客服系统
Volunteer Time Off Is the Perk Your Company Needs Now
Employees have made it loud and clear they want more than a paycheck from their jobs. Among the biggest contributors to a great employee experience, according to new LIKE.TG research, is a sense of purpose. Many businesses have responded by focusing more on purpose and impact on society. But there’s an often overlooked element of that new focus: paid volunteering, or volunteer time off programs.
From the Corporate Giving Study 2021 conducted by NVPC, 42.3% of the companies surveyed in Singapore include corporate giving in their business policies. Within this percentage, only 11% allocate paid volunteer time off (VTO) benefit, despite the fact that companies with a culture of volunteerism have better morale, retention, employee engagement, and brand perception.
Many companies offer employees some kind of volunteer opportunity, but it’s often a single day of volunteering or raising money for charities.
Make volunteer time off a core part of employee engagement
LIKE.TG was founded on the principle that businesses can have great social impact. The company offers employees an above-average VTO benefit of 56 hours, or 7 business days, each year. They can use that time to volunteer for one of the nonprofits LIKE.TG formally supports — the company has pledged millions of dollars to support education, workforce development, and climate justice initiatives — or one of their own choosing.
We’ve learned a lot over the years about how VTO impacts our workforce and the community. We’re happy to share our expertise and best practices here.
According to Jamie Olsen, senior director of Citizen Philanthropy at LIKE.TG, about 75% of the company’s 73,000-person global workforce participates in the VTO program, with about 25% using the whole 56-hour allotment.
“These are the types of programs that people want and that are attracting them to companies right now,” she said. “They better the community. They improve people’s happiness. They make them feel more engaged when they are sitting at their desk.”
The recent global research by Deloitte found that the younger generation workers are seeking balance and sustained change. Many are concerned about the state of the world and how companies can make work more purpose-driven.
Companies that create aspirational workplaces foster a culture of inclusion, purpose, listening, caring, and empathy.
How to establish your own VTO program
LIKE.TG has donated more than $530 million and 7.3 million hours since our founding. The company might be an outlier in the resources it devotes to VTO programs — Olsen’s team, for example, has 25 people dedicated to it — but there are steps that you can take to establish your own VTO initiatives. Here are some tips:
Self-service digital options
Build volunteer engagement programs that align with your strategic focus areas or what your business focuses on. While employees should be free to volunteer however they choose, try to steer them toward opportunities where you’re already making a financial commitment. Try to pair employees with organisations that support them.
Focus on important goals
Think about your specific goals rather than spending time or money on any problems. What change do you want to affect, and where can you have the biggest impact? Formalise your goals in writing, and make sure all employees are aware of them and how they can participate. Doing so will give everyone something to rally around.
Plan with scale in mind, but within the budget you have
Think several steps ahead, considering all the different factors that might come into play. For example, LIKE.TG used to award employees who hit certain VTO milestones with donations to their cause, with no cap. When that became unsustainable, we reworked the programs while still recognising the employee’s efforts.
Track activity
Use tools that help employees find opportunities that align with organisational initiatives. LIKE.TG built its own digital tool, Volunteerforce, that lets employees log their VTO hours, organise team volunteer activities, and search for opportunities by skill, project type, duration, and location.
“I think a lot of companies start managing this with Excel spreadsheets, or with someone in HR managing this off to the side, but that quickly becomes unscalable and unsustainable,” said Olsen. There are several companies that provide volunteer tracking apps.
Incentivise employees by creating impact milestones
At LIKE.TG, employees who hit at least 7 milestones — repeat volunteer engagements, donating skills, joining a board, organising a team event, etc. — are entered into a lottery for a grant to an eligible organisation of their choice. That’s in addition to standard company matches to eligible organisations.
Volunteer time off is the evolution of employee engagement
It’s easier to measure the impact of corporate giving for the recipients than it is to measure the impact of VTO on employee engagement and morale. How does LIKE.TG measure employee impact? Olsen’s team collects survey data to better understand how employees are inspired to connect with the community in meaningful and sustainable ways.
“We also look at participation in our programs, and how many people are hitting each of the impact milestones,” Olsen said.
She said 13,500 employees have hit at least seven impact milestones.
Over the last few years, much has been made about the importance of purpose-driven employment. Lately, quiet quitting, where workers collect a paycheck by doing the minimum and no more, has made headlines. But here’s the thing — is quiet quitting really about slacking off at work, or about employers giving employees the freedom to lead a more purposeful, fuller life outside their jobs?
