, employees, and customers. So, it was a natural fit for him to work for a LIKE.TG independent software vendor (ISV).
“I saw that LIKE.TG is a very powerful platform,” he says. “What took us a month or a year to develop ourselves, we could deliver in a week with LIKE.TG. I could develop custom components within the LIKE.TG platform with very little code in a very short time.”
Thắng says that building applications on the LIKE.TG platform also ensured he could deliver more stable solutions. “To develop custom software without LIKE.TG, we might have to make 10 versions before it’s stable. But LIKE.TG gave us a stable base we could more easily build on.”
This kind of agility and stability meant Thắng could help more customers with much shorter development timelines. But the speed of deployment doesn’t guarantee the success of a project.
“We must understand how to best utilise the benefits of LIKE.TG for each customer,” he explains. “We need to think about the customer’s pain points, understand their workflow, and identify LIKE.TG components that will best fit their requirements.”
One size doesn’t fit all
Building that knowledge has made Thắng a sought-after LIKE.TG Architect. He joined VinGroup as a LIKE.TG Specialist and now leads LIKE.TG deployments across the company’s B2B and B2C subsidiaries.
This presents its own challenges. VinGroup is a diverse corporation with many subsidiaries across the technology and industry, trade and services, and social enterprise sectors.
Prior to LIKE.TG, VinGroup had no centralised 360-degree view and no collaboration across the group. Part of Thắng’s role is to maximise usage of LIKE.TG and drive change management within the company’s business units.
Thắng has already led LIKE.TG deployments for subsidiaries in the company’s hospitality (VinPearl), automotive (VinFast) and healthcare (VinMec) sectors. However, what works for a five-star resort operator is very different from the needs of an electric vehicle manufacturer. That’s why Thắng says he treats every business unit as a new customer with a different set of needs.
“LIKE.TG provides a stable architecture, but we must meet a range of different needs within that structure,” he explains. “To do so, we must understand the pain points of each stakeholder and the processes behind them. In other words, we need to know what the employees do so we can create a system that helps them do it better.”
Humans helping humans
Thắng knows that at the core of any technology-based solution are humans helping humans. He says the best way to succeed is to collaborate and share knowledge with each other.
That’s a central value of the Trailblazer community in Vietnam, and Thắng is a passionate member. Since the pandemic started, he has organised several virtual meet-ups with LIKE.TG Architects across Vietnam.
“I’ve met many people like me through the Trailblazer community,” he says. “The core value of LIKE.TG is using technology to help people work together. All of us in the Trailblazer community work together to help each other find better ways to leverage the LIKE.TG platform for our employers and customers.
“We are not in competition with each other. We share best practices and learnings, and help each other to make the platform better every day and deliver more value to the end-users.”
The young Thắng dreamed of making a positive impact on his community as a doctor. While he may have taken a different path, Thắng has remained committed to helping others. He uses technology as a healing medicine for business, and makes his colleagues and customers feel better.
Check out these other posts from our Inspired Trailblazers series:
Meet Joanna Teo: Customer-Focused Data Evangelist
Meet Francisco N. Collantes Jr. : Delivering Energy Through Collaboration
Bringing Service Back To Banking
Customer experience (CX) at retail banks has dropped in priorityover the past year. It is important to address this shift and reprioritise the relationship between customers and banks. Doing so is beneficial for both long and short-term financial goals.
Eighty percentof customers value the experience a company provides as much as its product and service offerings. Consumers want a personalised experience and instant resolution and communication from their banks.
One proven way to deliver meaningful experiences at every customer touchpoint is by implementingautonomous finance, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) and automation to deliver optimised experiences. Autonomous finance can help provide these personalised, seamless experiences for consumers and bring the “service” back to banking.
Here’s how retail banks can optimise customer experiences in this new, all-digital world.
Personalising the customer experience matters
No one wants to feel like just another name on a list of customers. By analysing customer data, businesses can predict their customer’s needs and communicate consistently across all channels providing apersonalised experience.
Banks should tailor offers to each customer, keeping in mind what their financial portfolio looks like. For instance, if a customer already has two credit cards, they’ll find constant offers for a new credit card exhausting. Although people demand the convenience of digital offerings like mobile and online banking, they still want to know there’s a person on the other end who cares. Understand where your customers are at in their lives and offer services to best fit them atthat moment in time— whether it’s refinancing student loans or creating a new savings account to prepare for a family.
Transparency is key to establishing trust and loyalty
A little transparency goes a long way, especially in personal banking when dealing with people’s finances. Communicating with customers often can build trust and loyalty while also improving financial literacy. Offering automated notifications for high and low balance as well as free credit scores establish transparency.
If a small business needs a loan, they’ll want to know what stage the loan review process is in. In this case, a real-time digital tracker or notification updates can provide the transparency customers seek.
Users want a simple, intuitive experience
Digital banking services are now standard, which means customers know what to evaluate when comparing the speed and usability of online and mobile offerings. Users want easy-to-use banking platforms that offer quick logins, digestible features, and products they need.
Banks need to meet customers where they prefer to communicate, whether it’s through a chatbot, live agent, contact form, SMS message, WhatsApp, or social media.Chatbotsare especially helpful in addressing customers quickly and helping them navigate the platform to get the answer they need, without being put on hold or speaking with an automated representative.
Digital culture drives experience improvements
Banks need to be flexible and allow both in-office and remote work as we navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic. If not all teams are digital, it can create a disconnect and a subpar customer experience. Getting all employees from the back-office to frontline workers onboard with the digital journey to work towards one goal as an organisation is important. For example, in early 2020, people working from home had to constantly make trips to the office to get loan paperwork when it could have been transferred to digital files. This inefficient practice led to delayed customer service and communication.
Consumers today have so many choices of who they allow to manage their finances. For retail banks, improving customer experience is a critical competitive edge.Research shows81% of companies will mostly or completely compete on the basis of CX over the next few years.
People want all the benefits of digital but still crave human interaction. But, overhauling any aspect of a business can sound intimidating. However, it can drive business growth and customer loyalty. Autonomous financecan address these areas, setting the industry up for future success.
This post was originally published on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
LIKE.TG Women’s Network Shares How to Break Gender Bias
Every year in early March, groups around the world take time to pause and celebrate the contributions of women for International Women’s Day. While it’s a day for sharing success stories and celebrating progress, this is also a time to reflect on and address the challenges that stand in the way of a more gender-equal world.
This International Women’s Day, individuals and businesses are encouraged to share how they are breaking gender bias. To honour the day, members of the LIKE.TG Women’s Network (SWN) share what today means to them, as well as what changes they hope to see in 2022.
Wendy Walker
Wendy Walker is JAPAC President, LIKE.TG Women’s Network and Vice-President, Marketing ASEAN.
Equality is something I have always been incredibly passionate about. As a marketer, I am naturally curious about all human beings – what makes us different, how we interact – and I love having the opportunity to be surrounded by a vast diversity of thought. Like many of us, I have had situations throughout my career where I have experienced inequality, and I‘ve seen others in the workplace experience inequality. Those moments drive me to want to do whatever I can to contribute to fixing the problem.
Our LIKE.TG Women’s Network (SWN) started as a grassroots vehicle for women supporting each other. It has evolved into a global, sophisticated team that brings together women and allies with a focus on nurturing and growing equality within LIKE.TG. I feel very privileged to have the opportunity to lead this group across JAPAC.
We aim to make all SWN activities inclusive for all employees, to ensure we can empower our allies to learn and show up as even more supportive.
We want to support everyone in the workplace, and help with guiding, mentoring and navigating to get to an outcome of equality for all.
Rebecca Haly
Rebecca Haly is ASEAN President, LIKE.TG Women’s Network and Director, Customer Success, APAC.
International Women’s Day (IWD) is a celebration of the female voice and female talent. It’s an opportunity to recognise those who haven’t necessarily had a voice or a platform to raise their voice. It’s also an opportunity to reflect on how far we have come in improving the equality agenda as well as a reminder of how much more there needs to be done to improve opportunities for everyone.
How do you plan to celebrate the day?
I plan on sharing my appreciation to those who inspire me, as well as connecting with the women and men who have lifted me up throughout my life and career.
I’ll also be conducting an interview for our LIKE.TG employees in Asia with a very talented female leader – Debbie Watkins, Co-Founder and CEO of mobile money app Lucy, will be joining us to talk about how they’re closing the financial inequality gap for female entrepreneurs.
The 2022 IWD theme is ‘break the bias’. What do you think are some effective ways to address bias in the workplace?
We all have blind spots and biases. We’re only human. But it’s important we learn to recognise them. Employee training on hiring practices and employee engagement is a great way to begin to address this. Regular training is mandatory for us here at LIKE.TG and it’s a foundational way to address any biases we carry when we are hiring or engaging the talent in our organisation.
Can you describe some of the changes that have inspired you on the path to gender equality, or changes you would hope to see to promote gender equality?
I would love to see attitudes and allyship improve. I’m always intrigued by the women I speak to who don’t see any issues with equality in their lives or in their workplace. That’s an incredible privilege but it’s certainly not what the data says or what experience tells us. Exercising allyship and educating ourselves around where the inequality exists for marginalised groups is important for all, and especially for those who consider that inequality and bias don’t exist.
Xinyi Li
Xinyi Li is ASEAN Vice-President, LIKE.TG Women’s Network and Account Executive.
IWD is a time of celebration of courage, connection, and contribution to the community!
How do you plan to celebrate the day?
As a gold facilitator for #IAmRemarkable (a 1.5-hour workshop that focuses on helping participants to understand and practice self-promotion), I will be running a workshop to help others to break bias, creating an environment where differences are valued and celebrated, not judged. And in doing so, I want to enable my participants to self-promote, to connect, and to feel empowered.
The 2022 IWD theme is ‘break the bias’. What do you think are some effective ways to address bias in the workplace?
The best way to address it is to openly talk about it:
Don’t assume. Clarify on the spot if we are uncomfortable with a comment.
Join events such as #IAmRemarkable or Human Library to share your personal experience of bias, your perspectives on overcoming limiting beliefs, and practical actions we can all take to help each other break bias at work and in personal life.
Can you describe some of the changes that have inspired you on the path to gender equality, or changes you would hope to see to promote gender equality?
Through my experience running multiple #IamRemarkable workshops, many women have expressed how they felt uncomfortable with self-promotion but want to do more like their male counterparts. It is definitely a muscle that needs to be built over time and I want to help more women to get started as soon as possible!
Namrata Khetrapal
Namrata Khetrapal is a SWN committee member and Global Onboarding Manager.
For me, IWD is an annual reminder to do a reality check. It’s a time of reflection for me to check if I am living up to the promises I made to myself as a woman and as an employee, to my community of women around me and at the workplace. In my previous V2MOM I had committed to creating safe spaces for women to learn and support each other (I also lead the LeanIn initiative in ASEAN) so IWD also is a perfect opportunity to renew that commitment and prioritise this goal again in the new fiscal year’s V2MOM. It’s personally important for me to know where I stand today vis-a-vis last year in terms of growing as an individual, empowering and educating myself, as well as helping other women at the workplace.
How do you plan to celebrate the day?
I will definitely be pampering myself a bit with some “me time”. I will also be reaching out to other women in my network to just send them a reminder that they should continue working on empowering themselves. I empower myself by being deliberate with my intentions to learn new skills for career progression, work on eliminating self-limiting beliefs, and having a positive outlook. I also create platforms and initiate conversations through initiatives like #IamRemarkable and LeanIn Circles within the company and outside to spark discussions around empowerment. It’s important to remind myself that once I’ve empowered myself, I should try to help another woman to realise her potential as well. We all need to pass it on!
What do you think are some effective ways to address bias in the workplace?
The very first thing we all can do is to recognise that we might have unconscious biases or might be stereotyping without realising. You can only solve a problem if you acknowledge it exists. I’m sharing some simple and practical steps that we can take in order to help ourselves in our individual capacity irrespective of our designations and roles in the company:
Let’s not discriminate based on gender
Let’s not attribute work skills to someone’s gender
Let’s make work-related decisions that could impact someone’s career based only on their work and merit, not their gender or any other similar aspects.
Let’s not judge others, especially fellow women on how they should dress, behave or not behave.
Respect everyone irrespective of their gender.
Create equal opportunities for growth for everyone and make conscious efforts to maintain gender parity
We do not need to wait for the organisation to take these steps for us – change starts with us!
Can you describe some of the changes that have inspired you on the path to gender equality, or changes you would hope to see to promote gender equality?
