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AI Is Here and It’s Rewriting the Way Call Centres Work
These days, AI seems to be everywhere and in everything — from our cars and refrigerators, to our food delivery services, sleep measurement apps, even our toothbrushes. It’s been called the holy grail of computing. But what exactly is AI?
Put simply, it’s a piece of code which derives its intelligence from existing data to solve problems and make complex decisions easier and faster. That makes it extremely useful in automating repetitive business tasks, uncovering opportunities for growth, engaging with customers at scale, and saving costs.
These benefits are very evident in the call centre scenario.
Make every service experience memorable with AI
Gone are the days when customer support was perceived as a cost centre. Today, business leaders recognise good customer service as a way to differentiate their organisation, boost customer trust, and catalyse business growth. In fact, 78% of service agents say their company views them as brand ambassadors.
But to live up to these expectations, agents have to be empowered with the right tools. This is especially true in a COVID-19 world where the majority of service professionals (75%) say that managing case volume has become more challenging. Not only are they dealing with a rise in cases, but they’re also facing more complex cases with anxious customers who are harder to satisfy.
Here’s where AI-powered tools can help. They enable agents to be more productive, find answers quickly, deliver smarter recommendations, and make better-informed decisions. AI chatbots can also help customers self-resolve issues faster.
6 ways AI can add value to your service organisation
Here’s a look at how AI tools like Service Cloud Einstein can be used in call centres to optimise both employee efficiency and customer satisfaction:
Auto-triaging cases: As case volumes go up, AI can help your call centres do more with less by quickly triaging and routing cases. For instance, Einstein Case Classification automatically predicts and pre-fills case fields based on historical data. This saves agents valuable time and effort. Meanwhile, Einstein Case Routing uses machine learning to direct cases to the right queue in real time — so, customers don’t have to be kept waiting.
Recommending responses: Einstein Article Recommendations helps your agents find the right answers to customer cases quickly by surfacing the most relevant knowledge articles within the agent console itself. Einstein Reply Recommendations goes a step further by empowering agents with responses to common questions during chat and messaging conversations. This lowers case resolution time, while enhancing customer satisfaction.
Enabling customers to self-serve: Most customers (65%) prefer self-service for simple matters. So, it’s no surprise that AI-powered chatbots like Einstein Bots are becoming increasingly popular. They can immediately engage with customers to answer common FAQs, check the status of a claim, or provide personalised advice.
Using voice as digital medium: A solution like Service Cloud Voice can help transcribe the customer’s voice in real time, and route it to the AI engine in LIKE.TG to suggest the next best actions instantly. Let’s say a customer is on a live call with an agent, saying they’re unable to change the temperature on a recently purchased geyser. Based on their inputs, AI can automatically surface a trouble-shooting workflow. This makes it easy for the agent to choose the best course of action, and reduce the turnaround time.
Cross-selling and up-selling: Every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to build trust and loyalty. The challenge for agents is to know what to offer customers at what time. AI-powered tools like Einstein Next Best Action can help by automatically recommending products, offers, discounts, or actions that are most likely to boost customer satisfaction. Say, the customer has purchased a travel package. The next best action might be to offer them a good travel insurance plan, or connect them to a local transport service partner. This way, you maximise the impact of your customer interaction.
Uncovering actionable insights: Not too long ago, businesses could only analyse a fraction of customer calls — that too, manually. But with AI tools like Service Analytics, you can analyse customer interactions at scale, and derive practical insights on customer churn, CSAT scores, and contact centre performance. These insights delivered in real time can help you proactively adjust and optimise service to deliver the best possible customer experiences.
4 things to think about before adopting AI
Everyone wants a piece of the AI pie. But first, identify what exactly you want AI to do in your call centre. Then, determine whether or not the solution you select actually has those capabilities. If you aren’t clear about your objectives, then your agents will only end up with one more tool that isn’t really useful.
Some things to consider before you embark on your AI journey:
Data quality:AI models are only as good as the quality of data on which they’re built. So, pay attention to the completeness, accuracy, bias, consistency, and labelling of your data.
Employee learning curve:Ensure that your AI-enabled tools are intuitive, easy to use, and seamlessly embedded in your CRM. If employees have to struggle to use AI, then it won’t matter how powerful the tool is — it won’t yield optimal returns.
Out-of-the-box technology:Look for AI tools that are already robust, comprehensive, and flexible enough that they don’t have to be customised heavily. Too many customisations could result in costly technical debt.
Effort investment:You want an AI solution that can be rolled out swiftly and with minimal effort. Complex and lengthy implementation cycles will simply bog down the business.
LIKE.TG’s AI offering, Service Cloud Einstein is specially designed to meet these criteria. It can be implemented quickly with minimum customisation and rapid employee adoption. The best part is that Einstein is built right into Service Cloud, your service channels, and your CRM data — which makes it super-easy to roll-out and use. Agents don’t have to toggle between multiple tools when talking to customers. With all AI capabilities they need on a single screen, agents can coordinate service requests much more smoothly, and deliver connected service experiences that your customers love.
We’ve only just scratched the surface of AI’s potential. As the technology grows more sophisticated, it will undoubtedly unlock new opportunities to improve both customer and agent experiences, as well as revenue growth.
Find out more about our AI offering, Service Cloud Einstein.
This post was originally published on the LIKE.TG IN blog.
Being Human in the Time of Automation
If you’re like most people, you probably think there’s a good chance that AI or robots will have a significant impact on the global job market. Yet surveys also show that most of us think that these disruptive technologies are primarily going to affect someone elseーsomeone with a skill set or an educational background that lends itself to repeatable work. This is a risky assumption on everyone’s part, including mine.
AI and robotics aren’t just for everyone else to think about. The robots are not only coming —they’re already here. But that doesn’t mean we’re all out of a job. It means that we need to explore opportunities for ourselves and our teams tohumanise the future of workto complement and even enhance AI, automation, and productivity.
At LIKE.TG, we recently invited award-winning New York Times technology columnistKevin Rooseto discuss the impact automation is likely to have on our lives and jobs. Roose shared that AI and automation are already changing the way we work — particularly for highly-educated, white-collar workers, whose everyday jobs are already evolving thanks to AI.
Predicting the impact of automation technology on the future of jobs
In the course of research for his book “Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation,” Roose found that for hundreds of years, we’ve been predicting what machines can and can’t do — and that usually, we’re wrong.
Here are a few examples to his point:
“I can state flatly that heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.” —Lord Kelvin, 1895
“There is no prospect whatsoever that the employment of electronic digital computers in the field of translation will lead to any revolutionary changes.” —Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, 1962
“You won’t get the best seating or the best fares … what happens if you just press the wrong button?” —travel agency owner quoted in a 1984New York Timesarticle on the first automated ticket machines at airports
The disruptive technologies that would prove each of those predictions wrong went on to reshape economies and workforces forever. Yet at the time, each statement reflected widely-held beliefs. In the early 1980s, for instance, people were very skeptical that computers would ever meaningfully replace human travel agents. That changed quickly with the advent of travel-booking websites, which gave consumers direct access to making arrangements without a travel agency rep or the associated fees. Today, it’s a lot more likely that you use online sites to book everyday travel, except when using a travel agent is mandated as a workplace policy.
Where AI is changing the job landscape
Although many of us still think of robots on the assembly line as the typical agent of job displacement, AI has made advances in fields that many people never imagined were vulnerable to automation:
Healthcare: Machine-learning algorithms can diagnose some types of cancer or perform common X-rays with better accuracy than human radiologists. Other AI applications are in the works that can detect illnesses that range from cancers to Parkinson’s disease from smelling human breath.
Creative work: AI can compose music, write prose, build video-game levels, and write newspaper articles indistinguishable from human output.
Coding: Low-code or no-code development platforms take the complexity out of coding.
Analysis/pattern recognition: AI and machine learning are analysing data sets to identify patterns and trends. They are reporting real-time insights and can even predict, in some cases, what’s likely to happen next.
Influencers: Some of the biggest social-media influencers aren’t human — they areAI-designed models.
Lip-reading: While the average human accurately lip-reads 54% of the time, a deep network created byOxford and Google DeepMind scientists, LipNet, reached a 93%success score in reading people’s lips.
Creating AIs: Given the ability AI has to quickly process large data sets, it’s able to create child AI applications thatoutperform human-created AIs.
Listening: Whether it’s adding items to your shopping list, or producing meeting minutes from our Zoom calls, AI applications can more accurately capture and process what they hear than many humans.
When you hear stories like this, it’s easy to feel uneasy. Like many of us, as Roose was writing about the inroads AI was making, he got worried about his own replaceability as a journalist. He embarked upon a path to research how we can avoid being replaced by robots, which is the premise of the book and the bulk of his presentation.
How to future-proof your career
Now an important question: What can we do as individuals to protect ourselves from being replaced by AI and robots? First, the bad news: Pretty much every job as it exists today can, in some way, be automated. In all honesty, there isn’t any technology-proof job or career path for the long-term.
Now, the good news: Human creativity and resolve is at an all-time premium. And it’s not limited to big “C” creatives like (insert your favourite artist, composer, scientist, or performer).
This is not a time to panic — it’s a time to build on the roles and capabilities that can be automated to deliver new value at every level. Upskilling is now for everyone. We are all students again. Creativity, empathy, critical thinking, collaboration, data science, resilience, adaptability, and other “not-so-soft” skills are ranked as critical for everyone in apandemic worldand beyond.
As AI drives down the price of goods and automated services, it also increases the value of human goods and human experiences. It rewards those that are good at creating these new things in collaboration with machines.
With this in mind, there is one primary thing you can do to make your job a little more future-proof, regardless of what it is: not so ironically, be human.
The best way to differentiate yourself is through your humanity and creativity, not your productivity. Accentuate the human labor involved in what you do or what you make — whether it’s making a ceramic bowl, providing customer service, selling a technology product, or how you show up in any given moment to be present, aware, and ready to participate.
Think beyond using AI and automation to work as fast, at scale, and cheaply as possible. That’s what everyone else will do. Make that human touch more visible and more value-added. This is what the human economy is about: experiences and feelings that machines cannot replicate. Experiences are personal on every side. That’s what makes them special. They involve human beings and in reality, it’s that humanity combined with meaningful experiences, that we’re going to seek out and pay a lot for.
This post was originally published on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
What is a Relational Database? Features & Uses
A relational database is a type of database that stores and organises related data points. Data is organised into tables that are linked based on shared data. They are the most common type of database used by businesses today.
A database like this enables you to search across one or more tables with a single query. It also helps you understand the connections across your data so you can make better business decisions.
Relational databases are ideal for complex data analysis and operations. In a non-relational database, tables can share the same data but they can’t ‘relate’ to each other. With a relational database, they can.
One use of a relational database is connecting tables for customer data and transactions. A business will have both data sets but they may be siloed. A relational database brings these together.
For example, in the customer table, there may be fields for:
Customer ID
Customer Address
Customer Email, etc.
In the transaction table, there may be fields such as:
Customer ID
Transaction Amount
Item Purchased, etc.
As both tables contain a Customer ID, the tables can be related. This means a warehouse team can find the Customer Address that corresponds to the Customer ID, without this information being recorded as a separate data point on each transaction. Relating these data sets can also be used to produce reports, such as a customer statement.
We explore the features, uses, and benefits of a relational database below. Plus, we outline LIKE.TG’s relational data features.
Features of a relational database
Relational databases need ACID characteristics.
ACID refers to four essential properties: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability.
These features are the key difference between a relational database and a non-relational database.
Atomicity
Atomicity keeps data accurate. It makes sure all data is compliant with the rules, regulations, and policies of the business.
It also requires all tasks to succeed, or the transaction will roll back.
Atomicity defines all the elements in a complete database transaction.
Consistency
The state of the database must remain consistent throughout the transaction.
Consistency defines the rules for maintaining data points. This ensures they remain in a correct state after a transaction.
Relational databases have data consistency because the information is updated across applications and database copies (also known as ‘instances’). This means multiple instances always have the same data.
Isolation
With a relational database, each transaction is separate and not dependent on others. This is made possible by isolation.