In an age when businesses are expected to engage in social issues in bigger and more visible ways, the next step is giving employees the tools, support, and time they need to do just that.
Prioritise employee engagement to boost morale, productivity, and retention.
DOWNLOAD REPORT
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
4 Steps To Building a Successful Partnership Strategy
You want to get your product or service into the hands of more customers. Other companies might want to get your product out there, too — if it helps generate revenue for themselves. And that can form the foundation of a successful channel partnership strategy.
As a channel partner or Cloud Reseller, you can increase your value to new and existing customers — and, in turn, grow your profits. We’ve seen this happen time and again over the last six years at LIKE.TG. And along the way, we’ve learned a number of important tips from successful partners, including how you can get your solutions to market faster.
A key word we hear when we talk to our current partners is “scale.” They want to go big. And their main question is: What is the key to scale our sales efforts and maximise revenue?
Let’s start thinking through the four steps to help you define your partnership strategy:
1. Understand where you win
Identify your best, high-growth products, market, and segments.
Start by gathering your facts, sales data, recent information about closed deals, and success stories. Where are you trending in regards to market segments and verticals? Which product combinations are selling the best in each region?
Action: From your wins, define what can complement your solution to your end customer. Talk to your customers and get feedback by asking the following questions:
What makes their decision making easier?
What helps the sales process go smoother?
What do they believe creates better alignment?
What makes your solution more attractive compared to your competition in the market?
2. Establish the business goals for your partnership strategy
Understanding where you win — what regions and verticals — will help you target areas that you want to invest in. Sharing this information will also make it easier for partners to recognise an opportunity where they can partner with you to get to market faster.
Questions to ask yourself:
Are you looking to co-market/co-sponsor events?
Are you looking at expanding into new markets and regions? New market segments and verticals?
Are you looking to work with other LIKE.TG partners who complement your technology?
Are you looking for other LIKE.TG partners who can support your implementations and provide professional services?
Are you looking to leverage existing networks and expand your coverage through your partner channel?
Look at your competitors’ partner programs, including the type of partners they target, the events they sponsor, and how they are incentivising and creating value.
Action: Answer the above questions, and identify the top two reasons you are looking to partner. Write down your business goals for the partnership strategy. Now, define the three benefits you can accomplish by developing partnerships in the ecosystem.
3. Develop measurable objectives
Here are some questions to answer in order to set revenue targets for your partner program:
What is your predicted partner-led revenue as a percentage of your total revenue?
If you have worked with partners to drive revenue in the past, what was the dollar amount your partners generated over the last two years?
Consider joint marketing efforts with your partners, and the amount your partners will contribute to that program. Below are some potential scenarios:
Is it more cost-effective to embed a partner solution instead of building it in house? If yes, have you evaluated potential partners? If no, perform a cost analysis to develop, maintain, and upgrade the solution.
If you are looking to get more leads and referrals through an extended network, is there a software company that has many of the same customers? Reach out to develop joint marketing plans. What about a partner who is already in your target vertical or market?
To build a better brand and create awareness, consider the partners that have done a great job in this area. Can you brainstorm together?
Partnerships are there to help you with all of the above, but prioritise your business goals, and have clear objectives so that you can pick the right partners. Then, put a partnership strategy together and drive toward success.
What you can do now
Getting started is half the challenge. Begin with these four activities on your journey.
Measure and know your business metrics and your customer profile
Define your goals and business needs
Determine the amount you are going to spend on your defined objectives
Determine the amount you are expecting your potential partner to drive
4. Set yourself up for success with LIKE.TG Partner Program
The LIKE.TG Partner Program enables our partners to build and grow successful businesses while delivering ongoing and meaningful customer success. The Program has been designed with a fair and transparent partnership model to create a thriving and connected ecosystem where it is easier for partners to collaborate and do business with LIKE.TG.
Under the program, partners are given access to premium tools and resources they can leverage to supercharge their sales and marketing strategy, and take their solutions to the next level.
Some resources you can look forward to:
Pardot Plus
Premier Success Plan
Accelerate Program
Platform Experts AppExchange
Performance Incentive Referral fees
Access to Marketing Development Fund and many other Partner Marketing assets/resources
Find out more about LIKE.TG Partner Program Overview here.