Apart from SWN, I also actively participate in other equality groups like Outforce. I like to regularly attend talks and virtual events to educate myself. I intentionally interact with women and allies from different professional fields and with those whose life journey is different from mine. It is only through education that we can empower ourselves or change ourselves for the better. By taking a simple step, starting with self reflection, to see where we are in terms of our biases and judgments today, we can really pave the way for self growth and self awareness. I also hope to see all of us support one another as we all together navigate our way to make our workplaces “bias-free”.
Tanushree Rohera
Tanushree Rohera is a SWN committee member and Solution Engineer.
I love IWD because of the conversation it sparks. I love it because it allows amazing women to learn from other amazing women, and realise that they’re not alone. And I love it because it reminds us that even though we have come a long way, we have a long way to go. For the past five years, IWD has prompted me to bring together women to understand their challenges and honestly, to face my own. Last year, for example, I worked with a TechNGO and we brought together women leaders and young working professionals. I was amazed by how different the backgrounds were but how similar the challenges were. IWD allows for these conversations.
How do you plan to celebrate the day?
The first thing I wanted to do this year was to take stock of the books I am reading and how many of them are by women authors. I read recently that we subconsciously end up reading mostly male-authored books, and I would like to balance that perspective, across genres. In terms of events, SWN has some great events lined up which I am keen to attend. I joined the UN Women’s Summit on the 4th of March and will attend the Fireside Chat with Debbie Watkins on the 8th of March. I’ll also be attending a “Be Bold” event hosted by Kearney and Stanley Black Decker.
The 2022 IWD theme is ‘break the bias’. What do you think are some effective ways to address bias in the workplace?
Earlier this year, I came across a book called, ‘Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men’. This book completely changed my perspective on decision making and I would recommend it to anyone who has decision-making authority. The broad point the author conveys is that we tend to make decisions based on the data we collect and the interpretation of that data. Through multiple examples across management, healthcare, politics and product design, she proves how there exists a very real gender data gap – we either do not collect a lot of data related to women or are not disaggregating the data related to women to understand how certain decisions affect women in different ways. With this context, a few things that I would think are helpful in overcoming this bias:
Representation in the data being collected: For every decision being made, it’s really important to re-examine the data and see if it’s broken up or disaggregated to include the holistic needs of the people who are being served. Small things like planning a team get-together over lunch vs. post work (a lot of parents find it hard to meet post-work commitments) can make a big difference in fostering an inclusive environment.
Representation in the voices being heard: People solve problems that they are conscious of. Often we may not solve a problem, not because we do not want to, but because we did not know it existed in the first place. That’s why ensuring a decision table is composed of people who are representative of the people being served is extremely important.
Representation in the role models shared: Gender data gaps are perpetuated in history. Often, we consider certain roles to be only for men, only because the success stories shared have largely been men. For example, did you know that the world’s first programmer was actually female? (Ada Lovelace in case you would like to look her up). And did you know that computing started as a predominantly female occupation? Learning and sharing these stories helps open up avenues that previously may have seemed too far away for a lot of women.
Can you describe some changes that have inspired you on the path to gender equality, or changes you would hope to see to promote gender equality?
For me, representation is by far the biggest driver of equality. My greatest influence towards gender equality has been representative role models. This started at home, with my mother. A trailblazer in her own right, she did not define or limit herself by gender. That mindset percolated down to my sister and me. Despite that, when I entered into the workplace as the youngest team member with tons of energy, I feared not being taken seriously. But then I met role models through work: super enthusiastic and very well-respected colleagues like Archana Ganeshalingam, a Solution Engineer in the London office, or Caroline Yam, a Program Manager in the Australia Office, and I learned to not limit myself and express that energy and enthusiasm. A few years later, seeing Jody Kohner opening All-Hands calls cemented that belief.
Representation takes different forms, but seeing someone who you can relate to succeed, especially if you are from a minority, is a very powerful kind of representation. It allows for more voices to be heard, paving the way for a more equal, representative workplace.
Clarissa Wang
Clarissa Wang is a SWN committee member and Senior Recruiting Manager, Asia.
While I’m glad that we have a “dedicated” international women’s day, it’s one of those things that isn’t just subject to the day, like Valentine’s Day. IWD to me is the icing on the cake, a platform to promote a cause that should be top of mind for everyone every day.
How do you plan to celebrate the day?
I have a toddler son, and I plan to introduce the concept of IWD to him. He probably will not really understand, but I have been intentional in introducing concepts of equality (everything boys can do, girls can do as well), trying to break the cycle of gender stereotypes (boys can’t play with dolls, etc.), and teaching consent (no means no and I will stop).
The 2022 IWD theme is ‘break the bias’. What do you think are some effective ways to address bias in the workplace?
I think breaking the bias comes from the top. It takes vulnerability from both genders to normalise topics such as mental wellness, family time, etc. As a people leader, I always emphasise the “success from anywhere” values. I encourage walking (camera off) meetings – I dial in to calls when I’m dropping off or picking up my son. I feel if I normalise doing these #parentthings, my team will be encouraged to do the same. It’s great to hear from senior leadership about how they balance family and work. I think breaking the bias is also advocating for female advancement in the workplace. So that we can see that it CAN be done.
Can you describe some of the changes that have inspired you on the path to gender equality, or changes you would hope to see to promote gender equality?
I think I have learned early on in my leadership journey that women find it more uncomfortable to share their achievements, and I found the #IamRemarkable training to be pivotal in how I think about this – it’s not bragging when it’s based on facts. Because I work in recruitment, I see the need for female leaders in the industry. My ideal future would be one where job descriptions are welcoming, not intimidating; where women dare to try even though they may not fit 100% of the criteria; that hiring teams have courageous conversations about transferrable skills vs non-negotiable competencies; and that we see more diverse faces in leadership positions so that we too can dream to “be like them when we grow up”.
LIKE.TG Live: Asia Is Coming – Here’s What You Can Look Forward To
Get ready for inspiration, innovation, and celebration!
On 12 May 2022, Trailblazers, industry leaders, partners, and LIKE.TG experts from across the region will come together at LIKE.TG Live: Asia. This year, our theme is ‘How the Future Works’. We can’t wait to inspire you for what lies ahead and equip you with the tools you need to succeed from anywhere.
We’ve worked hard to help you get even more from your virtual experience and make this LIKE.TG Live: Asia your best ever. Here’s a sneak peek at what you can look forward to:
Be inspired by our very special guests
Don’t miss the live discussion with Simon Sinek!
Simon Sinek is an internationally acclaimed visionary thinker and leadership expert. He is also the author of multiple best-selling books, including Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, and The Infinite Game.
Simon will join Chin Yin Ong, Chief People Officer at Grab, and LIKE.TG’s Sujith Abraham, for a live discussion about business resilience and growth. You can ask Simon questions during the live QA. Make sure you drop those questions into your event registration form to get into the queue early.
Learn secrets to success from LIKE.TG customers
Hear practical learnings of how companies use LIKE.TG to stay connected to customers, partners, and employees.
Trailblazer Ninja Van will share insights into its advanced service engine, powering a dynamic customer experience. Ninja Van is one of Southeast Asia’s fastest growing tech-enabled logistics companies with a network in six countries.
You’ll also hear from our LIKE.TG leaders Sujith Abraham, SVP GM ASEAN and Cecily Ng, SVP GM Singapore.
Register now for LIKE.TG Live: Asia
We have an incredible show in store for you full of inspiration, learning, and entertainment. We can’t wait to share the very latest, exciting innovations to succeed from anywhere.
Register now for LIKE.TG Live: Asia. That way, you can stay up to date with our event announcements.
When: 12 May 2022, 10–11:30 am SGT
Where: Watch from wherever you are!
How: This year’s event will be delivered via virtual livestream, so you can watch from anywhere. Audio interpretation will be available in Thai, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Bahasa Indonesia to make this event more accessible. Closed captions will be available as well.
5 Ways To Acquire and Retain the Best Talent
The Great Resignation: it’s a concept plaguing organisations globally, and the ASEAN region is no exception. In Singapore, for example, a survey by jobs portal Indeed revealed that 24% of workers intend to leave their current employer in the first half of 2022. Forty-nine percent are unsure if they will stay in their positions for the next six months.
So, what’s driving this instability?
There are a few factors at play. For one, many employees are re-evaluating what they want from their careers in the wake of the pandemic. Another contributing factor is around retention. Securing a great employee is all well and good. However, if you’re not working to keep them engaged, you risk losing them.
In fact, outstanding employee experience (EX) has become the competitive edge no business can afford to ignore. Why? Because highly engaged employees improve customer satisfaction and revenue. Now more than ever, a large number of the workforce is considering ditching their employer for a better offer.
Having been recognised as one of the Best Workplaces in Asia for the fifth year in a row, we’ve collected a few tips to help you attract the best talent and keep them engaged.
1. Embrace new ways of working
Having a flexible work environment is no longer optional. According to the EY 2021 Work Reimagined Employee Survey, six in 10 respondents in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesian and the Philippines said they would quit their jobs if not provided post-pandemic flexibility. However, 60% of Singaporean respondents to the LIKE.TG APAC Employee Engagement Report said their employers have limited or no technology to support flexible work.
This disconnect will be a big driver in employee turnover, as flexible work practices become the norm, not the exception. In a tightening labour market, the most competitive talent will demand flexibility. If your business cannot fully support remote work, it will put you at a disadvantage.
Here at LIKE.TG, we’ve adopted a “success from anywhere” mentality, reimagining the physical office as a digital one. Our employees can cut down on time-consuming commutes, while introducing more flexibility to their work and home lives.
“From speaking to the market, we hear that most employees want to have the optionality of flexibility,” explained Clarissa Wang, Senior Recruiting Manager, LIKE.TG. “They have also been telling us that many employers are trying to offer this, but when it comes to executing and turning it into a reality, most employers fall short. We find that this is a great opportunity to share how LIKE.TG has frameworks, programs, and trainings to ensure flexible working is scalable and sustainable, and how the “flex team agreements” are critical in boosting psychological safety in a flex setting.”
2. Workplace branding is critical
Your employee-focused branding needs to be as strong and unique as your customer-focused branding. Just as you attract, engage, and retain customers, you need to do the same for employees.
An ‘Employee Value Proposition’ (EVP) is a useful way to define what makes your organisation special to employees. Gartner defines EVP as having five key attributes:
Opportunity: for career growth and development
People: quality of managers and coworkers, senior leader reputation
Organisation: market position and social responsibility
Work: high interest in job and work/life balance
Rewards: compensation, benefits, and leave allowance
If you can list meaningful responses to these, then you’re close to defining a clear and differentiated message around your employee brand.
According to a Mercer COVID-19 pulse survey, 68% of employers in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines said having a reputation as a ‘great place to work’ helps attract talent.
3. Mixing your secret sauce: there’s no such thing as readymade business culture
Much like the sourdough starter you fed during lockdown, your business’s culture isn’t something that will just happen. It’s alive, ongoing, and develops with intention.
Culture comes from actions and is driven by leaders. Sure, you can take all the pieces of culture you’d like your business to have. However, like a bad jigsaw, it doesn’t mean all the pieces will fit together. To acquire and retain employees, culture needs to be differentiated, authentic and, ideally, built on a purpose beyond profit. It’s worth getting this right. More than three-quarters of employers who responded to the Mercer survey agreed that an organisation’s culture helps to retain talent.
Culture can cover many aspects of working life. These include wellness policies, aligning with employees’ values, and fostering development opportunities. Looking after your employees is also good for business. A whitepaper by HDR Asia found that a 1% increase in participation in employee wellness programs translates to a 5 to 10% increase in ROI.
4. Invest in the Employee Experience (EX)
Another important factor contributing to staff turnover is a failure to invest in a fulfilling employee experience.
In a hybrid environment, you need to make technology work for you. Your business might be bending over backwards to make your Customer Experience (CX) as smooth as silk. However, outdated technology and clumsy processes will leave your employees floundering.
More often than not, when a business introduces a technological solution for employees, it is selected and deployed based on the needs of the business. The employee’s needs are neglected, and adoption is low. Smart use of tech can invigorate your staff, drive value into the business, increase innovation, and enable seamless flexible work environments.
Frictionless productivity improves EX and benefits the business culture. Something as straightforward as giving employees the power to communicate easily wherever they may be is vital in unifying your workforce and building your employer brand.