Isolation keeps the effect of a transaction invisible until it is committed. This reduces the risk of confusion.
Durability
Durability means that you can recover data from a failed transaction.
It also ensures that data changes are permanent.
Uses and benefits of a relational database
Relational databases are often the backbone of a customer relationship management (CRM) system — such as LIKE.TG.
But tracking customer transactions is just one use case for a relational database. There are many others. We even use some in everyday life. For example, when you withdraw money from an ATM, your bank balance may instantly update on your mobile app if it’s using a relational database. This is because this scenario’s data point (“Account Balance”) is consistently updated across all platforms.
There are multiple benefits of using a relational database over a non-relationship database. And many of these affect other systems, including LIKE.TG.
Some of the main advantages of a relational database are:
Data consistency
As mentioned when we outlined ACID, a core part of a relational database is consistency.
A relational database model ensures that all users always see the same data.
This improves understanding across a business because everyone sees the same information. This ensures that nobody makes business decisions based on out-of-date information.
Data working together
All the data in a relational database has a ‘relationship’ with other data. Columns are built in a way that makes it easy to establish relationships among data points.
Data working together gives a more holistic view of all your data — including your customers.
Data flexibility
Relational databases allow for flexibility. Users can change what they see. And it’s easy to add additional data at a later time.
A relational database also allows for a subset of data to be viewed. This means you can hide certain data if some users only need access to a specific set of columns or rows.
Relational data features in LIKE.TG CRM
LIKE.TG’s CRM is built on a relational database.
LIKE.TG calls its tables “objects”. And these objects can relate to each other. These relationships can be used to share information and create connected views of data.
There are two types of relationships in LIKE.TG:
Lookup relationships
This is the most basic relational connection in LIKE.TG.
A lookup relationship links two objects so that you can “look up” one object from the related items on another object. Lookup relationships can be one-to-one or one-to-many.
A standard one-to-many relationship is an Account-to-Contact relationship. This allows you to connect several Contacts to a single Account.
A one-to-one relationship is when only one set of data needs to be related. For example, if you’re in real estate, you may have a Property object and a Home Seller object. The Property only has one Home Seller, so there is only one set of data that needs to be related.
Parent-child relationships
Parent-child relationships are harder than lookup relationships.
With these, one object is the parent, while the other is the child. The parent object controls some of the behaviours of the child object, such as who can view its data. It also means if you delete a parent object, you delete all the associated child objects.
As an example, you may have a parent-child relationship between Property and Offer. All offers are exclusive to one property. Should the property be taken off the market, you can remove the Property object to delete all of the associated offers from your system.
Parent-child relationships are used when objects are always related. When objects are sometimes related, this is a lookup relationship.
Why choose LIKE.TG
LIKE.TG gives you all the benefits of a relational database with the enhanced features of a CRM. Plus, LIKE.TG is taking CRM to the next level, with innovations such as LIKE.TG Einstein which utilises artificial intelligence.
LIKE.TG Customer 360 is the world’s #1 CRM system. It brings sales, service, marketing, commerce, IT, and analytics together. And it’s all made possible by a relational database.
The Future of Commerce – Connected Data, Headless, and More
If 2020 was a year of turbulence for commerce, the future of commerce is all about momentum.
The mass acceleration to digital has changed the customer experience forever, providingmore channels, choices, and flexibility. But each new offering sets the customer expectation bar a little higher, increasing the pressure on companies to deliver more at a faster pace.
To help teams prepare for what’s ahead, Lidiane Jones, LIKE.TG’s executive vice president and general manager of Commerce Cloud, offers her perspective on the future of commerce.
How has commerce changed over the last year?
Our customers are turning away from traditional channel planning and embracing a digital-first approach that brings more flexibility. Digital is also leading our customers to use their physical spaces in more intentional ways.In automotive, for example, dealers can know a lot about customers who research vehicles online before they ever walk through the door.
As I mentioned atDreamforce 2021, digital transformation is here to stay and commerce teams are betting on customer-centric experiences throughout all of it. Even B2B sellers are trying to understand the end user of their products. That’s not just to develop a better relationship with buyers, but to understand the feedback from their customers’ customers.
The key to all of this is data. More and more, companies are looking for full ownership of their data to get true insight into what shoppers or buyers want.
How can brands take the buying experience to the next level in 2022?
I recommend that brands step back, figure out their unique value proposition, and then apply the right strategy that will capture customers and keep them coming back for more.
Building a greatcustomer loyalty programis an important trend, but the approach depends on the brand. For some companies,sustainability is important. Their customers want to know if the brand is socially responsible. In other cases, it is about promotions or other financial incentives. It can also be about personalised experiences or social connections, like what brands a shopper’s friends are considering.
That could be a very different approach for some brands. How are teams preparing for the future of commerce?
Our Commerce Cloud customers talk a lot about choice and flexibility, which is something a fullheadless commerce implementationoffers. More and more, commerce teams are moving away from traditional architectures and choosing headless because it gives them the freedom to be agile and deliver compelling experiences faster across any kind of engagement channel, from social to mobile. Over the last 12-18 months we’ve focused on building the tools our Trailblazers need to build a connected experience where data isat the centre of everything.
Creating those highly personalised experiences across the customer journey can be really challenging. So, we are excited to give our customers the chance to deliver the most complex interactions withLIKE.TG CDP.
Speaking of planning, we’re getting close to the holiday shopping season. How can brands prepare for spikes in demand?
Profitability during peak shopping periods is all about preparation. Two things are top of mind for our customers. First, when you hit that peak demand, you’re wondering, “Will I have enough products? Will I have the right inventory to fulfill those needs?” You never want to be over or under. You want to be as close to what your demand is as possible, so having the data and tools to plan is essential.
The second thing is, “Am I going to be able to deliver in time for the customer’s needs?”
A lot of shoppers wait until the last minute to order. With ourlocation-based inventory capabilities, our focus has really been anchored to helping customers plan inventory effectively. They need to be prepared for what their demand is going to be and then optimise delivery times so they can meet consumer expectations in a cost effective way.
Beyond retail, what online buying trends do you see next year for other industries?
If you want to sell digitally with confidence, you have to be as immersive as possible. That’s why we’re seeing an incredible acceleration in emerging technologies. In automotive and manufacturing, we’re seeing a huge adoption of 3D virtual reality (VR) capabilities to help people research what they want to buy. Video selling for furniture is another example. You actually want to talk to someone before you buy a very expensive piece of furniture.
Another fast-growing trend is theinnovation across payments. If you are trying to buy a product that’s really expensive, or if you’re making a large B2B purchase, you want more flexibility in your cloud cash flow. Giving customers new payment options is a smart way to build repeat business and customer loyalty.
Speaking of social responsibility, how can brands become more sustainable and use this as a competitive advantage?
We have the responsibility and the opportunity to build businesses that are more sustainable.Net Zero Cloudgives companies a better view of how sustainably they’re running their businesses.
Commerce teams specifically worry about keeping waste to a minimum. A waste of inventory is a waste of resources. It’s more than a matter of financial hardship. We’re excited to create opportunities for environmentally conscious brands that want to adapt their business models to operate more sustainably.
The trend in retail, for example, is to buy products back and resell them. Some brands have customers who are really passionate about this. It’s become a great revenue source. But more importantly, it’s an embedded strategy that supports sustainability in a genuine way.
LIKE.TG Commerce Cloud empowers you to create seamless ecommerce experiences that inspire and convert today’s connected shoppers. Learn more about Commerce Cloud.
This post originally appeared on the US-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
6 Signs Your Business Needs a CRM
As your business grows, you might find that some of your processes are starting to show their weaknesses. Here are six signs that your business would benefit from a CRM system.
When people talk about Customer Relationship Management (CRM), they are usually referring to a system that helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more.
The goal of a CRM is simple: improve business relationships. By managing your customer information all in one place, you can track your customers’ journey from start to finish, right from the first interaction.
Small and medium-sized businesses face a huge range of challenges. These include: acquiring new customers, increasing sales revenue, simply finding the time to run their business, and so much more. CRM can help with all of these.
CRM can also help you address some of the challenges businesses have faced due to the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, enhancing digital customer experiences, or improving collaboration between remote workforces.
One more thing: operating your business without a CRM may be costing you money. By using a CRM, you can automate repetitive tasks, free your sales teams up to find more prospects, generate more leads, and win more deals.
So, how do you know when your business needs a CRM system? Drawn from our new CRM Handbook, here are some of the signs to look out for:
For details on this infographic, please click here.
Bringing the Power of Hyperforce to Indonesia
We’re delighted to share that Hyperforce is coming to Indonesia in late 2023. Delivered through our partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), any business will be able to deploy LIKE.TG apps and services in the region by leveraging the scale and agility of public cloud computing.
“Digitisation is the key to developing deeper relationships with customers and building a flexible workforce,” said Sujith Abraham, Senior Vice President and General Manager, ASEAN, LIKE.TG. “We are proud to bring the benefits of Hyperforce to organisations in Southeast Asia. With Hyperforce, organisations can unlock the ability to host data locally with the scalability of the public cloud as they grow and pursue innovation.”
LIKE.TG, Reimagined on Public Cloud
Hyperforce is a reimagination of our platform architecture built to securely and reliably deliver the LIKE.TG Customer 360, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Industries, and more, on major public clouds.
A complete re-architecture of LIKE.TG, Hyperforce delivers a powerful and scalable platform to support the success of our global customer base. Key features include:
Performance at B2B and B2C scale. With the elasticity of public cloud, customers can more easily access compute capacity as required to be more flexible and efficient. Hyperforce allows resources to be deployed in the public cloud quickly and easily — reducing implementation time from months to just weeks or even days.
Built-in Trust. Hyperforce’s security architecture limits users to appropriate levels of access to customer data, protecting sensitive information from human error or misconfiguration. Encryption, at rest and in transit, comes standard, ensuring the privacy and the security of data.
Local Data Storage. Through Hyperforce, customers around the world can choose to store data in a particular location to support compliance with regulations specific to their company, industry, and region.
Backwards Compatibility. Every LIKE.TG app, customisation, and integration, regardless of Cloud, will run on Hyperforce.
The Next Chapter for LIKE.TG Customers
LIKE.TG is committed to accelerating our customers’ digital transformations by empowering them to grow, fast and at scale, on our trusted platform.
Through our partnerships with major public cloud providers like AWS, LIKE.TG will continue to deliver Hyperforce around the world. We will empower our global customer base to enter new markets and succeed from anywhere, while ensuring customer trust by remaining compliant with local regulations.
How To Find, Win, and Keep New Customers in 2022
Building a customer base has always been a big test for startups and small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). This has become an even greater challenge over the past two years.
What’s changed? Customers now expect more from businesses than they did before.
They desire a richer experience when they are shopping online or have a question. They also want to access personalised services at any time, and are much more likely to deal with companies that meet their needs.
Keeping up with changing customer expectations affects the vast majority of modern businesses. In fact, 72% of participants in this year’s global State of Marketing report said that meeting customer expectations has become harder over the past year. The same survey found that the greatest challenge businesses faced in 2021 was delivering real-time customer engagement.
There are similar insights in LIKE.TG’s latest Small and Medium Business Trends Report, in which SMBs highlighted the key challenges they are facing:
Personalising customer engagements
Providing a connected experience
Responding to enquiries quickly
This shift means businesses need to think afresh about how to find, win, and keep customers.
Instead of traditional advertising and marketing, many find that improving how they collect and analyse customer data delivers the best results.
Already, 85% of small businesses use data to drive their customer engagement, according to the State of Marketing survey. Just 38% of respondents are satisfied with the completeness of their customer data.
The good news is that there are tech tools that can help SMBs collect better data and use it more effectively. Consider using these tools to identify, attract, and retain new customers in 2022 and beyond:
FIND customers with Pardot and Marketing Cloud
For most SMBs, finding customers is one of many competing priorities. If you’re focused on developing a product or service that people will love, there’s often not much time left for identifying leads.
That’s when solutions such as Pardot and Marketing Cloud can be very useful. They help SMBs create meaningful connections with customers, capture high quality leads, and achieve more conversions. Already, 2.8 million SMBs rely on Pardot to help them find customers.