Learn how marketers can drive growth with innovation.
DOWNLOAD GUIDE
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Dreamforce 2022: Inspiration and Action To Get To Net Zero
With sustainability unveiled as a core value for LIKE.TG earlier this year, sustainable transformation was a key theme at Dreamforce 2022.
Packed with sessions featuring environmental experts and thought leaders, Dreamforce 2022 inspired the LIKE.TG community to take action for a more sustainable future. Attendees were empowered with practical tools and strategies to help them go net zero.
This was also the most sustainable Dreamforce ever, with many steps taken to reduce our carbon footprint:
Dreamforce was 100% beefless and porkless for the attendee lunch. This helped conserve millions of gallons of water.
The lunch program offered 100% compostable packaging with containers, napkins, and utensils that could be tossed in the green bin.
Once Dreamforce was over, attendees could drop their conference badges and lanyards in designated bins for recycling.
Instead of receiving backpacks and other giveaways, LIKE.TG is giving all attendees the opportunity to offset their travel-related emissions to Dreamforce – by supporting carbon offset projects and reducing greenhouse gases.Carbon projects at Dreamforce Net Zero Vista contributed to LIKE.TG’s commitment in growing 100,000,000 trees by 2030. 3,000 LIKE.TG employees also planted 5,000 native seedlings in partnership with not-for-profit organisations Literacy for Environmental Justice and Golden Gate Audubon Society.
Rather than providing packaged water, water stations were available throughout the campus for attendees to refill their own bottles.
Net Zero Treehouse located in the Net Zero Vista at Dreamforce.
Change-makers inspire sustainable transformation
Net Zero keynote with Dr Jane Goodall
World-renowned environmental advocate Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE spoke with Marc Benioff to kick off the Net Zero Summit at Dreamforce. Jane declared that it is ‘a new day for our environment’ and that it is critical for us to use innovative thinking to go net zero. She shared her own journey and experiences as a primatologist and anthropologist leading to her efforts in environmental leadership today.
“We are part of the natural world, and not separate from it,” Jane said. “But today, we feel separated from it.”
This feeling of separation has led many people to think they can have unlimited economic development on a planet with finite natural resources. According to Jane, business has an important role to play in climate action by being a platform for change and an essential source of innovation.
“Business must drive and support the ‘ecopreneurial’ thinking our planet so desperately needs,” shared Jane. “Through innovation, education, and mobilisation, we will continue to thrive together, as a planet, as a species, as people.”
During the conversation, Marc revealed that Jane influenced him to focus on forests, and was the inspiration for the 1t.org platform to grow, restore and conserve one trillion trees. Jane also shared that her dream of empowering young people to take climate action inspired her to establish the community action programme Roots Shoots.Today, the program’s participants include young people from kindergarten to university age in countries across the world. The participants in Roots Shoots are empowered to help people, animals and the environment. These projects enable them to make impactful change and inspire others to do so too.
Watch ‘A New Day for the Environment’ — Net Zero keynote here.
ASEAN Business Spotlight: PETRONAS
Energy and utilities companies have a unique role to play in the transition to a clean and equitable energy future.
With sustainability embedded in their business over the last two decades, PETRONAS has committed to achieving net zero by 2050. The company has embraced technology-driven innovation to help it become more agile and meet its sustainability goals. In partnership with LIKE.TG, it deployed PETRONAS360 to enable all partners, customers, and executives to access a single source of truth. This helped their teams to pivot, be agile, fail and recover quickly on their digital transformation journey.
Aadrin Azly, Chief Digital Officer, PETRONAS spoke about the company’s sustainability vision and its evolving partnership with LIKE.TG. According to Aadrin, PETRONAS began with a focus on nation-building and then international growth, but today it is increasingly focused on the transition to clean energy.
“The energy transition has to happen in a fair, equitable and measured manner — so we focus not only on delivering clean energy, but also to those who need it the most and in an affordable way,” said Aadrin.
“Sustainability solutions, like carbon tracking and methane tracking are of interest to us. We’re also working with LIKE.TG to meet our target of deploying 90% of our applications on the cloud.”
In ‘The Energy Utilities Future: Agile Energy Transition’ session, Azureen Azita Abdullah, Head of Downstream Digital Innovation, at PETRONAS, shared how the Malaysian energy provider is making the transition to net zero.