5. Make every day count for staff, not just the first one
Are you welcoming new staff into the fold? Congratulations! Hopefully, your business provides a stellar hiring and on-boarding experience that sees new employees leaping out of bed to start work.
What happens after that? The first few days are just the beginning of the employee retention experience. It’s the rest of the journey that really counts. Just as you map the customer life cycle, the employee life cycle needs similar attention. Managing and planning for the long-term is key to developing and enhancing the employee experience.
An engaged employee has clarity about their role and how it contributes to the purpose of the business. Don’t leave them guessing. Instead, show them every day how their actions help build your business success.
Just as customers leverage the power of the connected world to explore their options and express their loyalty (or lack thereof), so do employees. The employee voice, when amplified through employer review sites like Glassdoor, is powerful.
Smart organisations will nurture their staff and create advocates for their business.
We spoke with more than 3,000 office workers and 75 IT leaders in Australia, India and Singapore about the relationship between technology and employee engagement. Download the APAC Employee Engagement Report to find out what we learned from them.
This post was originally published on the A.U.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
How To Build a Data Culture: What Leaders Need To Know
Your company accumulates mass quantities of data every day. You collect information from marketing, sales, service, and more. There aremission-critical insightslocked inside. The question is, what trends are you missing? Can you surface them tomake smarter, more strategic decisions? If so, how?
Building a data culture is the only way to unearth these buried insights. That’s a formidable task for the83% of CEOswho want their organisations to be more data-driven. Yet, companies that embrace this approach to decision-making are more successful. In fact, leading data-driven companies to reallocate talent and capitalfour times fasterthan their peers. Furthermore, the 58% of companies that make decisions based on data aremore likely to beat revenue targetsthan those that don’t.
So, what’s next for leaders ready to build a data culture? See how CEOs can overcome challenges and empower their employees to make smarter decisions faster.
CEOs face countless decisions about where to start when building a data culture. Overcome analysis paralysis bystarting smallwith a use case that proves the value of your new data culture. Promote the payoff with skeptics: McKinsey research showsdata-driven companiesaccomplish goals faster and that their initiatives contribute at least 20% to earnings before income taxes.
Here’s why this works:
Data analysis surfaces actionable trends
Data analysis surfaces patterns thatunearth valueand enable companies to take advantage of market opportunities faster. That drives growth, nurtures innovation, and strengthens differentiation from competitors.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning take the guesswork out of decision-making
Companies that still rely on institutional knowledge and gut feelings to guide decision-making are leaving money on the table. With artificial intelligence and machine learning, employeesmake the right decisions quickly and confidently.
Strategic work keeps employees engaged
When data analyses guide routine decisions, employees spend less time on basic tasks and more time focusing on strategic work. That keeps them engaged and productive. That’s why84% of data-leading organisationshave observed an increase in employee retention.
Empower the right team to score a financial win
The best way to build a community of data champions is to demonstrate how data-driven decision-making grows revenue and streamlines operations. Don’t choose an analytics use case just because it might produce an interesting outcome. Instead, opt for a project that will yield a financial win and that you can later scale for maximum impact.
Here’s how to start:
Step 1: Choose the right team members
Start a working group that includes diverse colleagues from across the organisation. These team members should bring a collaborative mindset, differentiated skills and abilities, and distinct organisational perspectives. Make sure you include executives, line managers, data engineers, developers, and machine learning architects.
Step 2: Equip your team with the right training and technology
Withaccessible technology, you can connect team members and enable them to unlock hidden insights. Don’t assume your team members have the skills or tools to get started on their own. Instead, give themcomprehensive trainingso they can learn how to make data-driven decisions from anywhere (without having to be an actual data scientist).
Step 3: Start small
Test your assumptions on a small scale and iterate. You’ll know you’ve hit a winner when your colleagues can measure the value of your project on their bottom line.
Here’s how this worked at one financial services company. After a simple clustering analysis evaluated subclasses of data across sales territories, right-sizing the coverage led to$1 millionin incremental revenue the following year. That win was enough to build enthusiasm for data-driven decision-making across the company.
Step 4: Prioritise data culture’s human element
Ensure team members review raw data analyses to understand downstream utilisation. Only human eyes can determine if bias has influenced the conclusions.
Avoidbias by proxyby not taking data at face value. “Nobody can just drop all your data in and the right answer comes out,” said Mark Nelson, Tableau CEO. “It’s that human insight that helps you jump from raw data to conclusions.”
Take the next step to build your data culture
The process of iterating and scaling new data strategies means success won’t happen overnight. However, leading companiesencourage experimentationbecause they believe not being data-driven is the bigger institutional hazard. Inaction is the biggest risk of all.
This post was orignally published on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
The Most Important Phase in Digital Transformation is The Beginning
The pace of change is faster than ever. As a result, business and technology leaders tend to launch into projects with speed and momentum without first planning for success. Jonathan Hatcher uncovers a new framework called Phase 0, which aims to align business goals before the project starts. Jonathan draws from vital lessons that the LIKE.TG Professional Services team gathered from hundreds of highly complex, fully integrated enterprise-scale project implementations.
With inputs from Karl Kuchejda, Director, Services Leader, at LIKE.TG.
The most important moment in a digital transformation is at the very start. That’s where decision making is nimble and it’s easiest to affect valuable change.
Now more than ever there is an imperative for organisations to meet customer expectations, capitalise on new technology, and create a working environment that attracts and retains the best talent.
Although it is tempting to move fast into project-mode, shifting into action without proper planning introduces risk later down the line. This shows up as misaligned objectives, internal politics, and over-indexing on ‘getting it delivered’. As opposed to achieving high user adoption and realisation of business value.
To address this most critical stage, our team has developed a process called Phase 0. This helps businesses develop a clear roadmap of what they want to achieve, and how to get there.
Slow down before you speed up
The sheer scale and complexity of transformations needs a clear runway to ensure the project will be successful. There are innumerable moving parts to consider, competing business goals, and teams to align. With so much at stake, it is vital to get all the important details right.
Our team has gathered insights from hundreds of complex, enterprise-scale transformation projects. These insights are distilled into a framework we call Phase 0. The most successful projects use this precious time before the project starts to reimagine what is possible, gain internal alignment, and conduct detailed planning. Our aim is to help our customers develop a clear vision of what they want to achieve, and a roadmap on how to get there.
We recently worked with a customer in the telecommunications industry, who ran a strategic planning exercise with LIKE.TG Professional Services. The aim was to help align executives, pinpoint business value opportunities, and bring high value LIKE.TG user experience elements to life. We co-created a phased architecture and delivery roadmap, which will allow them to move into their LIKE.TG project delivery with confidence, alignment, and speed.
While every project requires bespoke advice for the customer’s scenario, there are three core elements to our approach. These are empathy, alignment, and action.
Empathy: Engage your customers and employees early
At the end of your project, a mark of success is your end users: your customers and employees.
Does it improve the way customers interact with you? Does it help employees do their jobs? Leading with empathy allows you to reframe preconceived ideas to discover the best possible solution. This is where we start with Phase 0.
Spending time with customers and employees to understand what they are trying to achieve, their frustrations, and hopes is core to our human-centred design approach. This discovery work is vital to ensure technology decisions centre around user needs.
Designing experiences with the LIKE.TG platform in mind from day one proactively balances user needs while maximising use of out-of-the-box capabilities. This paves the foundation for fast and agile implementation leveraging LIKE.TG best practices.
Here’s an example of a healthcare provider who wanted to build an online community for new mothers. We worked with the business and their community to explore how they ideally wanted to share information. Together, we found a solution that could be created with minor changes to an existing product and were able to offer a streamlined solution without reinventing the wheel. This is a win-win scenario for the business and the new mothers.
Empathy isn’t just about the user experience. It also applies to deeply understanding the customer’s broader technology environment. Enterprise customers invariably have multiple complex technology systems that need to deliver their capabilities alongside LIKE.TG. It’s important to take the time to understand each customer’s unique technology environment. This helps to develop an optimal approach around where LIKE.TG should play and how it should be integrated to deliver on CX outcomes.
Alignment: Bring everything back to your why
Executive alignment early in the process is critical. Without it, we commonly see issues arise during project delivery. These issues can cause delays and increase the risk of project failure.
As part of Phase 0, we map out specific project objectives and business success drivers. This is done with a LIKE.TG lens, identifying and quantifying the impact of desired changes. Once agreement has been reached, objectives are aligned to executive OKRs or KPIs. This provides a baseline for measuring success throughout the project and serves to align key stakeholders on transformation goals at the start.
For example, we worked with a multinational conglomerate company that was looking for opportunities to optimise their sales and service model and enable them to assist more customers. We proposed a model that would deliver process automation, increase digital channel optionality for consumers, and drive efficiencies across sales and service teams. We helped them gain insight into how a self-service model for customers and partners could be achieved. This enabled the team to visualise new opportunities for technology to streamline their business and better engage with customers and partners.
As strategic planning unfolds, sharing progress is important to align teams, showcase outputs, and gain additional feedback. We regularly bring cross-functional teams together to share insights, success, and lessons learned. This open forum helps to motivate the team, and keep them aligned on the vision.
Action: Propel your team into delivery
Planning allows a thorough scan of the project ahead, factoring in complexity, risks and navigating roadblocks through better program design.
At the action stage, you want to walk away with a plan that includes how the project will be delivered in detail. You should have a clear idea of the investment, phases, benefits, risks, and dependencies involved.
We look to understand the customer’s unique environment, the resources they have available, nuances of their business operating model, and their project delivery methodology.
Our approach is to dive deep enough into key aspects of the project such as costs, risks, integration, and data migration. Then, emerge with a transformation plan that decision makers can proceed with confidence.
It’s vital to have diverse input into this planning stage from both the business and technology teams. There should also be a single executive owner allocated to being accountable for progressing into a business case.
Launch your project into success
The most successful transformation projects clear the runway before launching their project.
Take the time to plan, reimagine where you are headed, and how to get there. Then the project can be launched into clear skies ahead, instead of building the plane while flying.
Give yourself a month or two to map out a strategic plan, based on empathy, alignment, and action. That’s how you can set yourself up for not just success, but transformation.
This post was originally published on the A.U.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
How Daughters Of Tomorrow Is Using LIKE.TG To Empower Singapore’s Underprivileged Women
More than 25,000 women from low-income families in Singapore are struggling to find and sustain a living. That’s a statistic Daughters Of Tomorrow (DOT) is working hard to change. The Singapore-based IPC charity supports underprivileged women in Singapore to build financially independent and resilient families.
Since 2014, DOT has impacted more than 1,100 women through befriending, skills-training, job-bridging and post-employment support programs. That’s an excellent achievement, but Kaylee Kua, Senior Manager, Programs Operation at DOT, says there’s much more to be done for Singapore’s underprivileged women and families.
“There are a lot of women in Singapore who have challenges finding livelihood opportunities,” she explains. “Many of our beneficiaries have often had a long hiatus from work due to care-giving duties, and they may be disjointed from what is currently happening in the job market.
“Our beneficiaries often do not have the privilege to further their education, and this results in them only having the accessibility to work in blue collar jobs. However, that often requires shift work, which is not mum-friendly.”
To make matters worse, Kua says the financial situation for many of Singapore’s low-income families got worse during COVID-19. “A lot of low to middle income families lost their jobs during the pandemic,” she explains. “The income gap is widening, and this is creating a group of new poor.”
This has created a perfect storm for many of Singapore’s struggling families. Kua says it’s a battle that must be fought on multiple fronts.
“We have to help rebuild our beneficiaries confidence, and support them to reskill. At the same time, we need to help employers understand the challenges our beneficiaries face, provide working arrangements suitable for care-givers, and pay a living income.”
Consolidating the development journey
These are serious and complex problems. But the dedicated team at DOT is up to the challenge. They are using digital transformation to streamline operational processes and personalise their approach.
“We started with four employees working from colour-coded spreadsheets,” Kua explains. “But as our team grew, it became more difficult to collaborate. As a registered charity, we also need to make sure our annual reports are accurate. But this was difficult without a consolidated data source.”
DOT beneficiaries follow a thorough personal and professional development journey. This requires beneficiaries to engage with several DOT teams as they complete each stage of their journey.
Kua explains that after women are referred to DOT by their social workers, they complete the DOT Confidence Curriculum. Many move on to the befriending program, then go through a bridging process into employment. Finally, beneficiaries receive six months of post-employment support.
Each time a beneficiary moves onto a new stage in their journey, their case is handed over to the relevant DOT team. As the organisation grew, this process became increasingly difficult to manage.