There are several ways that Pardot and Marketing Cloud can help you find more customers:
They allow you to automate a wide range of processes, thus improving efficiency and freeing up resources.
They work seamlessly with LIKE.TG, enabling SMBs to effectively use the data they have already gathered.
Data Studio provides sophisticated marketing analysis.
With Pardot and Marketing Cloud, you can quickly build personalised, data-driven email campaigns. You can reach customers on their preferred channels, which should speed up your return on investment.
Pardot also generates insightful ROI reporting, so you can understand which elements of your strategies are working.
These features deliver real results. With Pardot, customers have seen sales revenue increase by 34% and marketing effectiveness increase by 37% on average.
WIN customers with Sales Cloud
As customers seek businesses that truly ‘know’ them, SMBs respond by accelerating their investment in sales tech. Fifty-three percent of growing businesses surveyed in the SMB Trends Report said they have already done this.
Many of those businesses are adopting Sales Cloud, one of the modules that runs on the LIKE.TG platform. Sales Cloud provides companies with the tools needed to modernise how they sell and how customers buy in a digital-first, work-from-anywhere world.
Some of the most powerful features are:
Rich customer activity timelines that allow you to track sales opportunities and move forward faster.
Advanced automation for most daily sales tasks, including activity tracking and email alerts.
A mobile app that allows you to access, manage, and update CRM data on the go.
Sales Cloud powers every aspect of your sales process with a 360-degree view of the customer. With all your customer data in one place, your sales team can contribute to each sale. No more spreadsheets, searching through emails, or looking for a sticky note. You can also take advantage of AI-powered sales tools to automate day-to-day processes. This frees up your sales team to concentrate on winning more deals.
Like other LIKE.TG products, Sales Cloud has an intuitive interface that makes winning a customer a hassle-free process. It also features real-time dashboards to empower and accelerate your decision making.
KEEP customers with Service Cloud
For many SMBs, retaining customers after the first sale is perhaps the most challenging aspect of growing a customer base.
As customers become more selective, it’s far from certain that one sale will lead to another. In fact, more than half of all SMBs around the world have now invested in customer service software, according to the SMB Trends Report.
The data speaks for itself. Ninety-one percent of customers agree that a positive customer service experience makes them more likely to make another purchase. More than 70% of customers say that they have made a purchase decision based on the quality of the customer service. Fifty-eight percent have said that their customer service expectations have risen over the past two years.
LIKE.TG’s Service Cloud solution is the ideal choice for businesses hoping to establish and maintain high levels of personalised customer service. It allows SMBs to:
Engage with customers on their favourite channels
Serve them faster with automated workflows
Deploy AI-powered chatbots for 24/7 responsiveness
Service Cloud also makes it easy to set up self-service options for your customers. That way, customers can easily access knowledge articles, information about their accounts, and community support 24/7.
Get the tools to succeed in 2022
The past two years have tested customer-focused businesses around the world. 2022 seems likely to be another challenging year.
The SMBs that successfully build their customer bases will be the ones that deliver excellent customer experiences.
As you move forward, let LIKE.TG be your trusted partner. LIKE.TG has the solutions you need to find, win, and keep new customers.
Read more about the LIKE.TG tools available to small and medium-sized businesses.
Introducing New Made-for-Singapore Digital Skills Learning Paths
Businesses are grappling with many challenges today. These include the transition to a work-from-anywhere world and the reimagining of core strategies that can meet changing stakeholder expectations. Businesses have to figure these out, all whilst driving growth and innovation.
At LIKE.TG, one of the challenges we are particularly passionate about tackling is digital skills and workforce development. With companies around the world rapidly transitioning to digital-first models, the demand for employees with digital skills has soared. However, current efforts to upskill and reskill talent is not keeping pace with this demand, and there is still more to be done.
Our newly launched LIKE.TG’s Global Digital Skills Index reveals a growing global digital skills crisis: 76% of the world’s workforce feel unequipped for the future of work. This sentiment resonates with 71% of respondents based in Singapore.
At the same time, only 29% of Singapore’s workforce say they are actively pursuing training on digital skills now. While 79% of respondents in Singapore have ‘advanced’ or ‘intermediate’ social media skills, just 34% feel prepared for the workplace digital skills needed over the next five years.
The good news is that the appetite to learn is there. Nearly half of Singapore’s respondents say that they plan to learn new skills to help them grow in their current careers.
Businesses need to take the lead
In Singapore, there has been a lot of progress in expanding the breadth and depth of digital skills training over the last few years. However, according to LIKE.TG’s Digital Skills Index, it is clear that all nations, including Singapore, need to sustain and step up investment in digital skills urgently.
Now, more than ever, businesses need to take the lead in collaborating with governments, partners, and communities to tackle the growing digital skills crisis.
At LIKE.TG, we are committed to providing equitable access to digital skills through a range of initiatives. These include:
Trailhead, which has helped more than 3.7 million people, including over 85,000 in ASEAN, learn new skills for the future of work
Our Trailblazer Community, which empowers people to learn alongside LIKE.TG peers and experts
We also work with universities and government agencies like SkillsFuture in Singapore and Digital Economy Promotion Agency (DEPA) in Thailand to help workers reskill and upskill.
Taking a step further with new made-in-Singapore Trailmixes
To get more people in Singapore excited about starting their digital skills journeys, we are excited to launch six new bespoke Trailmixes, or learning paths, on our free online learning platform Trailhead.
Each Trailmix is focused on a specific in-demand digital skill. Completing one will earn you a special Singapore-themed badge that you won’t find anywhere else.
Raffles Trailmix
Like the founding of modern Singapore, all great stories start somewhere. Begin your learning journey by brushing up on these personal skills.
Skills focus: Personal development skills
Merlion Trailmix
The Merlion: actual mythical creature, or successful marketing campaign? Learn how to devise your own digital marketing strategies here.
Skills focus: Digital marketing
Downtown Trailmix
The LIKE.TG ecosystem will create 18,600 jobs in Singapore within five years. Jump into our cloud and find out what the buzz surrounding cloud computing is all about.
Skills focus: LIKE.TG cloud
Mandai Trailmix
Count the birds, bees, and other flora and fauna you can find at Singapore’s biggest wildlife parks — then crunch those numbers like a pro.
Skills focus: Data analytics
One-north Trailmix
Master user experience (UX) basics at the one-north innovation cluster, where start-ups with sleek modern products call home.
Skills focus: UX Design
Jurong Quest
Blaze a trail and open up a new frontier of opportunities with these cutting-edge skills and technologies.
Skill focus: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
SME leaders, share these Trailmixes with your teams. If you want to take it a step further to kickstart your organisation’s digital transformation journey, check out the Productivity Solutions Grant programme, which offers subsidies of up to 80%.
Join Trailhead and our Trailblazer community
Whether you’re just starting out in your career, or are a mid-career professional looking to stay sharp, these Singapore Trailmixes provide a variety of starting points. There’s also a balanced range of difficulty for anyone looking to upskill or reskill.
Don’t learn alone! Grab a few friends or co-workers as you hit the trails and keep each other motivated on your learning journey.
After you complete these six modules and pin the exclusive badges proudly to your profile, you might feel more confident about tackling more advanced topics.
At that point, we recommend you fully immerse yourself into the hundreds of modules that Trailhead has to offer. Don’t forget to join the Trailblazer community to earn resume-worthy credentials and connect to opportunities worldwide.
We can’t wait to see what you’ll learn and build!
Hop over to Trailhead and check out our new Singapore Trailmixes today!
Hybrid Work: How OfficeMate Supports Its Customers to ‘WorkAnywhere’
The nature of work has changed. COVID-19 forced companies across Asia to move to remote work. Now, some of those same companies are adopting hybrid work models. That means many employees are engaging in a mix of remote and office based work.
This is a reality OfficeMate understands. The Thailand-based office supplies provider knows its customers’ needs have changed. OfficeMate is changing with them.
“Our business is not limited to office spaces,” explains Apipoj Piasak, Head of Data and Digital Platform at OfficeMate. “Cafés, restaurants, hotels, homes, and beaches have all become workplaces.”
Mr Apipoj says OfficeMate is using digital transformation to provide a more customer-centric service journey. It’s a concept the company calls ‘WorkAnywhere’.
He explains the company’s new service model has been built and tailored to support all businesses, workers, and lifestyles.
“Our aim is to deliver a hygienic, rejuvenated, and digitised work environment that unlocks the human ability to deliver the best performance from anywhere.”
For OfficeMate, that means giving customers access to more than 100,000 products and services across a wide range of business needs. Products like masks, air purifiers, and sanitation items help customers maintain hygiene workplaces. Equipment like laptops and WiFi routers enable remote work.
Growing with digital transformation
OfficeMate has been one of Thailand’s best-known retailers for more than 26 years. It began as a product catalogue and call centre business. Today, the company operates a vast network of more than 100 stores across the country.
The company’s digital transformation journey began six years ago with Service Cloud. After evaluating multiple vendors, OfficeMate chose LIKE.TG to implement an end-to-end solution to support its business growth.
This included implementing internal workflows, and using Service Cloud dashboards and reporting to track customer service cases. The company also analysed data to improve customer service and satisfaction.
This helped the company become more than a standard office supplies provider. It enabled OfficeMate to partner with businesses of all sizes and types. It also supported the company’s more recent shift towards a customer-centric service model.
Connecting with customers
As the company continued to grow, OfficeMate executives implemented Sales Cloud, Digital Engagement, Communities, and LIKE.TG Knowledge solutions to deliver new customer-centric service channels. It also empowered employees with the LIKE.TG Mobile App to manage all interactions on the go.
Customers are able to connect with OfficeMate in several ways. For example, new ‘Call Shop’ and ‘Chat Shop’ innovations are blurring the lines between physical and virtual stores. The aim is to make shopping as easy and convenient as possible for all customers.
‘Call Shop’ connects customers with a shopping assistant who guides the customer experience via a phone call. ‘Chat Shop’ enables customers to text queries to customer service staff via the real-time LINE chat app.
“Now, instead of simply selling products to our customers, we listen to their needs and try to understand what they are looking for,” Mr Apipoj explains. “OfficeMate has become our customers’ personal shopper to source all the products they need for their businesses with only a few clicks.”
Stepping into a digital future
The results of OfficeMate’s customer-centric transformation have been strong. The company has improved service times, created more cross- and up-sell opportunities, and is closing sales faster. OfficeMate’s Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) has also improved.
As OfficeMate continues to step into its digital future, Mr Apipoj says customer data will help the company propose the right offer or service at the right time.
The company also plans to introduce Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to further personalise shopping experiences with a chatbot.
Along with advanced warehouse automation, Mr Apipoj says this will help to connect all online and offline channels.
“Part of our goal is to build a seamless digital customer journey that delivers the best customer experience,” he concludes. “We believe this will give us the power to meet all future challenges.”
How Does LIKE.TG Use Slack To Collaborate and Connect?
On July 21, 2021 LIKE.TG completed its acquisition of Slack. This brings together the #1 CRM and the trailblazing digital platform for the work-from-anywhere world.
Businesses need to be successful from home and office — especially in this era of flexible work. Slack makes workflows seamless and supports the way people naturally work together: in real-time or not, in-person and remote, structured and informal. LIKE.TG and Slack bring together all your teams with the apps and data they need in a single, collaborative workspace. Plus, Slack Connect functionality lets internal teams engage more productively with external partners, vendors, agencies, and customers. So you can deliver the exceptional experiences that help grow your business.
Slack is also changing the way we work here at LIKE.TG. We have new ways to connect anywhere, anytime. We’re building greater transparency into everything we do with teammates, stakeholders, partners, and customers. We’re sending way fewer emails, and we’re using features like Huddles for impromptu voice chats.
In short: We’re collaborating in real-time.
What does this collaboration and communication look like in practice? We talked to Samuel Steele, Head ofStrategic Sales Programs Office, ASEAN, and Mildred Chow, Creative Services Professional, Strategic Sales Programs Office, ASEAN, both LIKE.TG employees based in Singapore. They gave us an idea of how they use Slack in their team, and how it’s changed their approach to work.