“Now we have a clear roadmap for energy transition, and we are escalating this whole ecosystem to our nation and hopefully catalysing it for the whole region,” said Azureen.
Sustainable Transformation is Everyone’s Job
While businesses have an important role to play in conserving the environment, they can also do this in a financially sustainable manner. In the very insightful discussion, ‘Sustainable to the Core‘,a global panel of thought leaders examined how organisations can embed sustainability into their business model.
According to Kathy Varol, Purpose Strategy Expert and Consultant for CSR ESG, businesses should realise they can’t have unlimited growth on a finite planet. Her advice to companies embarking on their sustainability journey was — “Identify a purpose for your company and use environmental, social, and governance as a framework to bring that purpose to life — holistically across the organisation with accountability, control and metrics.”
David Reynolds, CEO, Department for Trade and Investment, South Australia, shared how his state has pursued sustainability goals and facilitated the transition to renewable energy. This enabled the Department, a public sector organisation, to show private corporations that sustainability can be used for economic development and turned into a business advantage. Orlando Ferreira, CFO, IDB Invest shared his views on sustainability from a development banking perspective.
“Nine out of ten projects that fail do so not because of credit issues, but because ESG criteria were not put into place,” said Orlando. “Sustainability is not just the right thing to do, but the right thing for business itself.”
Paul Polman, Business Leader, former CEO of Unilever, and co-author of “Net Positive” concluded that sustainability is a story of hope.
“There are the right demand signals from the market today, especially from Gen Z and the millennials on sustainability. But we need to move faster, and everyone has a place and role to play.”
Watch ‘Sustainable to the Core’ here.
Climate action, here and now
To empower businesses to take climate action, LIKE.TG introduced the first-of-its-kind Net Zero Marketplace at Dreamforce. The platform makes carbon credit purchases simple and transparent, allowing any organisation to accelerate climate positive impact at scale. Attendees were able to offset their travel-related emissions to Dreamforce and learn more about the Net Zero Marketplace.
Net Zero Marketplace, built onCommerce Cloud, connects buyers andecopreneurs— environmentally-focused entrepreneurs who lead and drive climate action worldwide.
It is this type of environmental focus and commitment that is drivingBrowzwear, a 3D apparel design company, to reduce waste in the fashion industry. Supported byCustomer 360, Browzwear has scaled its operations to help more than 1000 fashion companies on their sustainability journey.
Dreamforce was a great opportunity for the LIKE.TG community to come together and be inspired by Trailblazers, thought leaders, environmental experts, and activists. It showed how each of us has a role to play in going net zero, and showcased tools and strategies to help us get there — together.
Watch all the Dreamforce episodes on Sustainabilityon-demand here.
Catch all the magic fromDreamforce 2022 on-demandon LIKE.TG+
3 Ways to Elevate Your Financial Services Customer Experience
The latest Future of Financial Services Report – a window into global customer preferences and behaviour – sheds light on what ASEAN customers today expect from financial service providers. Customer experiences of banking, insurance, and wealth management services are falling short of expectations. This is prompting customers to switch service providers. But for financial services institutions (FSIs) willing to make changes, these trends present an opportunity to inspire new loyalty, trust, and business growth.
LIKE.TG ASEAN’s Prakash Thomas believes that customer behaviour has significantly shifted in the region. In an era of economic uncertainty with the lingering effects of the pandemic, customers today prefer digital-first experiences in almost every aspect of daily life. As Regional Vice President of Financial Services Health, Thomas notes FSIs are having to rethink customer journeys, and make them digital-first to meet customer expectations.
“Financial services are making the shift to digital-first experiences,” said Thomas. “Yet customers aren’t satisfied and aren’t afraid to switch providers. Over one-third of customers across banking, insurance, and wealth management switched providers in the last 12 months — for an easier, better experience. Today, FSIs have an opportunity through digital transformation to anticipate customers’ needs just like Spotify and Tiktok anticipate what their users want next.”
As interest rates and costs of living rise, the report shows consumers are more willing than before to look for better alternatives that meet their needs. Global customer churn rates are substantial at 22% for banking, 33% for insurance, and 33% for wealth.
In Singapore, the churn is high especially in wealth management services with 46% of surveyed customers switching providers – 13% higher than the global churn rate.
This can be partially explained from the reasons for switching providers.