Unifying beneficiary data
Kua says DOT needed a consolidated 360-degree view of each beneficiary’s personal progress and needs. The solution was LIKE.TG’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP).
NPSP helps DOT to organise program, beneficiary and fundraising data. It provides a unified view of beneficiary data across programs, and supports personalised relationship management from a single platform.
“Initial adoption in 2018 was tough,” says Kua. “We had to limit access to our old database and spreadsheets, and put a cut-off date on employee access to it. But as our LIKE.TG system grew with new functionalities, the team saw how it was improving our processes.
“All the beneficiary data can now be easily handed over to the next team when a beneficiary progresses on their journey. LIKE.TG has helped us to streamline a lot of processes, and makes reporting much easier and more accurate.”
Jonathan Tan, Assistant Manager, Marketing and Data at DOT, holds fortnightly meetings with volunteer LIKE.TG Architects who help with user training and platform customisation.
“We use Trailhead for step-by-step guidance, and the LIKE.TG volunteers help us with more complex customisations. There are certain new processes we want to add in as we grow, and the LIKE.TG volunteers help us deploy new functions much more quickly.”
Closing the income gap
Tan says the next step on DOT’s digital transformation is to implement Pardot and Experience Cloud to increase donor funding and engagement, support outreach to volunteers, and provide more timely updates to befrienders about the progress of their befriendees.
Kua explains the organisation is also looking into technology to eliminate human biases in decision making. This, she says, will ensure every beneficiary has the same positive experience.
But in the short-term, Kua says DOT will remain focused on providing practical support and driving digital inclusion for Singapore’s underprivileged women and low-income families.
“The truth is that many of our beneficiaries who have been in long-term employment are still struggling to make it out of the poverty cycle,” Kua concludes. “Over the next few years, we will be advocating for employers to help close the income gap.
“Women are currently the main care-givers, and we need employers to understand their challenges and needs. While society changes its views on care-giving roles and responsibilities, we also need employers to re-evaluate the value of work and pay more sustainable wages, so that hardworking families can rise out of poverty. Technology will help us shift the needle.”
Learn more about how Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) supports charity organisations to help people in need.
Crafting a Customer Journey? Ask Yourself 11 Questions First
Regardless of which department you are part of, the best results will come when you have a relentless focus on your customer. By ensuring that your every action leads to a better customer outcome, you gain loyal brand advocates, and your business grows.
Part of your efforts to put the customer first should be to understand the customer journey, and how it can be improved. Before you create your ideal customer journey, you need to understand what your customers are experiencing today. According to the latest LIKE.TG research, 80% of customers agree that the experience a company provides is just as important as the products or services they offer.
What is a customer journey?
A customer journey is a description of your customers’ experience when interacting with your brand. In the past, this might have been as simple as a customer walking into a store, making a purchase, and then walking out. Never to be seen again.
Things are much more complex now. According to the State of Connected Customer report, nearly 75% of customers have used more than one channel to interact with a company when making a single purchase. Nearly 70% have even used more than one device in the course of a single transaction. Fifty-three percent of customers say they feel an emotional connection to the brands that they buy from the most.
It is, therefore, vital that you understand the different ways that customers interact with you. From the very first time they encounter your brand, all the way through to their first purchase, and beyond.
Ask the right questions
By understanding the journey your customer goes through when they buy from you, you can find areas for improvement. To generate a customer journey map that gives you these insights, you need to ask the right questions.
This list isn’t exhaustive, of course, but asking these questions will give you a good start:
Do you know all your customer touchpoints?
How many ways are there for your customers to interact with your organisation? You might be surprised. Advertising, social media channels, interactions with employees, search engine results pages, third-party information resources, reviews sites, the list goes on. That’s before they’ve even been to your website or store!
Do you know how your customers find you?
Are they finding your website? Do most of your customers come from word-of-mouth recommendations? Knowing how your customers find you will allow you to focus your energy on optimising those processes. There’s no point in optimising channels that don’t generate customers.
Can potential customers find what they are looking for?
When they arrive on your website, or in your store, can your customers locate the products they want?
You can check your website analytics, including site search, to assess how customers are browsing and what they might be looking for. Often, customers resort to search bars when they can’t find what they want.
Your in-store sales team could also share valuable insight. For example, do customers regularly ask for help finding particular products? This could inform decisions around in-store product placements.
Is there a place where your customers can look for the answers before contacting your customer support team?
Solutions such as Knowledge Base allow you to create repositories of company and product information, including frequently asked questions. This allows customers to serve themselves rather than contact your service team.
Make sure you track which articles get the most traffic. This data will tell you a lot about the things your customers want to know.
What kind of reviews are you getting? How are you using that data?
Customer reviews will tell you a lot about how your products are being used, and the levels of customer satisfaction.
Look for trends, including products or store locations that have generated particularly good or poor reviews. Are there common elements that shine a light on processes that can be learned from? What processes can you improve?
When was the last time you bought or used your own product?
If you’re very familiar with your products and services, you may not notice when there are opportunities for improvement. If it’s been a while since you tried to buy something through your website, it might be worth trying it out. You may be surprised!
Understand and evaluate your data
Some information about the customer journey can only be obtained by asking your customers directly. But there are other metrics that you can use to understand where there are opportunities for improvement.
Is your website easy to use?
Consider using a service that allows you to test your website with representative users. This can be a great way to highlight strengths and opportunities with your web experience.
Is your marketing related to your customers’ interests?
Find out how your customers respond to your messaging. Making sure that your marketing is speaking to your target audience will lead to more sales. The analytics that powers Marketing Cloud will give you insights into which campaigns are performing, and which are falling flat.
If you sell products online, do you get many abandoned carts?
To put it another way, do your customers drop off at some parts of your website?
This kind of analysis will tell you if there are parts of the purchase process that cause friction for the customer. Solutions like Commerce Cloud can help you optimise the purchase process with proven best practices. This includes saved carts, optimised checkout flows, and payment accelerators.
If you are selling B2B, is there a particular part of the sales process that causes your customers and sales teams problems?
As above, any points of friction will cause you to lose business. Ironing out those wrinkles could make all the difference. Sales Cloud can solve many problems by making your sales pipeline more efficient. This leads to better outcomes for customers and salespeople alike.
Are there particular products or services that generate a disproportionate level of customer service tickets?
To put it another way, are there bottlenecks in your customer service workflow?
The customer journey map goes beyond the point of purchase. Loyal customers will keep coming back again and again, but not if your post-sales experience is lacking. A solution like Service Cloud will let you see what your customers are asking. It will also highlight any potential areas where service could be even better.
Don’t forget your employees!
Make sure to include your employees in any evaluation of the customer journey.
Your teams interact with customers every day, so they have valuable insights into customer behaviours, pain points, and satisfaction levels. Get your service agents, sales people, and marketing team in a room together. Listen to their feedback and experiences. You should also consider whether they have the right tools to do their jobs efficiently. They will be able to tell you.
Use data to improve customer relationships
At the core of this evaluation is data. Done right, you will get a comprehensive understanding of the journey your customers go on when they interact with your business.
Remember to share customer data with your teams. When teams can access the information they need to do their best work, collaboration and alignment improves. This leads to more connected and personalised experiences for your customers, which helps you build stronger relationships with them.
Find out how to maintain focus on the customer throughout their journey. Download The Connected Customer Experience e-book to learn more:
5 Ways Financial Services Can Drive Profitability Through a Unified Customer Experience
Increased competition, changing customer expectations, and the rise of omni-channel experiences are all driving change for financial services. This means financial services institutions need to evolve the way they engage customers to stay competitive.
“A lot of financial institutions have to reimagine their operating model, as many banks and insurers are disintermediated by fintechs and insuretechs,” said Cyril Cymbler, VP Financial Services Practice EMEA ASEAN, LIKE.TG. He was speaking during a discussion at the recent IDC Asian Financial Services Congress 2022.
“To overcome that challenge, banks and insurers are focusing on initiatives to simplify their processes and create efficiencies, while improving the customer experience.”
This shift highlights the link between customer relationships and profitability. However, LIKE.TG research revealed that in recent years, exceptional customer service and support became more important than ever due to changing customer expectations in the digital age. This presents a massive opportunity for financial services institutions to stand out among the competition by elevating the customer experience.
How are customer journeys being reimagined in response? What opportunities exist to drive profitability? Here are five strategies to help financial services institutions drive profitability through a unified customer experience.
For details on this infographic, please click here.
What Are the Challenges and Opportunities Ahead for Singapore SMEs?
Each year, the Singapore Business Federation (SBF) publishes their National Business Survey. This survey is sent to more than a thousand businesses across Singapore. It covers many aspects of business: sentiment, priorities and challenges, transformation and innovation, and internationalisation.
After a tumultuous couple of years, the results of the 2021/2022 report give small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) reasons to feel confident about the year ahead. The report shows how businesses are bouncing back, how their priorities have changed, and the challenges that they are still facing today.
It also explains how technology will have an important role to play in SMEs’ success.
LIKE.TG will be hosting an interactive live session with SBF, and leading tech association SGTech. The webinar will give SMEs tips on how to embrace digital transformation more effectively.
Challenges and opportunities for SMEs in Singapore
Nearly half of the businesses surveyed think that the economy will improve in the next year, compared to only 31% from the year before. Additionally, fewer businesses reported that they have been negatively impacted by the pandemic — only 32% this year, compared to more than 60% last year.
Businesses are more confident about the wider economy too. Satisfaction levels with the local, regional, and global economic climates are all up compared to last year.
There are still challenges ahead. For example, organisations are worried about manpower. Both the cost and availability of a qualified workforce feature on the list of concerns.
Evolving business priorities
Commercial priorities dominate the focus of many SMEs in Singapore. Growing revenue and ensuring a positive cashflow remain the top two priorities for businesses.
However, there have been some changes. Attracting and retaining talent has become a much stronger focus, rising to become the third-highest priority this year.
Here’s how the top business priorities compare, from 2020-2021 to 2021-2022:
The power of technology
According to the report, the importance of digital transformation has been understood for some time. Sixty-five percent of SMEs surveyed said that business transformation is very important, while 29% said that it is somewhat important.
However, businesses that are interested in digital transformation face some road blocks. According to the SMEs surveyed, the top three key challenges to implementing technology were:
High cost of adoption (52%)
Upskilling employees to stay current (30%)
Cyber security risks (30%)
Despite these worries, the benefits of digital transformation are well understood. SMEs surveyed said that these are the top three key benefits of digital transformation:
Increased productivity (59%)
Optimised operations (48%)
Reduced operating costs (46%)
Businesses are working towards organisational transformation by investing in technology. A year ago, 34% of organisations surveyed said they would be investing in tech—this year that figure is 42%. Thirty-one percent of businesses are also re-engineering their processes.
The importance of governmental support
Ongoing challenges have meant that businesses are looking to governments for support more than ever.
In Singapore, SMEs have highlighted these key areas of support that they need:
Assistance in digitalisation (42%)
Financial support (39%)
Business strategy development advisory and consultancy services (38%)
The good news is that SMEs can access the Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) programme. This initiative aims to help these businesses kickstart their technology journey by providing grant support of up to 70%. LIKE.TG is a pre-approved IT vendor for the program under the SMEs Go Digital programme. An enhanced maximum support level of 70% has also been extended to 7 October 2022.
What does this mean for SMEs in Singapore?
The survey findings raise several questions. What can SMEs in Singapore do to lower costs while also driving digital transformation? How can they access support to enable this? How can businesses keep up with the evolving expectations of their customers?
To answer these questions, LIKE.TG teamed up with SBF and SGTech. Together, we will present our webinar, SME Digitalisation Roadmap: Tips To Fueling Growth and Customer Retention in 2022.
I’ll be joined by guest speakers:
Lin Guoliang, Deputy Director, Advocacy, Digitalisation Transformation, Singapore Business Federation
Eileen Tan, SGTech Singapore Enterprise Chapter Exco and Executive Director, Stone Forest
Keng Low, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Finantier
SBF and SGTech play important roles as multipliers and conduits to help companies, especially SMEs, in their transformation and growth. As Singapore adapts to live with COVID-19, trade associations and chambers will play an even more crucial role in strengthening the business ecosystem.
In the webinar, we’ll explore how digital transformation plays a central role in driving growth, increasing productivity, and lowering operating costs. Eileen will also share insights from the tech industry, including the move to the cloud.