Of course, the best place to have this conversation was on Slack!
For details on this infographic, please click here.
3 Ways Technogym Thailand Provides Exceptional Customer Experience
79% of consumers surveyed for the fourth edition of the State of the Connected Consumer report say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.
This principle certainly holds true for Technogym Thailand. The fast growing business is on a mission to help people live better and integrate wellness into their daily lives. Its products include a range of fitness equipment as well as digital technologies that promote health and wellbeing.
These products are popular with both businesses and consumers. Consumer sales were especially strong over the last two years as more and more people set up home gyms. Even so, the business knows the experience it provides is critical to its ongoing success.
“To ensure the business’ sustainability and continued growth, we need to provide customers with the best possible experience,” said Surachet Amornrattanavej, Managing Director of Technogym Thailand.
Here are three ways Technogym Thailand is delivering on its goal and delighting customers at every turn.
Empowers teams with a connected view of the customer
Customers today expect a consistent experience, even as they move between different channels and interact with different departments. However, delivering this experience is easier said than done. Technogym Thailand realised early on that having the right data was key.
“When it comes to brand perception, consistency is important. That’s why we chose to partner with LIKE.TG and invest in CRM in the early stages of business,” said Surachet. “We wanted to move all our data onto one platform so every department could access the same information and communicate the same message to customers.”
Technogym Thailand now has a 360-degree view of customers, including a history of every sales and support interaction. This information empowers teams to deliver a consistent and personalised experience at every step of the customer journey.
Delivers personalised and efficient field service
Technogym Thailand offers installation services as well as other post-sales support to help customers maintain their fitness products. The field technicians who provide this support are effectively the face of the brand. They are there for customers when they need help the most and trusted to deliver a superior service.
“It’s no longer enough to just go out and fix a customer’s problem. We need to provide an excellent experience from the moment a customer calls to report an issue through to the point of resolution,” said Surachet.
Technogym Thailand has equipped employees with LIKE.TG Field Service to make this experience as seamless as possible. Now, when a customer reaches out for help, a customer service agent can quickly raise a case and capture the key information needed to solve their problem. The agent can then create a work order and dispatch a technician with the right skills to do the job.
Technicians themselves have information at their fingertips to provide a more personalised service and resolve most issues their first time onsite. This includes details about the customer, their current issue, and any spare parts that may be required.
Adapts to evolving customer needs
COVID-19-related restrictions and safety concerns have made it more difficult for people to visit gyms and other fitness centres during the pandemic. Many consumers have consequently chosen to create or upgrade their home gyms, leading to an increase in sales for Technogym Thailand’s home fitness equipment.
As a result, Technogym Thailand has had to manage a spike in new installations as well as regular repairs. At the same time, it needed to ensure employee and customer safety by minimising time spent onsite.
Technogym Thailand used LIKE.TG to adapt and keep pace with customer needs. For example, the business has empowered customer service agents to work remotely and resolve customer issues over the phone. While field technicians have continued to attend to more complex problems, they’re equipped with everything they need to make site visits quick and efficient.
Like all businesses, Technogym Thailand knows it must continue to be agile to handle customers’ changing expectations. That includes being ready to support and interact with customers across any channel they choose.
For this reason, Technogym Thailand has extended its support channels to include WhatsApp, LINE, and social media. The business is also exploring ways to enhance customer engagement.
“Our customers’ needs are changing all of the time and it is really important to me that we’re able to adapt,” said Surachet. “LIKE.TG gives me the confidence that we can stay up to date and ahead of the trends.”
What Is a LIKE.TG Architect?
LIKE.TG helpsover 150,000 customersacross a range of businesses, nonprofits, and institutions connect with their customers. People around the world rely on ourcustomer relationship management (CRM) platformto keep their business running. A LIKE.TG Architect is vital to any complex or large-scale LIKE.TG implementation.
What is a LIKE.TG Architect?
ALIKE.TG Architecthelps design and deliver solutions for enterprise-grade customers using LIKE.TG products. The primary responsibility is to recommend the best solution for a given set of requirements and articulate the trade-offs involved in choosing one solution over another.
With LIKE.TG, there is never just one way to solve a problem. It’s the LIKE.TG Architect’s responsibility to choose the solution that will hold up over time, that will scale as the number of users increases, and won’t acquire lots of technical debt or require manual changes as time goes on.
A LIKE.TG Architect’s job doesn’t stop at solving technical problems. An architect brings technology, people, and processes together usinggovernanceand expert communication and listening skills to ensure solutions truly meet the needs of the business.
The most successful LIKE.TG implementations involve architects.A study by 10K Advisorsfound 82% of customers who reported the highest return on investment (ROI) in their LIKE.TG spend said they always work with an architect on their teams.
What skills does a LIKE.TG Architect need?
A successful architect is a big picture thinker and also an in-depth problem solver. An architect must have broad and deep technical knowledge but they also need to possess listening, communication, and presentation skills.
You might be surprised to learn that you don’t need to be a developer to become an architect. However, an architect needs to know how to read code and recommend coding best practices since they are often managing teams that include developers. Most importantly, an architect must know when to code but also when not to code. Having expertise in thedeclarative (clicks not code)side of the platform can separate a good architect from a great one.
Architects often bring knowledge and expertise in integrating LIKE.TG with other technologies and vice versa, as well as experience with governance and development operations. Ultimately, architects blend their technical expertise and business acumen to empower business and IT to work together towards a stronger future.
What does a LIKE.TG Architect do?
A LIKE.TG Architect is a trusted advisor and leader who partners with business stakeholders and executives to design a vision and architecture for a solution to a business problem. Often in the position of the technical team leader, they help educate the team with technical best practices. They also translate business needs to a technical vision that teams of low-code or pro-code builders can execute on. Architects also build proofs-of-concept (POCs) that teams can further iterate on.
An LIKE.TG architect will design the organisation strategy and data model for a LIKE.TG implementation. They will put technical solutions in place for identity and access, implement data and process integrations, anddesign solutionsthat account for large data volumes and data privacy needs. They’ll also identify the optimal solution for a business requirement and recommend using clicks, code, or a combination of both depending on the business use case. As highly experienced problem solvers, architects are often the final escalation point for any production issues.
An architect can also act as an influencer. They are the trusted technology leader at the table and are often tasked with building buy-in for new solutions. While an architect might not know the answer to every question a business stakeholder might ask, they are experts on LIKE.TG product capabilities and can think quickly and act fast. Their soft skills allow them to understand all stakeholder needs and communicate with them in their language.
What are the career prospects for LIKE.TG Architects?
The LIKE.TG Architect career path is one of the fastest-growing in the LIKE.TG ecosystem. In the past five years, the demand for LIKE.TG architects has seen a1,292% annual growth rate.
There are a variety of different LIKE.TG architect roles. Depending on your interests or skill level, you might gravitate towards one in particular.
Demand for LIKE.TG technical skills continues to grow.Studies showthe LIKE.TG ecosystem will produce 4.2 million jobs by 2024, with architect roles demanding an average salary of $123,000 USD.
What credentials and certifications are relevant for the job?
There are variouscertification paths for a LIKE.TG Architectthat recognise specialised knowledge and skills, as well as growing expertise using the LIKE.TG platform.
TheLIKE.TG Certified Technical Architect (CTA)solves complex, large-scale customer challenges to produce secure, scalable, and high-performance solutions that maximise the full potential of the LIKE.TG platform.
LIKE.TG Certified Solution Architectsdesign domain-specific, multi-cloud solutions on the LIKE.TG platform that power personalised, frictionless customer experiences that maximise business value.
Finally, an architect is a visionary. They build systems that will last, that others can maintain and that will scale as the business grows. They are often ambassadors for new technology and always plan for the future, thinking three-to-five years out when recommending a solution.
This post was originally published on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
What Is a LIKE.TG CRM Implementation Partner?
Companies of all sizes are accelerating their digital transformation initiatives, in response to changes in customer behaviours. Many are interested in implementing integrated, access-from-anywhere solutions. These include customer relationship management (CRM) solutions such as those offered by LIKE.TG.
Exploring a LIKE.TG CRM solution is one thing. Knowing which products, applications, and configurations best suits your business is another matter. This is why almost all LIKE.TG customers turn to dedicated experts to ease their entry into the world of LIKE.TG. These experts are implementation partners. There is a vast network of LIKE.TG implementation partners that help businesses achieve their CRM goals.
Let’s look at some of the most common questions people have about working with a LIKE.TG implementation partner. I’ll also share how you can get the most out of the partner relationship.
What is an implementation partner?
In simple terms, an implementation partner is an organisation that has been reviewed and approved by LIKE.TG to implement CRM solutions on LIKE.TG’s behalf.
Each implementation partner specialises in particular areas, industries, or applications. This means that there’s a partner that caters to every need, challenge, business, product, industry, region, and step along the LIKE.TG journey.
Why engage an implementation partner?
Our CRM solutions cover the entire spectrum of business operations. These include sales, marketing, service, and sustainability. Each product can be bolstered by add-on applications and platform-to-platform integrations.
In other words, the capabilities of the LIKE.TG ecosystem are endless. The challenge is to select the right product with the configurations and integrations that best suit your needs.
A larger company may already work with multiple technological solutions. They may need assistance in figuring out how a LIKE.TG product, say, Marketing Cloud, can integrate with their existing systems without causing friction.
A smaller company may be scaling quickly and know that continuing to work with spreadsheets will not support this growth. They may realise that they need to automate their processes, or it’s time to develop more personalised customer experiences. Implementing a CRM solution for the first time can feel daunting.
It is challenging for internal teams or employees with no experience with LIKE.TG to consider all the variables and implement a new and highly configurable CRM solution. Hiring a full-time employee to take charge of the implementation process can also be expensive.
These are some of the situationally specific reasons that 90 percent of LIKE.TG customers rely on partner applications and experts.
When is the right time to engage an implementation partner?
In a nutshell: as early as possible.
As with any significant investment, you need to do your due diligence. First, figure out what needs should be met, gaps should be closed, or issues should be addressed. In the case of LIKE.TG implementation, you formulate a vision of what you want to achieve, which is the ‘what’. Next, determine the ‘how’, which is the most complicated part.
As soon as you figure out your goals, it’s time to bring in a partner. The right implementation partner won’t just facilitate the ‘how’, but they’ll also help crystalise the ‘what’. They’ll help you clarify your success metrics, understand what is realistic, and advise on appropriate products. Finally, they’ll lay out a logistically sound timeline for your implementation journey.
Bringing in a partner late in the game almost always ends in missed opportunities in terms of scope and understanding. The relationship between a customer and a partner is close and collaborative. The only way to ensure smooth implementation is when the journey begins together.
How do I know which partner is right for me?
Certifications and credentials come into play, as does the specific expertise of that partner.
Some partners have generalised LIKE.TG capabilities. More often than not, they specialise in particular areas or functions of the CRM solution. Some might specialise in Marketing Cloud and customer data platforms (CDP). Others might specialise in harnessing the combined powers of Sales Cloud and Einstein.
Another factor, which has come to the forefront in recent years, is value alignment. People want to work with organisations that share their values. For example, they may choose to work with an organisation that champions diversity and equality, or prioritises sustainability.
Regardless of whether or not these things are top-of-mind for you, it’s important to shop around. Meet with multiple partners. Get a feel of who they are and the way they work. This is an important relationship, so don’t settle for anything less than the right fit.
The best and most comprehensive resource on both partners and products is the LIKE.TG AppExchange. There, 124,000 experts and 4,700 applications are at your fingertips. You can browse certifications, specialisations, and customer reviews.
What challenges might I encounter during implementation?
I can’t stress enough that bringing in a partner as early as possible reduces the chance of many challenges emerging down the line.
What’s also important is to be clear on what you want to solve and how you measure success over time. Most instances of confusion or dissatisfaction come from a lack of understanding on the part of the customer or the partner.