A common trend is the lack of trust ASEAN customers have in their providers. The biggest driver for switching providers was ‘hidden fees and fine print’ (40% in Singapore).
With customers expecting digital-first experiences even after pandemic-related social restrictions have eased, FSIs need to invest in technology to lift their digital capabilities. The report highlights three key trends in the future of financial services. To retain and delight customers in a post-pandemic economy, successful FSIs of the next decade will need to excel in the following areas.
1. Offer seamless digital services and customer journeys
As businesses shut and call centres were overwhelmed with customer calls during the pandemic, digital channels emerged as the preferred option to engage customers. This trend continues now for ASEAN customers, who are ready to change providers for a better digital experience. Customers highlighted ‘Easy to use digital interface and user experience (website, app, chat function)’ as another key reason for switching providers (39% in Singapore).
Andrew Taggart, Partner (Clients Markets Leader), PwC South East Asia Consulting, says FSIs are trying to make the customer experience seamless and easy.
“We have seen FSIs trying to move beyond creating good customer service through easy and efficient customer transactions,” said Taggart. “They are now trying to create more customer value by providing more contextualised and personalised insights, and advice at interactions across all channels, human and digital. This requires a shift away from the mindset that digital channels are only good for efficient transactions and that human interactions are better suited for handling enquiries, to an omnichannel customer journey that bridges the two.”
The report also reflects a consumer trend of switching to fintech platforms for their simplicity. When asked why they didn’t use a traditional provider, Singapore customers highlighted ‘easy and fast setup, verification, onboarding, and first time use of the app’ and ‘easy and intuitive user interface/user experience and navigation of the app’. Percentages for both were well above global averages.
Gary Teh, Managing Director (Group IT) at Great Eastern, a Singapore-based insurance provider, believes FSIs can implement service automation to deliver better customer experiences. But they should have a strategic approach to automation.
“We are guided by the value to the customer,” said Teh. “Ultimately, automation needs to enable customers to get service faster and more comprehensively in one click. If it doesn’t help the customer get quick service, then I’d say don’t do it.”
Great Eastern has successfully implemented many ‘one-click’ services – enabled by integrations with multiple platforms like digital IDs and instant payment transfer services. Its customers can fill in their application form with SingPass and pay via PayNow almost instantly. Products such as travel insurance, home content cover, and dengue cover can also be purchased at the point of need in one click, without having to go through an agent.
2. Make every interaction personal
From online searches to advertisements to Netflix choices, consumers are being delivered personalised experiences across industries like never before. Non-curated experiences are impacting customer satisfaction in a significant way. ‘Attentive and personalised customer service’ was the next highest driver for switching providers (31% in Singapore).
This is an area where traditional banks are still trying to improve their capabilities. Many are still using legacy systems with data silos across the business and no centralised source of truth. This makes it difficult to have a 360-degree customer view. When asked ‘does your provider anticipate your financial needs?’ only 13% of Singapore customers said they agree.
Delivering the relevant and personalised experiences that customers expect requires customer data to be readily accessible and easily managed. A cloud-based CRM like Customer 360 can provide a single, shared view of the customer journey across a service provider’s teams. It can enable teams to work together to deliver connected customer experiences and build strong relationships.
While data and digital capabilities are important, it is also equally important to deliver service with a human touch. Teh explains how Great Eastern relies on its network of agents to deliver personalised customer experiences.
“Nothing can beat personalised service with a human touch. If you had a butler, would you not call? So, our focus has been to empower our agents with the tools to deliver personalised service to customers. When we design our customer journey, we always have our agents in mind. Today, our agents can help our customers perform financial and non-financial transactions digitally. Customers don’t need to step out of the comfort of their home or office.”
3. Build credibility and trust with customers
A key theme of the global report is a continued lack of customer trust in financial providers. For the Singapore market this is particularly clear, with less than 18% agreeing with the statement ‘I trust that my provider is invested in my financial wellbeing.’
According to Taggart, customers are questioning service providers’ ability to use their data to provide proactive service and increase trust
“The customer experience of privacy today is clicking on long, never read, legalistic terms and conditions and then clicking through cookie acceptances,” said Taggart. “They are really left hoping service providers will do the right thing on data sharing, that the laws they don’t understand are sufficient to protect them, and providers have sufficient cyber defences to protect their data.