The speakers will also discuss how an approach focusing on workforce, technology, and business support is vital to success.
Lastly, we’ll talk about how government grant support can help you reach your goals for business growth.
Join us on 20 April 2022, at 10 a.m. SGT.
Want to become a digitally resilient business? Register for the free webinar: SME Digitalisation Roadmap: Tips To Fueling Growth and Customer Retention in 2022.
The 8 Rules of Service Leadership
Service leaders are a key part of any organisation and in the current landscape their role is particularly important. It’s vital that service leaders have a strong understanding of current best practices and successful ways of working.
What are the responsibilities of a service leader?
The main responsibility of a service leader is to manage service teams and ensure that the tools and processes they use are efficient and effective. It’s a broad remit, involving not just people management, but process management. In practical terms, this translates to:
Using forward planning to anticipate customer demands
Handling the challenges posed by external factors such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the pivot towards remote working
Increasing customer engagement and satisfaction by improving internal procedures
Why are service leaders important?
An organisation’s product or service may be outstanding, but if the customer’s experience of it is subpar, everything else fades into the background. Satisfied customers become advocates. But dissatisfied ones are more likely to share their experiences and they have many channels to do so.
Customer service is the backbone of any business, especially in the current moment. Customer-centricity has become a top priority. It’s down to service leaders to shape the reputation of their company by leading their teams effectively and developing intuitive, efficient processes for solving customer problems.
The 8 rules of service leadership
When coming up with strategies for creating effective service leadership, it’s important that service leaders keep some key principles in mind. We’ll call these ‘The 8 Rules of Service Leadership’.
1. Guide by example
Aim to inspire the service teams you lead by acting as a positive role model and embodying company values in everything you do. An organisation’s ethics are becoming increasingly important to its customers and employees, and leaders should exemplify the qualities they want to nurture in the workforce. Additionally, the 4th edition of the State of Service report reveals that:
76% of service and support staff state that communication is very important
71% say that listening skills are very important
62% say that adaptability is very important
It’s no surprise that agility is appreciated in a landscape littered with new obstacles. Soft skills like empathy and listening are prized in a potentially stressful climate. Service leaders who display these skills can guide by example.
2. Good solutions put the customer first
Nearly every customer is digitally savvy, rapidly changing expectations for service. In fact, the State of the Connected Customer report shows that 82% of customers now expect to solve complex issues at first contact. Moreover, the 4th State of Service reveals that 83% of service teams have changed their policies to be more flexible with their customers.
Ensuring that the customer is at the heart of everything you do – and communicating this focus to the teams you manage – will help you to make sound operational decisions in an increasingly customer-centric era. Developing new, customer-focused metrics is one way to raise the bar for great service. Consider KPIs based around satisfaction rather than volume.
3. Meet goals by leveraging smart data and connecting teams
To get insights into what makes your customers tick, and what they want from you, you’ll need to use the data you collect intelligently. Consider using a data management system such as LIKE.TG Customer 360, which allows you to combine learnings from marketing, commerce, and service operations to meet your goals.
If you are not implementing new technologies and leveraging data to keep up with the changing landscape, you are likely falling behind. The State of Service shows that:
81% of decision-makers are accelerating digital initiatives
87% of service professionals say that customers are using digital channels more
79% of service professionals say that it’s impossible to provide great service without a complete view of the customer’s interactions
Service organisations can use digital solutions to smash silos and connect teams, and leverage AI technologies like Einstein Analytics to track the productivity of remote agents.
4. Motivate your team by empowering them to make decisions
Rather than leading in a top-down way, make your teams feel that they are involved in a common goal of improving customer satisfaction. If employees feel that they have a stake in the processes they perform, they are more likely to make great decisions.
You never know where the next great solution or game-changing suggestion might come from, after all. W.L. Gore, of Gore-Tex fame, even gives its employees ‘dabble time’ to brainstorm new ideas.
More and more service organisations are embracing this idea of intrapreneurship or ‘mini-CEOs’, where data is democratised, agents can see their metrics in real time, and everyone can track company-wide goals and blaze their own path towards meeting them.
5. Communicate openly
It’s important to make time to connect with your teams, and to listen to their feedback with an open mind. If you don’t know what challenges they’re facing, how can you help? A good place to start is by surveying your team to get an understanding of how they’re managing in this climate, both in the workplace and outside of it.
At a time when 81% of agents describe their customers as being more anxious and 75% say they’re more demanding, service leaders need to try and lower the emotional burden on the workforce.
When supporting employees through difficult times, such as returning to the workplace after the COVID-19 crisis, consider using Work.com. The Command Centre in Work.com offers businesses a range of tools and resources, including a contact-tracing tool that respects users’ privacy and sensitively gathers data.
6. Plan to invest in people
Offering relevant training, including upskilling or reskilling, can help employees fulfil their potential and keep up with the changing expectations of today’s customer. The new normal requires new ways of working, so leaders need to make sure that their teams have the proper training to succeed. The State of Service shows that:
77% of agents say their role is more strategic than it was two years ago
55% say that they need better training to perform their role well
79% of decision-makers are making significant investments in agent training
It’s clear that the role of reps is evolving. Fortunately, on-demand training programmes are becoming more popular, so service reps can skill up even while working from home. For today’s service leaders, investing in people is imperative.
7. Create a vision for continuous improvement
Just because something has always been done a certain way, that doesn’t mean it’s the best way. Always look out for ways to improve and polish existing processes, and ask your teams to do the same.
By adopting new strategies, implementing cutting-edge technologies and encouraging teams to share their own ideas for solutions, service leaders can create a culture of innovation and continuous improvement. The changes don’t have to be huge – even small changes can help to oil the gears of inspiration and innovation.
8. Strong direction is critical, especially in uncertain times
Service teams need the right skills and strategies to succeed in a competitive landscape, but they also need strong direction. The uncertainty of the current climate demands leaders that can steer a ship towards shore, even through choppy waters. Building agility, nurturing a sense of purpose, and empowering the workforce with digital solutions can help today’s service leaders become world-class directors.
As Jack Welch, former CEO of GE, once said, “Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.”
Leading towards a better future
Both businesses and customers depend on effective service leadership – now more than ever. Having ineffectual or inefficient service leadership not only leads to dissatisfied customers, it can lead to an unmotivated workforce. Good service leaders inspire the workers, and they give them the tools they need to succeed. Put the 8 Rules of Service Leadership into effect today, and create a stronger workforce for tomorrow.
To see more about how service leaders are adapting to today’s challenges, check out The Service Leader’s Guide to Resiliency.
How Your Business Can Start the Journey To Net Zero
Over the past fifteen years or so, sustainability has progressed from a buzzword to a concept at the centre of public consciousness.
The ASEAN region is one of themost vulnerable in the worldto future climate change. Many livelihoods depend on climate-sensitive sectors, and the region features long coastlines. Climate concerns include climbing temperatures, rising sea levels, extreme weather events, worsening air pollution, biodiversity losses, and the depletion of natural resources. As a result, the momentum to make real change is picking up speed, particularly among the business community.
As employers, providers, and community leaders,businesses are uniquely placed to lead by example. In order for businesses to make a contribution to the journey to a net zero future, sustainability needs to be a factor in all business decisions. In 2020, the total GDP of the ASEAN region was approximately US $3.08 trillion. If little to no climate action is taken, by 2050 sea level rise alone isestimated to cost ASEAN nations an average of over US $2 trillion each. ASEAN companies who lead the charge on climate change stand to gain$1 trillion in economic opportunities by 2030.
What does that mean? Action is ongoing and required at multiple levels, and there isn’t a single answer. While the sustainability journey is specific to each organisation and isn’t always clear-cut, one thing is for sure: businesses can be platforms for change. The time for action is now.
Net zero and climate change: the key terms you need to know
We all know about climate change, but what about more recent sustainability-related terminology? We’ve summarised some common terms and their recognised definitions below:
Net zero: cutting climate pollution to zero by balancing what you put out into the atmosphere, with what you remove from it.
Carbon neutral: achieving a balance between the behaviours and practices that produce carbon dioxide and those that limit and remove it.
Circular economy: a model of production and consumption that fosters the continued life cycle of ‘waste’ through practices such as reusing, repairing, recycling, upcycling, refurbishing, and sharing.
5 questions with a sustainability advocate
We spoke to LIKE.TG’s César Vieira Lino, Regional Vice President for JAPAC Earthforce. Earthforce is aLIKE.TG Employee Resource Groupthat focuses on sustainability.
1. How can tech-based companies reduce their environmental footprint?
Every company will need to find its own approach, but tech companies have three areas that can have the biggest impact. These are operations, product, and offices.
LIKE.TG is a tech company, so we can use it as an example. We have anet zero operations strategy, which means that our data centres and so on are carbon neutral. In September 2021, LIKE.TG announced itbecame a net zero companyacross its full value chain. It has also achieved 100% renewable energy for all its operations.
LIKE.TG also launched a sustainability focused product —Net Zero Cloud. Not every company has to create a dedicated product, of course. There are other things you can do, including working with partners that have sustainability as a core value.
Finally, there are things you can do in offices, but I’ll address that in the next question.
2. How do LIKE.TG employees become involved in sustainability initiatives? How can other companies encourage engagement?
Of course, my colleagues who are working on Net Zero Cloud are working on many sustainability projects. Let’s look at how we approach volunteering. Earthforce is our ‘green team’. It has chapters in our offices around the world that hold events, connect with local organisations, and advocate sustainability.
Many companies will have similar ways for individuals to effect change. I see three pathways:
First, there are the things you can do in your personal life. That might be changing your lifestyle or spreading awareness of sustainability issues.
Second, is affecting change within your office and immediate teams, which brings me back to the first question. When I first joined LIKE.TG, we were already on the path to becoming greener at the company level. But when you look at the office level — supplies, catering, etc. — there’s no global standard you can apply from a top-down point of view. It has to come from the ground up. You can find ways to move away from single-use plastic, to encourage the purchase of local supplies and produce, and so on.
Third, is making use of your professional influence. You can report to your organisation about inefficiencies and what’s having the biggest carbon footprint in your area. You can be the person that pushes your company to be more sustainable.
3. The LIKE.TG ecosystem is made up of many partner organisations. How do you negotiate your own sustainability ethos with theirs?
I personally believe that either we change or the world will force us to change. I can only do my best to influence others to make the right decisions for themselves. It’s not really a negotiation, more of an acceptance that ‘This is my ethos, and yours is yours. Let’s try and live together with these two realities’.
When your company has a well-known product, project, or ethos, you get asked questions. Those questions lead to opportunities to listen, encourage, and advise partner organisations on their own sustainability path.
LIKE.TG is a founding partner of theTrillion Trees initiativeand we have our Earthforce group. Just explaining how our equality groups operate inspires other companies and their employees to drive internal change.
4. What would you say to an organisation looking to assemble a ‘green team’?
You need self-motivated people, as they’re the most effective for the green team. Identifying those individuals is the first step. There has to be a grassroots element to it.
Then, drive executive sponsorship. This helps to define the scope and range of the team and helps them to make the best decisions.
Finally, bring wider visibility to the work of the team. This uncovers potential blindspots in their work and gives them a broader audience. This is especially useful when their work requires greater buy-in from more stakeholders. This visibility also spreads the word and drivers further advocacy, which brings in more people to the green team.
5. Over the coming years, what will be the biggest concern when it comes to sustainability in business?
My biggest worry is that everything stays as is. Relying on economic factors alone to change minds is going to be very hard.
For example, companies could understand the need for change, but they will look at the ROI and not see how they will benefit.
Of course, over time, it will become more and more obvious that we need to change. But we are running against the clock, so we need to take that leap of faith as individuals and companies.
To companies that are reluctant or don’t see the benefits, I would ask them to switch the ROI equation. I’d say to them that it’s not about how much it will cost to change, but the massive cost of not changing.
At LIKE.TG, we believe that business is the greatest platform for change. Success should be for everyone on Earth and the planet itself.Join our #TeamEarth.
Ready to make a difference?
Are you ready to take the first steps on your sustainability journey? Here are some ways to get started.
Look out for those who care about sustainability
Look out for passionate people in your organisation. They are the ones who make things happen. Create an environment where they have the opportunity to come forward.
Stay informed
Sustainability is an ever-evolving field. Keep an eye on public policy and global climate endeavours to ensure that you are always up to date.
Start tracking emissions
If businesses use technology to track sales, why wouldn’t they do the same for their annual greenhouse gas inventory? Innovative technology now allows industries to implement sustainability initiatives in a way that’s never been possible before.