If both parties aren’t on the same page, then assumptions can be made, and misunderstandings on timelines and capabilities can arise. This makes objectives and success benchmarks harder to reach. As a customer, you need to be as transparent as you want your partner to be. Never be afraid to ask questions more than once. The implementation process can be highly technical and seeking clarification is natural.
Just as you place the customer at the centre of your business, partners place you at the centre of theirs. They measure their success by delivering exactly what you need. Customer success equals partner success. You should always keep that in the back of your mind throughout the process.
Any successful relationship in life thrives on open, honest communication from the outset. An implementation partnership is no exception.
How 3 Customers Successfully Digitally Transformed Using LIKE.TG
Digital transformation is an iterative process. How quickly you see results depends on the vision that you have for your business, and the metrics you are targeting.
If you’re just starting out with your own digital transformation, it can be difficult to see how the long-term benefits are worth the effort. The good news is that many others have been through the process, and a lot can be learned from their experiences.
Below, we hear from three businesses of varying sizes about their business visions, the steps they took in their transformation journeys, and the results they got.
AFDigital uses LIKE.TG to enable data-driven human connections
Founded in the Philippines in 2011, AFDigital began as a digital marketing agency. Since then, it has evolved into a multi-cloud LIKE.TG and MuleSoft implementation partner.
The vision
AFDigital uses a ‘glocalised’ approach. That means they support a physical, on-the-ground presence in key markets with a well-resourced Philippines-based delivery centre. Pauline Pangan, Founder and Managing Director, believes this model has been particularly effective in meeting their customers’ changing needs.
“Our goal is to help our customers redefine the human experience with LIKE.TG technology. That’s why we are constantly investing in building our capabilities,” says Pangan.
The transformation
The company started out using a collection of unconnected apps to manage their business, before investing in a full LIKE.TG Customer 360 deployment.
“We expanded our use of Sales Cloud, and started using Service Cloud,” explains Co-Founder and CEO Robin Leonard. “Then we started to use the single customer view in LIKE.TG as our platform for delivery, sales, service, and marketing.”
AFDigital uses Marketing Cloud to power all the company’s nurture journeys. It also deployed Experience Cloud and built an ecommerce platform with Store Connect during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Finally, it uses Tableau for data analytics and reporting.
“I am a strong believer that what you cannot measure, you cannot manage,” says Pangan. “LIKE.TG enables us to measure and manage the metrics that matter to our shareholders, our customers, our employees, and our partners.”
The results
AFDigital has seen an impressive 380% growth in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) over the last two years.
It has also doubled its customer retention rate over the last 12 months, and the opportunity conversion rate has increased from 28% to 52%. Perhaps most impressively, the company has achieved 900% revenue growth since investing in LIKE.TG.
The company can also use the enormous success of its own digital transformation as a case study to share with potential prospects.
“We achieved all this amazing success because we invested time and money to build the right processes. I always tell our customers that LIKE.TG is already solving the business problems of tomorrow. The only limit in the value we can squeeze out of the technology is our imagination.”
Anantara Vacation Club improves its customer service experience with LIKE.TG
Anantara Vacation Club’s vacation ownership programme was created in 2010 with a single property in Phuket. Now, it spans nine luxury Club-owned resorts across Southeast Asia and New Zealand.
The vision
Anantara Vacation Club has built an impressive customer base of more than 14,000 Club Points Owners in less than a decade. To help provide consistent customer experiences worthy of the luxury brand, it turned to LIKE.TG.
“When we had 500 to 1,000 Club Points Owners, we could still manage the process manually,” says Matthijs de Man, Director of Club Services and Innovation and Anantara Vacation Club. “But when you start getting 200 to 300 enquiries a day, it becomes unmanageable.”
The transformation
Prior to LIKE.TG, customer service agents dealt with enquiries through email, which was inefficient and time consuming. That’s when de Man and his team turned to Service Cloud for end-to-end customer management, from the moment of booking to the end of the stay.
“For a Club Points Owner, it’s a seamless experience,” says de Man.
Club Points Owners in China can now also log enquiries and communicate with customer service agents through the social media platform WeChat. Integrated Live Chat case management through the Club’s website has opened another in-demand customer communication channel.
“Our entire customer service team has the same access to Club Points Owners’ information – whether they contact us through our call centre, WeChat, Live Chat or email,” de Man explains. “Club Points Owners now get a consistent experience through any channel they choose to use.”
The results
Service Cloud had an almost immediate effect on the Club. The Club Points Owner base grew by an incredible 200 per cent following the deployment. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are down from around 10 hours to less than two hours.
Overall customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) never dip below 87 per cent and are as high as 94 per cent in the Japanese market. Chinese Club Points Owners also rate the Club’s customer service highly with CSAT scores consistently around 90 per cent.
“The best thing about Service Cloud is that our employees now have a clear understanding of everyone they are talking to, and an essential view of all their previous interactions with us” says de Man.
M1 reinvents itself to become a digital-first telco
Now in its 25th year, digital network operator M1 has brought numerous innovations and achieved many firsts in the Singapore market. In 2019, it was privatised and became a key pillar of Keppel Corporation’s (Keppel) connectivity business. It then started work to digitally overhaul all its processes and offerings, with a customer-first approach.
The vision
“Our vision is to become a digital-first telco and provide new made-to-measure personalised experiences for our customers. We want to set a new standard for what a digital experience looks like in our industry, ” said Nathan Bell, Chief Digital Officer.
The transformation
M1 has rolled out Sales Cloud to B2B sales reps and is using Service Cloud in its contact centre. It is using Tableau CRM to provide data insights that can be used to provide customers with personalised recommendations.
M1 also plans to leverage Marketing Cloud to provide customers with hyper-personalised offers and promotions. Combined with Datorama, this will provide real-time insights so that M1 can adapt campaigns to customers’ individual interests.
To realise the full potential of its digitalisation, M1 has used MuleSoft to integrate LIKE.TG with its Operations Support System and other technologies.
“Omni-channel is being redefined and we see increasing fluidity between channels, with customers moving more frequently from one to the next. LIKE.TG will help us keep pace with our customers and ensure a consistent experience, no matter which blend of channels they use,” said Bell.
The results
Throughout the transformation process, M1 has seen more than 1,500 employees learn new skills.
“When implementing new technologies, adoption is typically a push exercise and you have to convince people why they should get onboard. In this case, it was different. Everyone wanted to know what they could do to help get this out to our customers fast. LIKE.TG enabled us to deliver an incredible outcome and one that’s sustainable as we move into the new norm,” said Bell.
Most importantly, this outcome will support M1 in accelerating decision making and increasing relevance while realising its goal to be a digital-first telco. Ultimately, this leads to an improvement in the way it serves customers.
How SMEs in Singapore and Thailand Embrace Digital Transformation
How can your business find success in an all-digital future? Now that 2022 is here, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) should take time to learn from the past year and plan for the future.
The past year has forced many SMEs to change how they operate and embrace an all-new digital world. Customer expectations have also changed. For example, 61% expect to spend more time online than they did before. Contactless ways of interacting with businesses, such as online ordering and curbside pick-up, are here to stay. Flexible working has become more common, and 70% of SMEs have already created plans to manage future crises.
Governments and local communities have stepped up to help SMEs. In Singapore, LIKE.TG is now a pre-approved vendor under the Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) programme. The PSG offers grant support of up to 80% funding to SMEs to sustain their business and continue to grow. Customers such as Knorex have utilised this grant to help their digital transformation.
In a world swiftly moving towards a digital future, Singapore and Thailand are leading the way. In our latest Small and Medium Business Trends Report, we surveyed over 2,500 SME owners and leaders. They come from a range of industries around the world, including technology, financial services, professional services, healthcare, retail, and more. Around 12% of these were from Singapore and Thailand. It’s clear from their responses that they are ahead of the curve when it comes to embracing technology:
For details on this infographic, please click here.
How To Make Customer Loyalty the Driving Force of Your Business
Loyal customers will spend around 31% more with your company than new customers. That makes customer loyalty incredibly important for driving revenue.
Customer loyalty isn’t just about selling more. It’s also about the emotional relationship you build with your customers. Loyal customers trust your brand, recommend it, and return to buy again and again.
Customer loyalty is built on positive customer experiences. It is often formalised in customer loyalty programs that reward and incentivise your most valuable spenders. Customer loyalty programs are also a reliable way for businesses to obtain critical first-party customer data, and produce entirely new revenue streams.
These benefits are elevating the importance of customer loyalty programs within many organisations. However, many brands are still not leveraging the full power of customer loyalty.
1. Take an organisation-wide approach to customer loyalty
Customer loyalty should not be limited to marketing campaigns. Brands need to integrate loyalty programs into the entire customer lifecycle — from customer service to product returns. This will help to embed customer loyalty into the brand’s DNA, and create significant competitive differentiation.
To do so, brands need a connected ecosystem. That means providing a single, shared view of the customer across the organisation. This will not only enable better customer experiences. It will also help brands collect first-party customer data.
As Google prepares to remove support for third-party cookies, marketers must lead the switch to gathering first-party data. Loyalty programs will become one of the primary methods brands use to collect this vital customer data. This will further accelerate the elevated status of loyalty programs as the data they create becomes part of the brand’s balance sheet.
2. Provide premium benefits and exclusive experiences
According to a 2020 McKinsey survey, members of paid loyalty programs are 60 percent more likely to spend more on the brand after subscribing. The survey also found that paid loyalty programs drive higher purchase frequency, basket size, and brand affinity compared to free loyalty programs.
Paid loyalty programs can create an entirely new revenue stream for brands. This involves moving past a points-based program to focus on premium access, exclusive products, and special pricing.
Loyalty programs can also help brands maintain customer engagement outside of seasonal sales periods. For example, a leading swimwear brand uses its customer loyalty program to engage with customers beyond their busy summer-sales season. The brand uses customer data to personalise year-round customer communications, which are triggered throughMarketing Cloud Journey Builder. This has increased members’ average spend by 20%.
3. Create a connected, frictionless loyalty ecosystem
Third-party loyalty ecosystems are empowering organisations to extend the value of their loyalty programs beyond what a single brand can offer. For example, ShopBack connects 30 million shoppers with around 10,000 merchants and partners, in-store and online. The connected rewards and discovery platform drove more than $3.5 billion in sales across Asia-Pacific.
Future loyalty programs will also require customers to do less. Embracing a 360-degree customer view will enable brands to remove friction from their loyalty programs and use them to create additional value in the customer journey with superior experiences.
Connected communities will be another key element of future loyalty programs. Loyalty programs that are able to create new communities will be able to drive more frequent and deeper connections with consumers.
Leverage the full power of loyalty
The future is bright for customer loyalty programs. To leverage the full power of loyalty, brands must change the way they think about customer loyalty. Customer loyalty programs will no longer be about how loyal customers will be to the brand. They will be about how loyal the brand is to the customer.
For customer loyalty to become a driving force of business, the customer must be at the centre of the business at all times. This can be achieved with a 360-degree customer view that brings your entire organisation closer to the customer.
5 Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Advertising Sales
Artificial intelligence (AI) is getting real in the marketing suite. When asked where they planned to invest this year, marketers ranked AI as their #1 priority, according to our most recentState of Marketing Report. AI adoption is surging: 84% of marketers reported they use AI somewhere in their acquisition and retention engines, up almost three times over just two years ago.
What are these intrepid marketers doing with AI? Reported uses are expanding rapidly, from enhanced personalisation to improved segmentation, insight discovery, predictive modeling, and process automation.
Advertising technology also rode the wave of big data-driven AI adoption, as programmatic platforms revolutionised the process of buying and selling digital ads. Programmatic ad sales are soaring, from $60 billion in 2019 to an estimated $97 billion in 2022,according to eMarketer. It may seem from some angles that ad sales would become a kind of self-driving car, requiring the occasional redirect but not much else from the salesperson.
How do these salespeople feel about the impact of AI on their world? Two words: cautiously optimistic. On the one hand, 86% of sales executives see AI as having a positive influence on their future roles, according toour latest research. However, 68% of the same executives voiced concerns, primarily about the ongoing relevance of their current jobs. Thirty-one percent said automation might ultimately hurt the “art” of selling, as human-to-human relationships are replaced by optimised digital touchpoints.