“I think more is required to educate customers and ultimately allow them to participate in the data sharing market, i.e. if FSIs share customer data with an organisation, they will get benefits and in turn pass on benefits to the customer, like discounts, points, gifts, or upgrades.”
Customers want providers to care more about their financial wellbeing and the insights from the report outline some key areas for improvement. To start, financial providers can regularly highlight how they protect and use customer data, remain compliant to industry regulations and make terms and conditions easily understandable.
This post originally appeared on the A.U.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Building Resilience in Financial Services – How LIKE.TG Can Help
The uncertainty businesses felt at the start of the pandemic has re-emerged with many anticipating a global slowdown. The Straits Times reports that almost three-quarters of the World Economic Forum’s Community of Chief Economists believe that a global recession is at least somewhat likely.
There are a number of factors driving this uncertainty and market volatility, including supply and demand shocks, intense measures to tame inflation, and a lack of funding for new initiatives. These impact the flow of capital and influence investment behaviours, particularly when it comes to technology.
As a result, financial services firms are adopting different methods to adapt to the changing landscape. These include platformification and digitalisation of the front office to manage operational costs while providing new digital services. Firms are also creating value and competitive advantage with new offerings such as sustainable finance.
In short, firms have both an opportunity and challenge to reimagine their business models and customer experience.
Forging new pathways to success in financial services
LIKE.TG Customer 360 can help firms navigate the challenges ahead and unlock new opportunities. LIKE.TG’s Financial Services Cloud provides the platform for financial services institutions to build trust. It unifies the customer experience across channels, geographies, and lines of business for both consumer and commercial businesses.
With purpose-built industry functionality and all the capabilities of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, financial services firms can increase employee productivity, accelerate time to value, and deepen customer trust with every interaction. More importantly, they can be there in the moment for their customers who rely on them and trust them with their financial wellbeing.
At the same time, MuleSoft, helps firms easily automate any process to drive efficiency and productivity. MuleSoft also connects multiple systems to streamline the customer experience.
Slack supports faster resolution of issues for higher levels of customer satisfaction. The powerful collaboration tool also enables seamless communication with partners and customers, leading to less friction, more innovation, and faster decision-making.
New business models are underpinned by embedded experiences and ecosystems seamlessly integrated into the journey of customers, employees, and partners. With LIKE.TG’s innovative solutions, financial services can drive cost savings and build better business resilience.
Building resilience and customer engagement with data
During the pandemic, data-driven organisations proved to be more confident and resilient. To navigate this next phase of uncertainty, it makes sense for firms to turn to their data.
Tableau empowers teams with real-time insights and analytics to make informed decisions. They can make more accurate predictions about where business is heading. They can also identify opportunities to fine-tune operations and increase productivity.
With LIKE.TG Genie, firms can integrate data from every step in the customer experience to create a real-time customer profile. This profile enables all teams — across sales, service, marketing, and more — to tailor the experiences they provide in real time.
According to our Future of Financial Services report, three out of customers’ top five pain points in their digital experiences tie back to poor personalisation. So for those wanting to grow and engage their customer base, it is more important than ever to provide experiences tailored to each individual’s needs.
Balancing corporate responsibility and profitability
The need to build more resilient business models and drive sustainable growth will be highlighted at the Singapore FinTech Festival this week. The festival will also examine how organisations balance corporate responsibility and profitability in order to achieve greater stakeholder engagement and satisfaction.
LIKE.TG is a passionate proponent of stakeholder capitalism and committed to doing well by all our stakeholders — our customers, employees, partners, communities, the planet, and society as a whole. And we believe that data and technology can support more resilient and inclusive business models that serve the needs of all stakeholders in the financial services industry.
Just look at Bank Mandiri, one of the leading financial institutions in Indonesia. At the height of the pandemic, when many of its customers faced cash flow problems, Bank Mandiri leveraged its data to increase flexibility in its operations and assess customers’ suitability for a new loan restructuring program. Customers could still carry out their financial transactions and receive support with their financial and loan repayment needs.
Investing in sustainable growth
In the current climate, many firms may be feeling pressure to reduce their technology spend. However, investments in technologies like automation software can help drive efficiency and sustainable growth.
Additionally, Software-as-a-Service-based solutions that LIKE.TG provides reduce the upfront costs of new technology investments. Firms can pay only for what they need or, in other words, pay as they grow.