For example,Net Zero Cloud 2.0(formerly Sustainability Cloud) has been completely rebuilt to offer trusted reporting, deeper insights, and supplier management.
Net Zero Cloud allows organisations to go carbon-neutral faster through Customer 360 solutions. Data-driven insights allow users to take meaningful action both on a day-to-day and long-term basis, whether through tracking emissions or finding clear methods of increasing energy efficiency. The platform also facilitates carbon accounting audits in weeks instead of months.
More than 74% of people living in the ASEAN regionbelieve that companies are responsible for fighting climate change. Platforms such as Net Zero Cloud are not only welcome, but integral to the future of business.
To learn more about how your business can be part of the sustainability movement, read more aboutNet Zero Cloud 2.0.
LIKE.TG was an official partner ofCOP26, the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conferenceheld in Scotland in 2021.
What Is a Trailblazer?
Trailblazers are truly the heart and soul of LIKE.TG. Everyone who wants to innovate and deliver success with LIKE.TG can be a Trailblazer.
LIKE.TG’s technology helps companies of all sizes deliver customer and employee success from anywhere. The customers, partners, and technology professionals that make up the LIKE.TG ecosystem are seeing endless growth and opportunity.
According to a recentIDC report, the LIKE.TG ecosystem will create 9.3 million new jobs and 1.6 trillion in new business revenues worldwide by 2026. This growth is powered byTrailblazers— the learners and innovators who use LIKE.TG to build successful careers, companies, and communities around the world.
LIKE.TG’s technology helps companies of all sizes deliver customer and employee success from anywhere. The customers, partners, and technology professionals that make up the LIKE.TG ecosystem are seeing endless growth and opportunity.
According to a recentIDC report, the LIKE.TG ecosystem will create 9.3 million new jobs and 1.6 trillion in new business revenues worldwide by 2026. This growth is powered byTrailblazers— the learners and innovators who use LIKE.TG to build successful careers, companies, and communities around the world.
So, what is a Trailblazer?
Trailblazers are truly the heart and soul of LIKE.TG. And we’ve made it our mission to pave pathways for anyone to unlock career opportunities and provide them with the tools needed to succeed.
Trailblazer /treyl-bley-zer/noun
A pioneer; an innovator; a lifelong learner; a mover and shaker.
A leader who leaves a path for others to follow.
Most importantly, a person who builds a better world for others.
We believe everyone who wants to innovate and deliver success with LIKE.TG can be a Trailblazer. Whether you’re just starting your career or reskilling for a new one. Whether you’re an experienced leader helping teams to deliver digital transformation or an entrepreneur building business apps.
The opportunities are truly endless, and we invite everyone to explore the possibilities. Here, we celebrate some of our amazing Trailblazers and explore how you can start your own Trailblazer journey.
Who are Trailblazers?
Trailblazers come from all walks of life and deliver success in a variety of roles.
Here are a few Trailblazer Stories to show the beautiful diversity of our community, pathways to success, and opportunities to give back:
Brian Owens, Business Systems Analyst
Brianand his fiance had a pivotal conversation about their future in January 2020. Soon after, Brian decided to pursue a tech career and went all-in on learning withTrailhead, LIKE.TG’s free online learning platform.
After many hours of studying, building apps in hisTrailhead Playground, and networking with theTrailblazer Community, Brian earned hisLIKE.TG Admin Certification.
Brian landed his first job as a LIKE.TG Business Analyst in April of 2020. He is eager to help others follow in his footsteps and co-hosts certification study groups and spreads the word about LIKE.TG to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs).
Erika McEvilly, Junior Developer
Erikawalked away from a successful business development career when she had her babies. After a few years, she decided to pursue flexible work and discovered LIKE.TG throughSupermums, a UK-basedTrailblazer Workforce Partner.
During her job search, Erika was encouraged to pursue aLIKE.TG Developer career. So she learned to code during the pandemic, with the help ofRAD Women Codeand Trailblazers around the world.
Today, Erika is a Junior Developer for a major financial institution and is paying it forward as co-leader of theLondon LIKE.TG Developer Community Group.
Tracy Lim, Head of CX for Retail
Tracystarted out as a risk analyst in the banking industry but quickly determined she belonged in marketing. After a stint in B2B sales where she honed her listening skills, Tracy’s leadership offered her an opportunity to break into the field.
She excelled at the blend of art and science, which led to opportunities to lead digital transformation and customer experience in the banking industry.
When Tracy attendedDreamforce, she discovered the power of peer connections and a passion for helping others. Tracy passes on her love of technology by makingTrailheadlearning and friendly competitions part of her team’s regular routine. She also leads theLIKE.TG Marketer Groupin Manila, Philippines.
Max Rudman, CEO
Maxis the CEO and founder ofProdly, an app that helps businesses automate low-code app development. Before Prodly, Max took a Configure-Price-Quote app from an idea to a thriving company that was acquired by LIKE.TG with 200+ employees.
In 2019, Max had newinspiration to solve app development challenges. He decided to build Prodly, which now has 50+ employees and 40+ five-star reviews onAppExchange. Max pays it forward by sharing experience and lessons learned with other entrepreneurs and always enjoys the mutual benefit of shared learning.
What’s the story behind the Trailblazer hoodie?
The creation of the iconic black hoodie is central to the Trailblazer origin story. In 2015, the Trailblazer spirit was thriving in our community, and we wanted to create a way for them to showcase that identity and spirit. So we created the first black hoodie with “Trailblazer” written across the front in script font.
Originally, Trailblazers earned hoodies by learning during LIKE.TG events. Now anyone who wants to wear their Trailblazer pride canget oneon the LIKE.TG Store.
We also givegolden Trailblazer hoodiesas a gift of gratitude to Trailblazers who share their stories of doing well and doing good at LIKE.TG events around the world.
How do you become a Trailblazer?
Anyone can be a Trailblazer with LIKE.TG. Here are a few ways to get started on your journey:
Connect with Trailblazers from Anywhere:Join theTrailblazer Communityto collaborate with Trailblazers online, and choose from more than 1,300 local and virtual community-ledTrailblazer Community Groupsin 90+ countries around the world.
Skill up on Trailhead:Build your tech and business skills onTrailhead, our free online learning platform.
Build your business:Learn how toextend the power of LIKE.TGwith apps andBuild Apps as an AppExchange Partner.
Share your inspiration and expertise:Encourage friends and family to explorecareer pathsin the LIKE.TG ecosystem. Provideanswersto product questions, and volunteer to help new Trailblazers skill up and find jobs throughTrailblazer MentorshipandTrailblazer Workforce Partners.
Trailblazers are the true heart and soul of LIKE.TG, and we love to succeed together. We can’t wait to hear your#TrailblazerStory. Please keep us posted on the Trailblazer Community and social!
Don’t forget to spread the word to your family, friends, and communities you love.
This post was originally published on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
How UEM Sunrise Secures Data and Strengthens Customer Trust
As more organisations move to a hybrid workplace and accelerate their digital transformation journeys, they must do so in a way that strengthens customer trust.
Protecting customer data and privacy is paramount, but far from easy. Organisations face a rapidly evolving threat landscape in which Asia is the most targeted region. They also face increased expectations from regulators and customers when it comes to handling sensitive data.
How can business, IT, and security teams work together to enhance data security in the all digital, work-from-anywhere world?
UEM Sunrise Berhad, a LIKE.TG customer, recently spoke at a webinar on Navigating the Security Frontier in 2022. UEM Sunrise Berhad is one of Malaysia’s leading property developers. Hasniza Binti Mohamed, Director, Digital Incubation at UEM Sunrise Berhad, shared how the company ensures the security and privacy of customer data:
Build secure experiences
To protect themselves and secure data, organisations need to build security into every experience—even when innovating at unprecedented pace.
UEM Sunrise Berhad makes sure to prioritise security when building new experiences. For example, Hasniza’s team works with the business to develop a standard operating procedure (SOP) at the outset of each project. This allows them to identify all security requirements and make them part of any tender process.
“As a user of technology, you want systems deployed as soon as possible. However, from a security perspective, there are a lot of measures to put in place first,” said Hasniza.
Take control of privacy through identity and access management
Many customers are willing to share their data in exchange for hyper-personalised experiences. At the same time, they want to trust their data is safe. This is particularly true for personally identifiable information (PII) such as medical or financial records.
To maintain customer trust, organisations need to take control of privacy at every stage of the data lifecycle. For UEM Sunrise Berhad, this includes taking the time to classify data and establish clear policies about who can access it.
UEM Sunrise Berhad also has plans to introduce Privileged Access Management (PAM).
“Users manage many systems within the business and even though they are aware of our SOPs and data governance policies, but there’s still the possibility of users sharing the permissions with other users. So, moving forward, we will use PAM to centralise the access at our corporate level. This will allow my team to monitor and take action to remove any unnecessary permissions,” said Hasniza.
Be proactive in creating a trusted digital environment
Proactively embedding security and privacy controls throughout an organisation can help to increase the pace of innovation while strengthening customer trust. For example, adopting techniques like data masking allows teams to build and test applications while protecting regulated data.
Organisations also need to be proactive in addressing the evolving threat landscape. One way UEM Sunrise Berhad tackles this is through proactive threat hunting.
“Cybersecurity attacks are increasing and we can’t always predict what’s next. What we can do is use proactive threat hunting with AI to simulate attacks and identify any gaps. This helps to bulletproof our environment and protect us against any new virus or breach,” said Hasniza.
The bottom line is that as companies go all-digital, they need to stay safe, secure, and compliant. Building secure experiences, managing identity and access, and creating a trusted digital environment are essential to success.
98% of Marketers Measure Success Based on Data Privacy Changes
It’s an exciting time to be a marketer. Customers are increasingly engaging online through new innovative formats. Disruptive trends and technology continuously shake up the virtual landscape. Through it all, marketers have been at the forefront of digital transformation, adapting to meet the challenges and opportunities of a changing business landscape.
In this digital-first era, marketing’s responsibility has evolved around two critical roles: the stewards of customer relationships and the engine fueling growth. Eighty percent of marketers say their organisation leads customer experience initiatives across the business, while 94% of marketers globally view the marketing function as critical for driving growth — up from 87% last year.
In our latest marketing research, the third edition of the Marketing Intelligence Report, we surveyed more than 2,500 marketing decision makers around the world to uncover how marketers are using data for growth and customer experiences. Plus, we discover how marketers are adapting to a privacy-focused data ecosystem and the trends shaping cross-channel marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of the key findings. You can download the whole marketing report here.
1. Those in marketing report that proving impact is crucial
Today’s marketer has a dual mandate: growing revenue and nurturing customer relationships. This is reflected in how marketers define success. In Singapore, the top three metrics for defining success are:
Customer acquisition
Brand awareness
Conversions, or desired action
Fewer than two in five marketers around the world report that they feel completely successful in evaluating any of these metrics definitively. When asked to name the challenges they face in evaluating performance, marketers in Singapore named the following:
Manual data integration processes
Siloed data
Alignment across teams on measurement and reporting
2. Privacy changes have led to shifts in marketing strategies and investments
Over the past few years, data privacy regulations — such as GDPR, Apple Mail Privacy Protection, and Google’s deprecation of the third-party cookie — have encouraged marketers to adopt a consumer-first, consent-based approach to data collection. At the same time, marketers are feeling downstream effects in their analytics as popular performance metrics like email opens are now less relevant as privacy policies preventing tracking are implemented. In fact, 98% of marketers in Singapore agree that recent data privacy changes have fundamentally changed how they measure marketing performance.
Marketers are relying on technology to ensure they can continue to measure performance, understand their customers, and provide them with individualised experiences. In Singapore:
92% of marketers plan to either increase or maintain investments in marketing analytics
91% of marketers plan to either increase or maintain investments in customer data platforms
96% of marketers plan to either increase or maintain investments in real-time interaction and personalisation
Speaking of investments, more than half of marketers around the world have increased their investment in paid social, mobile marketing, and web experiences — places where customers shop and do business online. This comes as no surprise as 58% of consumers expect to do more online shopping after the pandemic than before, and 80% of business buyers expect to conduct more business online.
3. Data quality is paramount — but not universally accounted for
Regardless of their objectives, marketers need dependable data to demonstrate the value of their programs and drive outcomes. Nearly four in five marketers around the world say data quality is key to driving marketing-led growth and customer experiences.