Five reasons to be happy about AI in ad sales
Despite a natural fear of the unknown, there are good reasons to believe AI will make the business and — yes — the current jobs of ad salespeople better. It augments selling while leaving people to do what they do best: be human.
AI can level the playing field for both advertisers and publishers, giving even hard-working salespeople who don’t work for Fortune 100 tech or media companies the tools they wished they’d had in the past. These AI-driven superpowers can help sales professionals improve both their effectiveness (how well their product works) and their efficiency (speed and productivity).
1. Better data unification and harmonisation
With the impending deprecation of the third-party cookie in Chrome and Apple’s ongoing privacy changes, marketers are looking to first-party data to power their programs — including media programs. An impressive 88% of marketers said first-party data was a strategic priority for them in 2021, according to Merkle’s 2021Customer Engagement Report. For publishers, first-party data iskey to buildingaudiences that advertisers need; and for advertisers, first-party data is increasingly important as a seed for matching, targeting, and lookalikes.
However, first-party data is often fragmented and poorly organised, as well as complex. For example, 64% of customers start a purchase journey on one device and finish on another, perLIKE.TG research. Marketers face a daunting average of 12 major sources of customer data, up 20% from 2020, according to our State of Marketing Report. Often the data sitting in these sources contain inconsistent identification information (IDs), out-of-date information, and eccentric taxonomies.
AI can often be combined with a solution such as aCustomer Data Platformto greatly improve identity matching. Algorithms can be applied to perform “fuzzy matching” on IDs and resolve discrepancies. AI can also be used to make sure data from different systems is mapped to a common data model to ensure consistency.
2. Stronger segmentation and audience discovery
Customers of today, especially digitally nativemillennials, say they expect relevant experiences: that is, messages that are useful and timely in the context of their digital lives. Delivering a personalised experience requires both organised data and intelligent algorithms to find segments and uncover needs that are difficult to uncover using manual methods.
AI excels at smart segmentation — uncovering groups of customers and prospects who have attributes in common — at a scale and depth that isn’t possible for human analysts. AI algorithms can traverse billions of rows of customer data looking for patterns that might mean the difference between a valuable publisher audience and the same old “18-to-35 mom.“
For example, imagine a publisher with an established audience of science fiction enthusiasts. Suppose there is a significant subgroup of people who prefer robot-driven stories to human-driven stories, but there is no way to tell that without combining data from content analysis, web analytics, social listening, email, and commerce. Without AI, the publisher would sell a broad “Sci-Fi Lovers” segment. With AI, they can hyper-target “Gear-Head Sci-Fi” to — say — a campaign for a futuristic new vehicle.
3. Natural language interfaces with technology
Few areas of AI have more potential for impact on our lives than natural-language processing (NLP) and image recognition. Already we’ve seen the rapid rise of conversational chatbots in service. Voice interfaces are familiar to any of us who have ever asked Alexa totell us a jokeor told Siri that we’re in the mood for sushi.
Voice is already built intocall centre softwareand some analytics tools, but marketing technology is at the beginning of the adoption curve. Imagine an ad salesperson never having to touch a keypad again or — even better — have to click through drop-downs and menus looking for exactly the right command to select.
AI can reduce these time sinks, as speech recognition approaches 95%+ accuracy and voice navigation becomes commonplace. Efficiency will increase (less key clicking), and so will completeness (less reason to procrastinate in updating call records or ideas). The outcome is less time spent searching and updating and more time spent selling.
4. More efficient back-end processes and production
We’ve already mentioned how AI can help automate manual data plumbing and “munging” tasks such as ID mapping and harmonisation. It can also help make salespeople more efficient by prioritising their efforts, sifting through tasks and leads, and focusing their efforts.
One of the first areas of the sales process to benefit from AI waslead scoring. Despite initial reluctance from some sales teams —“What can a machine tell me about a good lead? I know one when I see one!”— many now routinely use algorithms to improve their priority lists. The same is true for tasks from summarising call notes to planning thebest wayto get from one customer meeting to another, in which order.
For ad salespeople, AI can help match available inventory with direct-sales opportunities that are most likely to close, minimising time spent on frustrating low-likelihood leads.
5. Improved measurement and optimisation
Accelerated by the pandemic, digital advertising’s rise has been impressive.More than halfof all ad spend is now digital, with an increasing proportion flowing through the largest platforms and publishers. AI can help to ingest and analyse all that data in a way that helps both publishers and advertisers estimate the impact of campaigns on desired outcomes, such as sales.
Measuring the impact of multi-channel campaigns requires ingesting information from dozens of sources and applying complex models to determine which creative elements, channels, devices, publishers, and tactics (such as time of day or ad size) made an impact. “Noise” can include factors such as competitive moves —Did they run a sale at the same time? Was there a new product launch?— the economy, and even the weather.
AI is well suited to help ad salespeople separate signal from noise and identify what works and what doesn’t. Some leadingAI-driven toolsalready provide automated optimisation recommendations based on the historical performance of marketing and ads.
AI excels at automating tasks that are mundane, and also at sifting through daunting amounts of data at dizzying speed. Humans do not. By letting the AI assistants do what they do best, we are already making ad sales jobs less artificial and more intelligent.
This post was originally published on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Get To Know the Spring ’22 Release
Innovation is one of LIKE.TG’s core values, and we commit to this value by releasing hundreds of new features and enhancements three times a year. Many of these innovations come from ideas that are crowdsourced and prioritised by real customers via theIdeaExchange.
Our first release of the new year, Spring ’22, is now generally available. With hundreds of new features and updates, you can maximise your LIKE.TG return on investment (ROI) with these three tips:
1. Learn about the top new features through Release in a Box
TheRelease in a Boxis a comprehensive guide with high-level summaries of the top innovations across all our LIKE.TG products. WithRelease in a Box, you can decide which new features and capabilities are relevant for your organisation.
2. Next, check out demo videos to see innovations in action
Our demo video playlists, found on theSpring ’22 release marketing website, showcase how you can utilise some of our top new features and updates. For example,see how Slack Huddlesoffers an audio-first way of connecting with colleagues, customers, and partners in real time. Watching demo videos provides an easy way to see new innovations in action.
3. Lastly, be sure to take the Spring ’22 Release Highlights Trail
TheSpring ’22 Release Highlights Trailis a great way to learn some of this season’s innovation highlights, all while earning a new badge.
This post originally appeared on the U.S-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Upskilling for the Future of Work: Tips From Our LIKE.TG Community
The way we work together is evolving at such a pace that it is important to reflect on the learnings. The pandemic brought with it significant logistical and technological changes that continue to reshape the workplace as we head into 2022, and each of us has our own unique experience of that change.
Which is why I turned to my network on LinkedInto hear their biggest insights on the future of work. The responses were thoughtful, astute and inspiring. Here, I’ve listed as many as I could fit into a blog and paired them with the most helpful Trailhead modules for a productive 2022 — no matter where you are working from.
My own biggest lesson from this year is about listening. Particularly as a leader, when we’re not next to each other in the office, it is even more important to listen to a fellow team member, to learn about what is going on in their mind.
Here is what our community shared:
Leadership with human qualities reign supreme
Perhaps the biggest takeaway is that 2021 has placed new emphasis on what’s human. In times of great flux, the best leadership is grounded in our shared humanity, as it enables meaningful decision-making and impactful action.
Teamwork skills start with empathy
Empathy was always important, but the dial has been turned up these past few years with work and home life colliding in the hybrid workplace. Karin Flores, Vice President Strategic Events, Customer Experience Center and Programs at Okta, encapsulates why the need for empathy has skyrocketed saying “Learning to balance work life and home life has never been more important, especially since the two have collided for many of us. As a leader, I have learned that it’s important to listen to your team and understand where they are in their journey”.
In fact leading with empathy is “absolute hygiene for any leader in this work-from-anywhere world”, an insight I agree with from Wendy Walker, Senior Director Marketing Asia Pacific at LIKE.TG.
Learning: How to dial up the empathy in leadership
As leadership is constantly evolving, we are also learning along the way. In the digital-first environment, many leaders have had to step into new mentoring roles, in flux and all online.
To help leaders learn new insights and to begin with empathy, we have designed a learning module to build empathetic leadership in business.
This Trailhead module helps leaders to navigate communication with team members amidst change. You can find practical tips on how to make your one-on-one meetings meaningful and help to balance your workload with your colleagues. We have included tangible ways to support your team members to work with their strengths, interests and the business goals.
Creating a diverse and inclusive workplace across the globe
Upender Rao, Manager of Global Business Services at LIKE.TG highlights the importance of sensitivity, diversity, and inclusivity. Both to cultural sensitivity and forgiveness of cultural stumbles, saying “We need a tad more sensitivity interacting with other cultures. We can’t know everything about every culture. If you don’t know, just ask. For the recipient, be forgiving if the speaker doesn’t understand your culture.”
Learning: Pathway to equality
LIKE.TG is committed to driving equality within our own community and beyond. We are on a path to cultivating a workplace that reflects our communities, to create an environment where everyone feels valued, heard, and has a sense of belonging. As a leader, I am proud to share our approach to equality.
We also believe that it is our higher purpose to create a world where everyone has equal rights, equal pay, equal access to education, and equal opportunities to succeed. We are working together with our entire community—customers, partners, employees, industry, and so on — to build a path forward.
Learning: Cultivating equality at work
More and more business leaders are seeing that cultivating equality is not just the right thing to do, but also the smart thing. Infact, employees who feel their voice is heard at work are nearly five-times more likely to perform their best work.
We are naturally social creatures, so we have developed a module on how to cultivate equality at work.
Laughter is the best medicine
One of my favourite insights on the humanity imperative is “The role of laughter – at ourselves, at each other and at the situation. We get so caught up in the daily grind and this year wouldn’t have been survivable without the LOLs.” Summed up so clearly by Leah Jackson, Head Of Digital Marketing at Goodman Fielder.
Infusing everything with kindness
Complimenting the need for empathy is the importance of kindness and its role in fostering equality, as LIKE.TG Marketing Director Andrew Ward put: “I feel many of us have learnt to be a little kinder to each other. I love the idea of linking kindness to results or outcome orientation in the long term.”
New ways of working and working together
It’s no surprise that a hot topic of conversation was just how different our work lives look in comparison to just two years ago. Calibrating this difference can be hard, because just as you think you’ve become used to the way things work, they shift again!
Aligning your business and people goals
Shahin Hoda, the Founder of xGrowth reiterated the importance of aligning your people with your business goals. For maximum impact, you want business vector alignment, this means creating a great culture to attract top talent, who then go out of their way to make a great experience for your customers. He added that “How result-oriented an organisation and its business units are is going to make or break future organisations.” Going on to say that “business vector alignment – has always been important.”
Listen to team members
Brent Ombler, Senior Business Analyst at Commonwealth Bank of Australia added that deep listening is pivotal, to hear what is being communicated, especially in a hyper distributed, or hybrid, working environment. He adds that “it’s more important now than ever to ensure that the communication channels are made available, and their usage continually encouraged.”
Trust still leads the way
Sarah Hargreaves, Marketing Director, Demand Generation at LIKE.TG, had some thoughts on the subject, particularly on trust and the use of Slack:
Learning: Collaborate with your team from anywhere
Essentially, work can happen at all hours of the day. So how do leaders stay in touch with team members across the globe? An easy answer is to set up a Slack channel to get out of the inbox, and into a dynamic virtual team environment. Stay across the project no matter your time-zone byworking with Slack.
Engaging with your team
Like trust, fostering team engagement is a big one as we move through 2022. Steve Elmore, Director of Advisory at Fresh Consulting shared insights into the importance of leaders’ EQ in the era of the great resignation. “Many organisations no longer have the stickiness of location as remote working becomes more the norm. Opportunities are no longer geographically bound. This places an increased burden on leaders to be more than they have been before.”
Learning: Keeping your teams engaged
Leaders will need to shift their approach to combat the great resignation. CEO LIKE.TG ANZ ASEAN Pip Marlow recently spoke to the Australian Financial Review on the opportunities facing Australian companies with her view to forget the great resignation, we are ready for the great realignment.