Visit us in person at the Singapore FinTech Festival to learn more about how LIKE.TG can help you build business resilience and customer engagement. Find us at booth #2H29 in Hall 2 at Singapore Expo from 2 – 4 November 2022.
How Customer Centricity Unlocks Profitable Growth and Success for SMEs
What is customer centricity? How can growing startups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) prioritise customer centricity to fuel growth and drive success? Customer centricity is about providing personalised, connected customer experiences across all channels — before, during, and after every transaction. Customer-centric businesses deliver more empathetic experiences to win over customers and build more highly valued customer relationships that return real business value.
Having a customer-centric mindset is more important than ever in a digital-first world. Whether you are a digital-native organisation or a traditional structured company, putting the customer at the centre of everything you do is critical to a successful digital transformation.
The problem is that many SMEs try to solve one problem at a time and lose focus on the big picture. That tends to create a disconnected ecosystem of siloed platforms, which can result in disjointed customer journeys and cause a customer success gap.
Prioritising customer centricity is one of the key factors to SMEs’ success and growth. Focusing on putting your customers at the centre of everything you do as your big-picture goal will help to close the customer success gap, support your customer journeys, attract investor interest, and scale your business. Here’s how.
1. Close the customer success gap with a single source of truth
Customers’ expectations and behaviours have shifted as we continue our transition to a digital-first world. According to LIKE.TG’s latest State of the Connected Customer report, 73% of customers now expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
That means customers no longer want to be categorised. Customers want personalised communication on any — and all — channels they choose. A few years ago, we started with the concept of 1:many. It then moved to a 1:1 model, thanks to the evolution of the Marketing solutions. Now, it has evolved into what we call the 1:U, where customers want the brands they love to know them on a personal level.
To close the customer success gap, you must put the customer at the centre of everything you do. That requires the right structure and technology to unify your data and create a single source of truth.
2. Choose technology that supports your customer journeys
To prioritise customer centricity, the technologies you choose should support your customer journeys. The right technology can help achieve this in three key ways.
First, it drives automations to add efficiency and consistency across your customer journey ecosystem. Second, it creates a single source of truth with customer data accessible to everyone, from anywhere. Third, it enables you to make data-backed decisions, and provides the agility you need to react to situations quickly.
Take Zenyum, for example. The Singapore-based smile cosmetics company deployed Sales Cloud to allow their team to analyse data by country within the markets efficiently. At the same time, Service Cloudand Experience Cloud help them create a sophisticated personalisation pipeline that delivers deep data insights, including a 360-view of each customer interaction. It is also used to connect different teams on a single platform, increasing efficiency, and reducing turnaround times by 40-50%. As a result, Zenyum has achieved 8x improvement in lead activation rate.
3. Attract investors and get funding for your business
How do you secure funding for your growing business? Securing business funding can be a difficult challenge to overcome. Investors, venture capitalists, incubators, and accelerators take customer success seriously when assigning value to your business. In a recent discussion with James Watson, Director of Investments at Catcha Group, we talked about what SMEs need to do to attract investor interest.
“We always look for companies that have relatively low cost to acquire customers, and have a platform that can retain them successfully with minimal churn,” he said. “You need to continue to show growth in obtaining new customers and make sure they are retained successfully without spending too much to retain them. Being able to innovate quickly, pivot your business, and directly serve your consumers is the key differentiator we look for in companies.”
Customer-centric companies are able to achieve this by leveraging data to understand customer behaviour and make insightful decisions to best serve their customers.
4. Scale your business with a digital-first mindset
At LIKE.TG, we define scalability as increasing revenue without substantially increasing resources. Achieving that is about using a digital-first mindset to create better efficiency and ensure that any additional resources are reflected in your return on investment (ROI).
This digital-first mindset has to be fused into your company culture. You need to identify the prime areas for automation, hire the right people ahead of the curve, and don’t become over-dependent on one person or isolated knowledge. Building your business with scalability in mind and taking a customer-centric mindset are the keys to growth and success.
Vietnam-based test automation platform provider, Katalon, is putting this concept into practice. The company has doubled in size in less than 12 months, and credits LIKE.TG as a catalyst for their growth.
To scale into the enterprise segment, the company uses automation through Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Platform and Inbox to enable the customer success team to touch every customer account while maximising efficiency and cost effectiveness. These solutions have reduced manual processes by 70%, improved conversion rate, and increased accurate forecasts by 50%.