Though marketers globally are investing in analytics technology, only 51% of marketing teams currently have employees dedicated to analytics, according to the marketing report.
As with all challenges, there’s room for opportunity. It’s time for organisations to use AI and automation to accelerate manual data integration and analytics processes, and free up marketing resources for more strategic, creative work.
4. Data-driven marketing cultures require a centralised view
Without a clear, holistic view of data, it’s hard to give meaning to data-driven marketing efforts. Our marketing report found 99% of marketers in Singapore emphasise the importance of having a complete, centralised view of all cross-channel marketing. Yet, 68% still evaluate the performance of their cross-channel marketing in silos, leaving plenty of room for improvement and integration.
Not only do marketers need to integrate data across business units and sources, they also need to share it to generate value, foster team-wide collaboration, and connect marketing to business outcomes. With data unified in one place, marketers are positioned to lead growth in their organisations and engage their customers.
Get Ready for LIKE.TG Live: Asia!
LIKE.TG Live: Asia is just around the corner. On 12 May, experts from LIKE.TG, industry-leading Trailblazers, and some special guests will gather to talk about how we can expect to work in the future. It promises to be an inspiring event, filled with advice to get you ready for the future of work.
LIKE.TG Live: Asia is an online event, meaning you can watch from anywhere. You can register your place now.
We have a host of engaging speakers lined up. First up, we are very excited to welcome Simon Sinek to join us to talk about resilience, and how it can be a foundation for business growth.
Resilience as a platform for growth
We all know the importance of bouncing back from setbacks, but did you know that building resilience in your organisation can have a positive effect on the bottom line?
Organisations that foster resilience have more engaged employees, are more productive, and have better financial performance.
Simon and Chin Yin Ong, Chief People Officer at Grab, will discuss how you can foster a culture of resilience in your organisation. Simon will also answer your questions, and leave you with some practical takeaways to help you build resilience, both personally and within your teams. The conversation will be moderated by Sujith Abraham, Senior Vice President and General Manager, ASEAN.
Simon Sinek
Simon is the author of multiple best-selling books including Start With Why, Leaders Eat Last, Together is Better, Find Your Why, and The Infinite Game. He presented his first TED Talk in 2009. It has since become the third most watched talk on TED.com, with over 40 million views.
Chin Yin Ong
Chin Yin is the Chief People Officer at Grab.She leads the People Operations (Pops), Grabber Technology Solutions (GTS) and Corporate Real Estate and Security (CREST) teams to build positive and personalised experiences for all Grabbers to thrive.
Sujith Abraham
Leading the ASEAN team, Sujith’s focus is to ensure the success of our customers, partners, employees, and community. Be inspired by his take on building a resilient team across the region
What else is happening at LIKE.TG Live: Asia?
There’s more in store! See a live product demo from a LIKE.TG customer and hear insights from LIKE.TG experts. Maybe catch a surprise or two.
Insights from visionary leaders: Sujith Abraham and Cecily Ng will discuss new ways to inspire employees and navigate change, and our vision for how the future works.
Lessons from technology Trailblazers: You’ll hear about innovation from Trailblazer Ninja Van Group, and see how Tokopedia uses LIKE.TG to stay connected to customers, partners, and employees.
Hear about our new core value: sustainability
We’ll talk about why sustainability matters and what you can do to kickstart efforts towards Net Zero in your organisation.
Register now for LIKE.TG Live: Asia
LIKE.TG Live: Asia kicks off at 10 a.m. Singapore time on Thursday 12 May. Register now to submit your questions for Simon Sinek. Remember, it’s a 100% virtual event, so you can participate from anywhere.Grab your seat at LIKE.TG Live: Asia 2022!
Intelligent Triaging and Automated Routing: How Service Cloud Enables Faster, Better Customer Servicing
Ever wondered how doctors in a busy emergency ward decide which patient they need to prioritise? The answer is triage.
Triaging is the meticulous process of categorising patients according to the severity of their conditions. This way, the limited resources — doctors, support staff, and equipment — are immediately directed to tend to critical patients in need of urgent attention.
This triaging process is widely used in the world of customer service as well.
Triaging and routing in customer service
Customer service teams are forever busy solving problems and answering questions. One way your customer service team works is by deciding which tickets to prioritise.
A triaging system reviews every ticket to assess for business impact and severity. If your customers raise complaints about an issue that has halted their core business processes, that issue will be assigned the highest priority. Issues raised by many but are not severe will be placed lower in the queue.
Triaging helps streamline the customer service and support process, routing the right tasks to the right agents. Tickets raised by several users or on recurring issues can be collated for a complete picture to understand the root cause.
Levelling up customer service with intelligent triage and automated routing
However, manual triaging can be time consuming and take a lot of effort. With human error creeping in, high-priority tickets could get ignored, or worse, some may ping-pong around.
Did you know that you can automate and streamline the triage and routing process using Artificial Intelligence (AI)? AI models help analyse service tickets in the context of requirement and purpose for accurate resolution. By analysing the ticket repository, AI can also help highlight trends and patterns in issues your customers face.
LIKE.TG Service Cloudensures tickets are routed to the right team and the right member in it, based on their level of experience, expertise, and knowledge. This way:
No one is working on tickets they can’t handle
Tickets are not missed or ignored
Nor are they bouncing around in the system
WithService Cloud Einstein, you can use AI to analyse incoming tickets for intelligent triaging andautomated routingand get the next best step recommendations.Intelligently assign tickets to the right person based on skill set, availability, capacity to handle, and business priorities. Also, tickets are assigned in real-time with an in-context view of the customer across all channels to offer relevant and well-informed assistance anytime, anywhere.
You can also deploy bots on the front line to service the more routine issues. This will eliminate the hold time as bots can immediately engage your customers. In case of complex requests, these bots can help reduce the ticket handling time by collecting and qualifying customer information for seamless handoff to service reps.
As a result, you have ensured the following benefits:
High-priority tickets always receive immediate attention
Customer service agents gauge the relative volume and priority of work for enhanced efficiency and outcomes
Analytics (average wait times, average handle times, and service level agreement adherence) to diagnose, react and fix problem areas faster
Operational insights: what is the volume of work your agents are handling, how long they’ve spent in certain statuses, and how often they accept versus decline work
Improved customer engagement by eliminating hold time and case handle time
With Service Cloud, you can streamline your service team’s processes to improve customer satisfaction and case resolution. Consistent and efficient customer support gives you the confidence to focus on your business goals rather than on daily operational issues.
This post was originally published on the I.N.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
How Do We Make Customer Centricity More Than a Tagline?
A little while back, I had a conversation with best-selling author and digital anthropologist, Brian Solis. He’s also LIKE.TG’s Global Innovation Evangelist. The main focus of our conversation was customer centricity, which is a phrase we hear a lot these days.
Brian sometimes describes himself as a futurist — another word we hear a lot. I’ll let Brian describe exactly what that means to him:
“Digital anthropology lets us understand how technology impacts communities. If you want to deliver better customer service for a digital-first brain, you need to understand what it is that they value, and what they expect. It helps to humanise the business, giving technology a sense of greater purpose. We’re going full steam ahead on digital, and we tend to make it transactional. We miss that warmth, and technology’s power to develop more meaningful relationships. The role of a futurist is to translate those trends. We ask what the next few years are going to look like, so that we can start to plan ahead rather than react to the next disruption.”
I really enjoyed my conversation with Brian. Here are my takeaways, including how we can make customer centricity more than just a tagline:
What does customer centricity really mean?
As Brian said in our conversation, you could ask any executive from any company in any industry whether their organisation is customer centric, and they would say yes.
That presents us with a challenge: how can we define customer centricity? Many organisations use it as a philosophy, but perhaps don’t have the tools to turn that into practical activity.
In reality, being customer centric comes down to whether or not your operations, decision-making, and planning are all based on the information you have about your customers. That data has to be accessible to everyone. If you don’t have a single source of truth about your customers, it is very difficult to be truly customer centric.
Brian told me about some research that we’ve conducted recently. It found that only 13% of businesses around the world have a single view of their customers and can act in real time based on that data. That means we still have a long way to go before every company is truly customer centric.
The gift of customer service
Customer service teams have the opportunity to drive the move to total customer centricity.
It could be said that customer service is often a weak link in the customer journey. You don’t often hear customers telling stories of being excited to contact customer service, after all.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Some of the best companies in the world have turned excellent customer service into a competitive advantage. As Brian puts it: “Service means to serve, to help, to advise. If you think about it, it’s a gift. You might have a customer who’s in need of attention. And if you can deliver that, then they will feel a sense of reciprocity. That can turn into loyalty in the form of an additional purchase down the road, or a referral. And these are all wonderful things.”
Successful businesses share the desire to deliver a better experience. An experience is an emotional reaction to a moment. If it’s exceptional, you’re going to remember it. This is where many businesses make mistakes. They either deliver bad experiences, or they deliver mediocre experiences thinking that it just checks the box. It takes effort, and the right organisational structure, to deliver exceptional experiences.
A reset moment for business
We have an opportunity to reinvent what it means to do business. This isn’t about the digitisation of old practices. We can invent new ways of working using the technology available to us.
Part of this big reset moment is changing how we think about our data, and what metrics we choose to concentrate on. Measuring clicks to resolution, or response times, is measuring the barriers to customer satisfaction.
What would happen if, instead, we started to measure the things we want to succeed at — satisfaction, lifetime value, etc.? These are human centred metrics that will ensure that we focus our efforts on improving the customer experience.
Brian says we need to have a ‘control-alt-delete’ moment: “Customers now have a more powerful voice that is being exercised through their digital transformation. The next wave of disruption is happening because people are looking for, and finding, better experiences. So, if we want to become truly customer centred, we have to start thinking like the customer and looking for ways to fix what’s broken. We have to innovate and deliver something new that we might not have otherwise thought of before.”
The ‘experience style guide’
Brian also introduced me to the concept of the ‘experience style guide’.
Many organisations have a style guide that dictates how their marketing materials should look, or their tone of voice. How many have a document that defines what customer service should feel like for the customer? It has the power to become a very important piece of policy for any business. An understanding of your business’s experience style guide would be just as important as understanding its branding or marketing messaging.
You can empower your customer service teams by reminding them that they are a key part of your organisation. Their efforts are a meaningful driver of positive customer experience, and have a direct effect on the value of the brand.
It’s time for C-suite engagement
This kind of change in attitude should come from the top.
To succeed, your organisation needs a culture of innovation, a culture of empowerment, and a culture of customer centricity. The CEO is the only one who could own that.
It can be incredibly difficult for executives to find the time to engage with this kind of thinking. In between meetings, we’re usually catching up on our inboxes, or dealing with dozens of competing priorities. Sadly, this makes it difficult to have that empathy that’s really required to understand your customer, and to know what a day in their life is like.
The advice I would give is to become your customer. Try a reverse-mentorship with an employee, or with a customer who lives life differently than you. That way, you can understand their needs.
For more insights into how customer service is the backbone of your brand, download our State of Service report.
Growth Plan for the Future: Prepare Your Business and Employees
Preparing a growth plan for the future is essential for small businesses. One of the biggest reasons small businesses fail is a lack of planning. A surprising number of business leaders haven’t prioritised tangible growth strategies and haven’t expanded the size, revenue, and scope of their small businesses.
Below, we outline five easy steps businesses can take to create a growth plan for the future.
5 tips to create a winning future growth plan
A future growth plan is simply a blueprint for how companies plan to hit their targets over a certain period of time. Most growth plans cover a relatively short time — usually one or two years — but some businesses create plans that extend well beyond that.
Future growth plans help companies lock down their objectives and focus on ways to meet those objectives. This gives investors a clearer vision of their future.
Here are five ways that companies can create a successful future growth plan:
1. Establish your differentiator
Your value proposition will go a long way towards determining the success of your business. Do you offer better prices than your competitors? Are you a knowledge leader in a particular space? Perhaps your service, or the customer experience you offer, is what sets you apart. Whatever your value proposition is, make sure that it’s crystal-clear to your audience.
If you look at your organisation and can’t figure out what exactly sets you apart from the competition, then chances are your customers can’t either.
2. Identify your ideal customer
Once you know what your value proposition is, you’ll know who might benefit the most from it; that’s your ideal customer. Once this target audience is identified, you can figure out the best ways to reach them. Spend time discovering:
which channels do they use the most
how they like to engage
what messaging do they respond to
how do your competitors target this audience
Once you have as much information as possible about your ideal customer, you can begin to craft an omnichannel strategy and leverage digital solutions like Marketing Cloud and Social Studio to reach them where they spend most of their time.