At LIKE.TG, we believe that our people, from individual contributors to top executives, are our greatest resource and the reason for our success. To keep your team motivated and create a great place to work, you can follow the trail on employee engagement to find why engagement matters.
Employees are looking for more flexibility, opportunity and to create work that has meaning. Virtual working has accelerated rapidly, and there is always more to learn. If you want to add in some new ways of working, then follow the remote work tips Trailmix.
Shift in mindset
The importance of mindset, balance and wellbeing is growing in the workplace. Effective leaders aim to balance stress in their own day as well as motivate others to achieve goals together. Equipping people with the resources to thrive is essential, particularly with the challenges we are facing. In fact, we have an entire series on the Wellness Playbook designed as a leader’s guide to employee wellbeing.
Remember to smile
Ian Gotts, CEO of Elements.cloud’s reminds us to stay curious, to not take ourselves too seriously because “humour is the best medicine but also accelerates connections and trust”.
Embrace change
David Barzilay, Senior Growth Strategist from Five Faces responded from the heart when he told us he’d learned to appreciate change. For him that means “not just being reactively adaptable, but understanding and appreciating the fact that change is the only constant in our lives, like it or not. So, we may as well start enjoying it.”
Learning: Practicing mindfulness
I encourage my team to embrace the power of mindfulness to reduce stress and create peace and joy in the day. You can connect to your inner mindfulness practices with the World Meditation Day Trailmix.
Virtual teams need radical honesty
This one strikes a chord with me – it is the power of radical honesty – for me, giving feedback is a gift.
Archana Sinha, Senior Director Corporate Marketing at LIKE.TG shares about “promoting a culture of radical honesty. Ensuring that as a leader you keep the team informed and aware and make sure information flow is seamless at all times. Being vulnerable and sharing when you don’t have all the answers is extremely important in the world of tomorrow. Sharing your vulnerability when you may need downtime or when you may not be at your best also encourages the team to be open about wellness and mental health.”
Winning in 2022
This has been an illuminating exercise for me to listen to your insights from this year. I have thoroughly enjoyed the sense of community that has emerged from this thread. As we are all evolving to the changing landscape, it is important to keep sharing the lessons and insights along the way.
Thanks for the fantastic reflections provided by everyone – there were too many to list, so if you’d like to check out some of the other insights, head here to see my original post.
Once again, I’d like to thank all who took the time to share their unique takes on the future of work, teamwork, and the hybrid workplace. If these contributions are any indication, the 2022 landscape is looking brighter than ever and I look forward to walking it with all of you.
Visit Trailhead to learn new skills from anywhere.
This post originally appeared on the A.U.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
4 Expert Tips on How To Build Your Retail Experience Around Customers
Retailers have been incredibly responsive to changes in consumer demand, supply chain availability, and store operations over the past two years.
In a short time, brands and retailers launched a variety of new services and customer experiences. These included options to buy-online-pickup-in-store, virtual appointments, flexible payment options, and livestream e-commerce.
As a result, customer expectations for what makes a great digital experience have increased. In fact, more than 80% of B2B and B2C customers now believe the experience provided by a company is as important as its products or services.
The greatest challenge now — for B2C and B2B businesses — is to keep up with customer expectations. Expectations of customers in both groups are converging in terms of speed, connectedness, and personalisation.
How can retailers harness technology and data to deliver a seamless customer experience and build relationships? LIKE.TG’s Global Head of Retail and Consumer Goods Industry Advisors, Matt Marcotte, shares his top tips:
Tip 1: Collect data at every customer touchpoint
Recommendations and personalisation are only as good as the data you collect and the accuracy of it.
Take every opportunity to ask your customers about their likes, wants, and desires at every touchpoint with the brand.
Tip 2: Let your brand’s personality shine
Whether it’s a promotion, limited quantities, or just reminding them to complete their purchase, it’s not just about sending the message.
The tone of voice and approach makes people either want to engage with you or just ignore your message. Find creative, fun, and personal ways to engage customers.
Tip 3: Make sure customer service is 24/7
One of the biggest customer frustrations is not being able to get in touch with a brand when they need to.
The right combination of self-service chatbots and customer service agents — with access to the customer’s data — is critical to ensure not only fast resolution of an issue, but also excellent customer experience. These types of engagements can make or break a brand and people’s willingness to continue buying from them.
Tip 4: Tap into social media feedback
Once brands see comments from customers, it is critical that they connect with that customer, deepen the relationship, and gather more information to inform their single source of truth. Just listening is not enough — customers want relationships with brands. Maximise every opportunity to build on that relationship through interaction.
Creating genuine customer connections
The brands that will experience the greatest success will be the ones that focus on:
Connected customers: responding at the speed the customer expects by using a unified platform and centralised data.
Connected stores: including virtual selling and engagement.
Connected employees: empowering team members through mobile, virtual service, and intelligence capabilities.
Together, these provide a seamless experience. It helps teams get smarter about their interactions with customers, and lets customers know you’re listening to them.
The secret ingredient is a relentless focus on knowing your customer. It must be at the core of everything. Get this right, and you’ll serve the right product and message to the right customer, at the right time and place.
Learn more about how consumer brands and retailers can deliver seamless, personalised experiences in our ebook The Connected Customer Experience: A Guide for Retail and Consumer Goods Brands in ASEAN:
How CRM Helps Small and Medium Businesses Win Customers
Customer expectations are always changing. As more and more customers become digitally savvy, it’s important that you adapt the way you do business. One thing that is increasingly important is a consistent customer experience. In particular, personalisation is becoming a vital part of marketing, sales, and service.
CRM can help you with this task, and it’s not just for large enterprises. Based on the latest research presented in our Small and Medium Business Trends Report, 67% of growing SMBs have invested in CRM software. In the same report, more than half of SMBs that we talked to said they were investing in service, sales, and marketing technology.
A CRM system gives you one unified view of your customers. It helps with contact management, sales management, productivity, and more. Using CRM helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.
Faster sales: Win more deals with less effort through automation of your sales process.
Smarter marketing: Find more leads and engage your audience with personalised content.
Better service: Keep more customers with outstanding personalised service.
LIKE.TG has solutions for every kind of organisation. Even the smallest business can get started with powerful CRM technology that will change the way they work.
Read the infographic below to learn how using a CRM platform can help you win customers:
Data sources:
* Win The Deal With The #1 CRM For Small Businesses: https://www.LIKE.TG/ap/solutions/small-business-solutions/win-customers/
^ Find Customers with the Best CRM Tools and Packages: https://www.LIKE.TG/ap/solutions/small-business-solutions/find-customers/
# Fifth Edition Small and Medium Business Trends Report
✝ LIKE.TG for Small Business: CRM and Customer Support Software: https://www.LIKE.TG/ap/solutions/small-business-solutions/overview/
For details on this infographic, please click here.
The Top 3 Small Business Trends for 2022
Last year was an unpredictable one for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the ASEAN region. As we look forward, we can’t be certain about what the year ahead holds for us. That said, we do have recent research that hints at the trends that will be important in 2022.
In the fifth edition of the Small and Medium Business Trends report, The Harris Poll spoke with 2,500 SMB leaders across the world. The results illustrated new trends, highlighting the links between revenue growth and certain approaches to business.
This latest update of the report shows that SMBs consider attracting new customers to be their number one challenge. This is consistent with the results from the previous editions. On top of that, the new report also shows that SMB leaders worry about retaining existing customers more than they used to.
For the SMBs planning in the months ahead, we believe these three trends will determine who’s staying ahead of the curve and who isn’t.
1. A focus on shifting customer expectations
The pandemic accelerated customers’ digital habits and their appetite for seamless, omnichannel experiences. It’s little wonder that survey responses show that 92% of SMBs in Singapore and Thailand plan to offer contactless services permanently. More than half of SMBs have increased customer engagement channels.
Customers don’t just expect more channels. They also expect convenient and personalised experiences with your business. Any time, anywhere. SMBs say that keeping up with demand and personalisation are two of their biggest customer engagement challenges. Therefore, SMBs will need to keep finding scalable solutions for meeting new expectations.
That’s why we’re confident 2022 will see an even greater focus on reshaping business operations around customers’ evolving needs and expectations.
2. Happy employees mean happy customers
Customers aren’t the only ones with changing expectations.
LIKE.TG research reveals that flexible working arrangements are now the number one employee expectation in Singapore — with growing SMBs more likely to provide this. In Thailand, the focus is on employee safety, with mask wearing and access to vaccinations among the top concerns.
Great customer experiences depend on employees having the data, tools, and circumstances necessary to do their jobs well. Empowering your employees with the right tools will lead to greater job satisfaction. This, in turn, leads to a sharper focus on customer needs.
3. Investments in technology that empower customers and employees
Underpinning these trends are digital solutions that empower both employees and customers.
Solutions in marketing and sales empower employees through better, more holistic customer data, helping them meet evolving customer needs. Additionally, technology like self service, AI, and chatbots can help SMBs’ service teams meet demand, while customers are freed to find answers on their own.
For sales, a CRM solution gives teams access to information about prospects in great detail and at a massive scale. With so much information on each prospect, your sales team has the power to deliver a personalised sales pitch every time.
Marketing teams can use CRM to organise marketing campaigns and assets in one place. With one central hub for marketing campaigns and lead records, your marketing team will also have unprecedented visibility into how campaigns are performing and driving revenue for the business.
Customer service teams can use CRM to get one cohesive view of the customer. Agents will have access to complete case histories, detailed account information, and even the customer’s preferred method of communication. All this information makes it easier for your agents to provide personal service that will turn customers into advocates for your company.
More than three-quarters of SMBs from Singapore and Thailand said they wouldn’t have survived the pandemic if they had been using technology from 10 years ago. It makes sense, then, that customer service technology, as well as sales and marketing solutions, are among the top investments made by SMBs in Singapore and Thailand.
Want to learn more?
No matter what 2022 brings, we’re sure that continued digitalisation built on a flexible tech foundation will be key to future success.
In our recent webinar, 4 Key SMB Trends shaping the future of work, Brian Solis, Global Innovation Evangelist, put it this way:
In the webinar, we discussed the main trends affecting small and medium businesses today. Brian also talked about what SMBs can do now to help them grow in the future.
Watch the webinaron how the latest key SMB trends can shape your future of business.
Email Marketing Best Practices That Drive Engagement and Results
Brands today can connect with customers using a wide array of digital channels. Still, good old email remains one of the most popular and effective.
Email offers solid return on investment and can be an important touchpoint along the customer journey. It also enables businesses to deliver hyper-personalised customer experiences at scale.
Effective email marketing requires a good balance of experience, critical thinking skills, and specialist knowledge of marketing and email techniques. It also requires a lot of hard work, as LIKE.TG’s Edna Tan and Chris Munro can both attest.
Edna is Senior Analyst, Field Marketing Operations, while Chris is Marketing Automation Data Senior Analyst. Together, they’re responsible for planning, building, analysing, and continually optimising email campaigns and journeys for LIKE.TG in the Asia-Pacific region.
In this interview, Edna and Chris shared their top tips for creating successful email marketing campaigns, as well as pitfalls to avoid. Read on to learn how you can make your emails stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes:
What do you think makes a successful email marketing campaign?
Edna: I believe there are four key elements to ensuring every campaign is effective and delivers an authentic experience. The first is relevancy and empathy. Consider what’s happening in the world, empathise with what customers are experiencing, and adopt an appropriate tone. The second element is segmentation. Understand the audience and segment your lists to send more relevant content. These targeted campaigns will lead to greater customer engagement and inspire recipients to take action. The third element is personalisation. True personalisation goes further than segmentation. It involves using your data to create compelling and personalised email experiences.
The final element relates to execution. Don’t skip the review process. The content and design of every email needs the review and approval of key stakeholders.
Chris: Edna has touched on our core philosophy: for us to be successful, we need to send people the right information, at the right time. We also need to align with what’s happening at the moment. Otherwise, they’ll disregard our email or it won’t have the desired effect.
What other tips do you have for creating emails that people want to receive in their inbox?