3. Analyse your revenue streams
The biggest reason businesses fail is that they’re simply not generating enough revenue. It’s critical that businesses evaluate their revenue streams and try to optimise them. Which pipelines are working; which aren’t? Why are some revenue streams not producing as expected; why are others booming? Are there any new revenue streams that can be added?
This shouldn’t be a one-off evaluation; it needs to be a regular occurrence. New technologies and changing customer behaviour can drastically affect the viability of existing revenue streams. So it’s important to monitor them regularly and make the needed adjustments.
4. Learn from your competitors
Unless they’re creating a category, no one begins at the top. You’ve most likely started a business because you’ve identified a gap in the market or a problem that needs to be solved, so you know how you’ll fit into the marketplace.
The next step is to look around the market and see who’s succeeding. Try to figure out where they’re falling short, what they’re doing well, and what you can do better. We’re in an age of sky-high expectations for customer service, digital experiences and personalised communications, so the bar for keeping up with the competition has never been higher.
5. Maximise talent
Ideally, your future growth plan should help you maximise your value proposition, and to do that, you need to maximise your talent. Once you know your differentiator and your target audience, you can put together a workforce with skills that are aligned with your goals. Finding highly motivated, inspired employees is a great place to start – skilling them up to be agile and work across functions is even better.
Where will your future growth plan take you?
Creating a future growth plan helps businesses become what they want to be, whether that’s one, two, five or ten years down the line. It helps establish a shared vision and a set of common goals, making it easier to align teams and pitch to investors. Most of all, helps businesses stay on the course to success.
To get started on creating your future growth plan, discover how to engage your ideal customer with personalised communication with AI and build your ideal app with zero coding knowledge.
What Is LIKE.TG AppExchange and How Can I Use It?
LIKE.TG Customer 360 is the world’s number one customer relationship management (CRM) platform. We have solutions to match any organisation size, industry, and business structure. But what if you could take that CRM and make it even better? That’s where AppExchange comes in. AppExchange is the most trusted enterprise cloud marketplace of apps and experts for your business needs. It has recently celebrated 10 million installs, and more than 91% of LIKE.TG customers have at least one app integrated within their CRM solution.
What can I find on AppExchange?
If you have a problem to be solved, or a question to be answered, chances are there is an app or expert on AppExchange that will help to meet your needs. There are thousands of pre-built and customisable apps tailored to specific industries, departments, and use cases. It’s not limited to apps either. On AppExchange, you can also discover:
Components that allow you to build apps and customise pages
Pre-built solution packages
LIKE.TG Labs apps — a collection of free apps built by LIKE.TG employees
Trailblazers from around the world in our dedicated Trailhead Community groups
Certified LIKE.TG consultants to help you with integrations and implementations
How do I use AppExchange?
Regardless of whether you have a specific problem, or you’re simply curious about what’s out there, the AppExchange homepage is a good place to start. From there, you can check out curated collections of apps and experts , find a list of consultants ready to create a bespoke fix for you, check out the trending apps, or read customer stories for inspiration. If you’re a return visitor, AppExchange provides recommendations based on who you are and what you’ve browsed in the past.
Of course, if you have a particular question in mind, a comprehensive list of solutions is only one search away.
AppExchange partners share their stories
With its thriving ecosystems of partners, AppExchange provides solutions as unique as the problems they’re solving. Below, we’ve shared just a handful of the many success stories we’ve seen from AppExchange partners. For more inspiration, you can take a look at the AppExchange customer stories.
Knowesis helps a large Thai bank transform its customer engagement
Based in Singapore, and with offices across APAC and beyond, Knowesis specialises in providing a centralised real-time view of customer attributes. It partnered with LIKE.TG to deliver key capabilities a large Thai bank needed to adopt LIKE.TG Marketing Cloud for campaign management.
Throughout the customer journey, Knowesis processes data from the bank’s core systems, allowing it to monitor customer transactions and provide personalised offers in real-time.
Through this partnership with Knowesis, the bank was able to:
Enhance its customer experience by reacting in real-time
Engage with customers through next-generation digital channels
Maintain capabilities provided by its legacy campaign management system, especially key governance features
Implement behavioural tracking, offer management, and a granular contact policy
Read more about Knowesis and their ready-to-use plug-in activities for Marketing Cloud Journey Builder.
Blufy helps schools, universities, and training centres manage their operations
Blufy is part of ‘TechMatrix’, a top tier LIKE.TG partner with a strong focus on education. Blufy is a student- and school-management platform built natively on LIKE.TG. It provides a ready-to-use, subscription-based platform for education institutions to manage student engagement, school operations, and CRM related areas.
It has helped its customers, including schools across Singapore, to:
Automate multi-centre school operations, including class and sessions scheduling, and attendance and assessment tracking
Publish courses and programs, and capture enquiries and applications directly into their CRM systems via configurable web forms
Streamline revenue management by automating billing and invoicing based on various fee and payment plans
Improve student engagement via self-service student and parent portals for class schedules, fee payments, student requests, etc.
Calendaring and resource management to allocate teachers, rooms, and other resources to classes via a drag-and-drop interface
Real-time insights into business performance for decision making
You can find out more about Blufy’s Student School Management Platform on AppExchange.
eBest provides digital transformation services for the consumer packaged goods industry
For the past 22 years, eBest has been serving world’s top Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands across more than 30 countries. It specialises in RTM (route-to-market) digital transformation IT services, optimising their customers’ retail execution and further increasing sales.
With a presence in Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Latin America, it is devoted to providing agile services and innovative products to enable customer success.
eBest has worked with a major soft drinks company in Asia, using its eBest iMarket and iMentor Solutions. The eBest Mobile platform integrated with their customers’ SAP and business intelligence systems to provide a fully automated sales operation to better control business outcomes.
Supervisors at that company gained real time insights to proactively address market issues and ensure 100% sales call completion.
Take a look at eBest’s automation, route plan, retail execution, and order management solution on AppExchange.
Top 10 KPIs for Email Marketers
Email marketing never works when the mentality is “set it and forget it.” Think of your process like a lab. To figure out what’s working and what needs improvement, you need to always be analysing your results. The key to proper analysis is having the right email marketing KPIs (key performance indicators).
Identifying the right KPIs always depends on the nature of your business: “Success” varies a lot if you’re selling enterprise software to executive buyers, versus sneakers to anyone who wants them. Plus, theaccelerated transition to the digital-first customerhas added extra nuance on top of this already complicated process. For example, changes to privacy rules such asApple’s mail privacy protectionshave made open rates difficult to accurately track.
However, there are some baseline KPIs that almost every email marketer should be using. Here are 10 email marketing KPIs to help you understand how well your messages are connecting and make adjustments to boost success.
1. Delivery rate
Delivery rate is the percentage of emails delivered. ((Number of sends) – (Number of Bounces)) / (Number of Sends).
Did your intended audience receive your email? This is where everything should start when reviewing your campaigns. If your emails aren’t successfully delivered to inboxes or are going directly to spam, your offers and content, regardless of how compelling, aren’t being received.
2. Click-through rate
The click-through rate is the percentage of clicks once an email is opened. (Unique Clicks) / (Delivered Emails).
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of email recipients who not only opened your email but also clicked on at least one of the links in the email. Marketers can use this to measure the strength of the email’s content, messaging, or offers. Combining this with web conversion (coming later!) can indicate whether your email and web messaging are aligned to create a relevant, consistent, and successful customer journey.
3. Clicks by link/URL
These are unique clicks on a link within a single email or across many emails. They are sometimes tracked by aliases or UTM parameters.
It’s also critical to knowwhatpeople are clicking on. A high CTR can look nice on the surface, but what if all those clicks are for the unsubscribe button? Or maybe your customers are clicking a link early in the email and not the main call to action you built your campaign around. Tracking clicks by link can help you identify what is grabbing people’s attention and that the flow of your email is working as intended.
4. Event lag
Event lag is the average time that passed between the click and send time.
Okay, so we know if someone has clicked, and what exactly they’re clicking on: But how long did it take for them to get there? Event lag is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your subject lines, preheaders, and the content of the email itself. With this measurement, you can understand if customers are moving quickly to open your emails, or letting them languish in their inboxes.
5. Bounce rate by bounce type
Bounce rate is the percentage of messages rejected by the email client (e.g., Google, Apple). Calculation: (Bounces) / (Sends).
While delivery rate is one of the key email marketing KPIs, it doesn’t tell the whole story. If your email isn’t reaching your customers’ inboxes, you need to understand why. This could occur for a variety of reasons, such as an invalid email address, a full inbox, a down server, or mail that was simply too large for the recipient’s inbox. Bounces are typically organised into a few categories, including:
Block.Bounces resulting from a complaint, blocklist, content, URL block, or authentication error.
Hard.Bounces caused by an unknown domain or user, or syntax error.
Soft.Bounces resulting from a full or temporarily inactive mailbox, or temporary domain failure.
Technical.Number of bounces caused by the server, data format, or network error.
It’s important to track emails that have “bounced” — and why — so you can avoid bounces in the future. For example, block bounces are indicative of mismanagement on the marketer’s end, while soft bounces are typically out of the marketer’s control.
6. Unsubscribe rate and complaint rate
The Unsubscribe rate is the percentage of unsubscribes per deliveries.
The complaint rate is the percentage of complaints per deliveries. A complaint is logged when a subscriber flags the email as spam.
While unsubscribes can be demoralising, there is a lot that can be learned from them. It’s critical to set benchmarks for these. What is your average unsubscribe rate per email? It’s natural that some churn will happen: For example, a company that targets parents with young children will have to continuously scrub and update their lists as those customers’ children outgrow that brand or product.
On the other hand, high unsubscribes and complaints for a specific email, or over a specific time period, are a flashing red flag for change, whether it’s your targeting, frequency, messaging, channel, or product offer. By drilling down into the details of the subject lines and content by segment for each send, you can understand mistakes to avoid in the future.
7. Web traffic and conversions
Web traffic and conversions and sales are the bread and butter of email marketing. Almost every email campaign is leading customers to some sort of web property where a conversion can happen. Yet this is often left untracked, as it requires connecting two data silos: email and web.
This typically calls for adding UTM parameters to email links to easily harmonise emails and campaigns sent in your email automation tool with web pages in your web analytics tool.
Doing so is worth the effort, as these metrics indicate the percentage of recipients who completed the email’s intended purpose, such as converting online to visit, purchase, download, or complete a similar call to action.
These are particularly important metrics for measuring ROI and optimising to meet your campaign goals.
8. Campaign performance (by campaign and by email)
Emails are almost never ad-hoc. They’re part of a larger customer journey, whether that’s a series of emails or a much more complex web of messaging across many channels. Oftentimes, a single email will be used in multiple journeys, at different stages or for different audiences.
No matter the case, it’s critical for email marketers to not look at their email performance in one silo or another: They must examine email performance by campaign,andperformance for specific emails.
Creating distinct email marketing KPIs for each can help; for example, click-through rate for a whole campaign versus click-through rate for individual emails across multiple campaigns. Doing this will help you understand why a campaign is working or not, and which emails to use in future ones.
9. Subscriber list growth and trends
Your subscriber lists are behind all of this. Are they growing? Are they stagnant? Declining? Tracking the health of your various lists and segments is a vital indicator of how your emails are performing over time, and if your email sign-up CTAs are effective.
It’s particularly critical to view subscriber list health in context of specific campaign and email performance. Try looking at other KPIs mentioned previously (such as CTR, bounces, delivery rate) and list growth for the same period. Is there a correlation in low CTR and stagnant email list growth?
Perhaps complaints jumped from a specific email to a list segment, and your list declined in response. These can all give you indications on what to improve in the future.
10. Most and least engaged subscribers
Likewise, it can be a great exercise to regularly analyse which subscribers in your lists are most and least engaged. High engagement may indicate a customer with high brand loyalty, who maybe should be targeted in an upcoming loyalty offer.
Low engagement, on the other hand, may mean they need to be re-targeted; or perhaps, be removed from your lists altogether. After all, the size of your lists ultimately is not what’s important. It’s how many people on those lists are actually engaging with your content.
While email marketing continues to change, the core principles have remained the same: Give your customers something of value, and they’ll return the favor.
Tracking your success in doing this, however, requires an agile mindset. While these email marketing KPIs can help get you started, you shouldn’t stop there. Always keep learning, testing, and evolving.