Chris: If you are establishing a new email brand, take time to understand the landscape around you. Find out what other businesses or industries are doing. Identify the metrics to track and understand the benchmarks for performance.
Once you have the lay of the land, turn inwards. Determine what information your customers want from you and start sending out emails. Never stop making changes and trying to improve. As long as you pay attention to what your customers tell you with their clicks, you’ll be in a good position to communicate with them in the way that they want. That’s the end goal.
What sets brands apart when it comes to email? What do you see in the market that inspires you?
Chris: I would say incredibly strong branding that follows through to every part of the business. So, when an email lands in your inbox, it has the same look and feel as the brand’s store or website. One of the reasons I find this so effective is because it immediately tells me who the brand is and I can just get straight into the content.
Edna: For me, it’s about personalisation. I do a lot of online shopping and there are a couple of brands that proactively email me recommended items based on what I’ve browsed or bought in the past. I now look forward to these emails—especially around events like Black Friday.
Chris: That’s the best possible thing you could hope for as an email marketer: subscribers who are ready and waiting for your email. I don’t think a lot of businesses necessarily achieve that, but it would definitely be the pinnacle of success.
When it comes to delivering successful campaigns, how does Marketing Cloud support you? What are your favourite features?
Edna: I spend most of my time in Email Studio, which allows me to quickly build emails with a responsive design that’s optimised for any device. It also enables a lot of automation that makes our workflow really efficient.
Chris: My favourite function is AMPScript. This is a scripting language that supports the creation of more personalised emails. Early on in my marketing career, I found AMPscript made it easy to add that extra bit of personalisation that shows people we know who they are. Seven years later, it allows me to continually elevate emails and make them as engaging as possible for each person.
What are some common misconceptions about email marketing or traps that marketers should avoid?
Edna: I feel there are a lot of studies on the best way to optimise email campaigns. However, not all approaches will work for every organisation. The best thing you can do as an email marketer is take in the learnings and then use A/B testing to see what strategies work best for your audience.
Chris: There’s a misconception with email that more is better, which can mean longer emails, greater frequency, or sometimes both. However, these things can actually be detrimental. So again, it goes back to knowing your audience and testing to see what works best for them. Look at how many times people engage with your message and notice when that engagement starts to drop off.
What are your best practices for measuring engagement?
Chris: LIKE.TG, along with a lot of other businesses, are now measuring the click-to-open-rate (CTOR) of our emails. This tells us how many of those who opened an email actually took the next step in the journey. It is a good indication of how successful the content of your email is for conversion and I’d suggest it’s an important metric to adopt.
We also look at metrics deeper into the customer journey to ensure that our emails are effective in driving the targeted behaviour. For example, we look at how many people download an asset after visiting a landing page and look at how many leads the campaign generates overall.
Recent changes to email privacy protections will impact metrics and temporarily make measurement harder. However, I think the changes will lead marketers to reevaluate what success looks like and rely more on measures like customer engagement scores.
Any final words of advice for those looking to refresh their email marketing strategy?
Chris: It is easy to get excited about building email journeys. However, these projects can often become overwhelming to the point that organisations get stuck and can’t move forward. My advice is to go ahead and plan out big journeys, but then break them up into bite-sized pieces that are more achievable to implement. For example, start with a welcome email. Then, add to the journey as you go, rather than trying to build ten emails at once.
Edna: Know your audience and that means using your data to personalise their experience. Also, continually test your messages to ensure they remain relevant.
Find out how you can put these best practices into action. Read our guide on how to find the right email marketing tools to reach your customers here.
How SMB Leaders Can Win Employee Trust Post-pandemic
Trust is the true currency in business; a value that sets successful businesses apart. It helps build work cultures where employees are encouraged to speak up, experiment, and give their best. But trust doesn’t come easy; it must be fostered carefully over time.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) that had to take tough decisions to survive, such as reducing work hours or perks, are looking to earn back their employees’ trust. LIKE.TG’s fifth edition of the Small and Medium Business Trendsreport shows that SMBs are taking steps to address employee concerns around workplace safety, flexible schedules, location, etc.
Based on the report’s insights, here are seven ways SMB leaders can win employee trustby making working easier and workplaces more conducive to growth:
1. Communicate transparently and consistently
Help employees understand company policies that matter most to them: safety measures, annual leave, remote working, and appraisals.Be transparent about your plans to handle health risks or economic downturns.You can do this by holding regular company- or team-wide meetings, making policy details available on your website, and sharing open calendars with employees.
Transparency is one of the best ways to build trust and increase employee retention. It is especially important for growing SMBs that want to attract high-performingprofessionals.
2. Be empathetic and supportive leaders
Allow employees to freely discuss personal and professional challenges. Ensure you let all employees know they have your support to overcome challenges and are free to seek time off when needed.
Penalising employees for simple mistakes and not allowing them to take risks reduces trust and productivity. Instead, work alongside them to help improve their performance. Also, set up an internal support group and forums to discuss everyday challenges. Empathy can allow SMB leaders to build strong relationships with each employee, enabling them to handleworkplace challenges better.
3. Listen to employees’ voices
Hear them out on the changes they would like to see at work. They can also share valuable feedback on how to improve processes and organisational structures at the ground level. SMBs that have small teams can have one-on-one conversations. Alternatively, hold team discussions and conduct anonymous polls to get employee feedback.
4. Entrust employees with greater autonomy
Give employees the autonomy to follow their styles of working. Employees dislike micromanagement. It isn’t a good use of an SMB leader’s time either.
In any case, SMB leaders can only don so many hats at once, making it important to encourage employees to be more accountable. This also instils a greater sense of ownership and pride in the employees.
5. Enable employees to contribute to business growth
Do this by continuously aligning their goals with company goals and visions. This shows that you trust them to be capable of doing more, encouraging them to trust you back and contribute towards achieving these goals.
Come together regularly to align individual and team goals with those of the leaders’. This can help SMBs come up with innovative ways to achieve their goals as a team and grow faster.
6. Help employees connect their passions with work
Enable them to grow professionally and explore their true calling. SMBs can do this by providing employees with opportunities to learn from colleagues, connect with industry experts, usefree learning tools, and encouraging teams to think creatively.
7. Walk the talk
Company values should be reflected in the way you work and your worldview towards employees, customers, and important causes. This reflects in how diverse your workforce is, what you do to enable work-life balance, how you approach mental health issues, and whether you use technology responsibly.
Furthermore,SMBs that stand by their values are more likely to be trusted and supported by their employees and communities. According to the Small and Medium Business Trends Report, 67% of SMBsconsider community support important for their survival.
SMBs should aim to win employee trust by supporting them
Resilience and grit are characteristic of SMBs. SMBs can take inspiration from those that thrived during the pandemic to tackle their challenges. They can use these insights and ideas to enable their employees to contribute to their organisation’s success collaboratively.
This post was originally published on the I.N.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
7 Ways To Improve Your Customers’ Online Shopping Experience
Thanks to the rapid shift towards digital, the close relationship between company and customer has become king. Online shopping has quickly moved from the fringes to the centre of commerce.
This reality brings with it as many opportunities as it does challenges. Organisational success now comes from a combination of understanding customer expectations on the deepest possible level and choosing the best tools to meet them.
According to data from the fourth edition of the State of the Connected Customer report:
Digital engagement spiked by 18% over the past year.
Eighty percent of customers say that their experience of dealing with a company is just as important as the products or services they receive.
Almost 60% of consumers expect to shop online more often in the future.
These statistics are just the tip of the iceberg. The popularity of online shopping is rising fast. That is why marketing, sales, and service teams are looking for any competitive edge that will improve the customer experience.
Here, we’ve broken down seven tips to help you get that edge. These include practical tips that you can act on as soon as you finish reading. We also share longer-term strategies that promise ongoing rewards. These tips, when implemented in combination, are a great way to improve every step of the customer journey.
1. Get to know your audience
We live in an age with plentiful access to customer data, even as the third-party cookie crumbles and privacy regulations tighten. However, that data is doing very little to benefit your business unless you use it in the right way.
The right way, in this case, is not only understanding the individual customer as intimately as possible. It’s also being able to group together similar individual customer profiles. You can use these to create audience segments and buying personas.
This is where CRM technology comes in. LIKE.TG Customer 360 offers a range of products, integrations, and add-ons. It allows you to arrange detailed pictures of your target audiences, enabling you to personalise your approach.
Whatever you want to achieve, LIKE.TG offers a selection of solutions to meet your needs. Take our quiz to build your own Customer 360.
2. Make your images work for you
Never underestimate the power of the image. We live in an increasingly visual world, where getting consumer attention is paramount. When online shopping, it’s easy for the attention of consumers to wander or get lost altogether, if the visual experience is sub-par.
By sub-par, we mean images of products that are underlit or overexposed, or look amateurish. Consumers crave the most enticing, dynamic, yet accurate representation of what they are looking to buy. If you have the budget, a 360-degree video of your product can boost sales even more.
Conversely, including images that are unrelated to the specific purchase can make your pages difficult to read.
In other words, images can make or break a sale. Implement them properly, and they’ll also help your site’s SEO ranking. Using images effectively requires thought and discernment, but if you get it right, your customers will appreciate the effort.
3. Show customers which products are most popular
The power of suggestion is always going to sway some consumers, but that’s not the only reason why popular products should be placed front and centre on your site. In almost all cases, products become popular for a reason, whether due to functionality, quality, or trends.
Your bestsellers are bestsellers for a reason. While new products are always enticing, never forget that customers are drawn to what others have purchased and endorsed.
Tableau for LIKE.TG Customer 360 allows different teams to gain a single view of customer data and act on the same insights. Amongst its many capabilities, one is the ability to bring together individual purchasing behaviours to get a real sense of product popularity. Tableau can help you present data in an easy-to-understand way, allowing every team to understand the insights. You can use this data to present popular products to different target audiences, offering deeper personalisation and greater ROI.
4. Remarket now and close more business
In the past, post-engagement retargeting had been quite clunky and, in some cases, off-putting to the consumer. Think of how annoying it is to receive ads for the exact product that you purchased a month ago. It’s also frustrating to get ads after accidentally clicking a link and closing it.
The good news is, this complicated process can be refined.
By using Marketing Cloud, you can track customers who’ve made a purchase, those who demonstrated interest but didn’t buy, and those who have been browsing elsewhere for similar products that you offer. You can then remarket to those individuals based on their personalised online shopping journeys. This minimises wasted ad spend and gives the customer what they want.
You can also take this flexibility further into real time with Marketing Cloud add-ons such as Interaction Studio.
5. Simplify the checkout process
The importance of the checkout process during an online transaction is often underestimated. Friction during the path to pay can easily lead to cart abandonment, and therefore a missed opportunity for customer loyalty.
Fortunately, the antidote to this undesirable result is: keep it simple. The customer shouldn’t have to wade through multiple lengthy pages to pay for what they want (particularly in the case of returning customers). Most people are time-pressed, and want to make a quick, safe, and hassle-free purchase.
You should also be clear about the extra information customers want, such as shipping costs and return policies.
Commerce Cloud is a sure-fire way to help you with all of the above.
6. Keep in touch with follow-up emails
Fact: a simple follow-up email can turn a one-time buyer into a loyal customer.
Chances are, if an individual has appreciated both the purchase and the experience, they’re far more likely to come back for more. Marketing Cloud can facilitate these kinds of meaningful interactions. You can send review requests, similar product recommendations, or maybe an inventive marketing campaign targeted to their preferences.
With the deep customer data that you have in your CRM, you can make each follow-up communication relevant to the individual customer. In this day and age of broken funnels and tangled pipelines, these benefits are priceless.
7. Do it all with consistency in mind
Tending to one or all of these individual aspects of the customer experience will be beneficial to an extent. The more you consider how each improvement relates to each other, the bigger the reward.
Consistency across channels and platforms is key. That’s because consumers use multiple channels to shop online, and they expect continuity across them all.
Products such as Commerce Cloud allow you to grab the attention of more customers and create a seamless omnichannel customer journey. One that stretches across marketing, sales, commerce, fulfillment, service, and beyond.