The company is also using LIKE.TG to streamline the entire sales funnel and divide tasks between sales and customer success teams, while maintaining a seamless experience across the entire customer journey.
LIKE.TG enables Katalon to hire in any country and optimise serving their customers globally, while keeping a culture of accountability through their remote sales, service and finance teams. This capability has contributed to a four-fold increase in revenue team growth.
5. Innovate and grow your business with a customer-centric vision
This is more evidence why the SME’s roadmap for sustainable growth should be centred around a 360 customer-centric vision that puts the customer at the core of the experience.
Building your business with scalability and customer centricity in mind is critical to growth and success. Learn how to create a winning strategy that can help you stay competitive and innovative in this fast-changing environment. Take your business to the next level and be the game changer for your business.
Watch our customer centricity video now to learn how to unlock profitable growth and success for your business.
No One Understands Your Charts — Here’s How To Change That
Charts are the language of business, used every day at all levels to convey information. But too often, they consist of incomprehensible pies, bars, gauges, dots, and lines, leaving the reader no more informed about the topic at hand. The good news is it’s almost certainly not your fault — it’s the charts themselves.
I’ve been helping people build better charts for 15 years, through my book, The Big Book of Dashboards, on Chart Chat (a video series about the good and bad of data visualisation), and at conferences around the world. I’m a senior data evangelist at LIKE.TG’s analytics platform Tableau, and here’s what I know: data visualisation is a language as expressive as the written word, a language that needs to be understood by all but often is not.
I’m endlessly fascinated by the power of data to persuade or inform. Seemingly trivial choices such as colour or orientation can completely transform a chart’s message. Check out this two-minute video for a perfect example of how a simple bar chart can be manipulated to tell two completely different stories.
In this post, I’ll share my top tips that will help you improve any chart. Each one represents a core aspect of data literacy skills. This list could also form a checklist you can use when creating charts to ensure you’ve made something that will work for your audience and help you communicate your message more efficiently. I’ll show the tips by making incremental changes to a typical chart you might find on any dashboard. Below is our starting point, an everyday pie chart:
Tip #1 – Avoid the pies!
Pie charts are everywhere. Humans love circles, but pie charts are rarely useful. Consider our example above. Who has the biggest sales? It’s hard to answer the question. Let’s apply our first incremental improvement and switch to a bar chart:
It’s not only easier when the data is shown in bars, your brain efficiently processes the bar chart on the right before you even consciously think about the data.
How can that be? Data visualisation takes advantage of “preattentive attributes.” These are environmental signals that we process subconsciously, and they’re super-useful. Length, colour, size, and angle are all examples of preattentive attributes. However, we process some more efficiently than others. Our brain is terrible at efficiently comparing sizes of slices in pies, but wonderfully efficient at perceiving even the smallest differences in lengths.
A chart should deliver its message in the most accurate way possible. Choosing the right preattentive attribute is a critical skill. Don’t just click the button that makes the most “attractive” chart. You should always think about whether the chart actually conveys the message you want it to.
Tip #2 – Avoid distractions (aka, “don’t make me tilt my head!”)
Your goal when making charts is to reduce the cognitive load on the audience as much as possible. How many times have you seen a chart with the labels rotated vertically? I see it all the time, most often on bar charts. Why not simply rotate the chart so the bar is horizontal?
Making these incremental changes helps people get to the insight more quickly because they can focus on data, not formatting. Other distractions that often clutter charts are excessive gridlines, intrusive axes or borders, or the use of three dimensional charts.
Tip #3 – Use colour with intent
Avoid the temptation to use too many colours in your visualisations. In all analytics software, colours are just a click away, and it’s easy to feel productive by sprinkling some into your charts.
Take a step back. Is the purpose of your analytics to make pretty rainbows, or to share insights?
Some of the most powerful and effective charts use only one colour. In the below example, the multi colours used on the left serve no purpose. Readers might be confused as to what the different colours even signify. The example on the right is more effective in highlighting the intent, which is identifying the top two sellers.
Tip #4 – Choose a good title
After choosing an appropriate chart, orienting it correctly, and using colour to highlight, you need to stop and think: what is this chart actually showing? What conclusion do I want people to draw from this chart?
The first thing people look at on your chart, and the most likely thing they’ll remember, is the title. It’s the one chance you get to tell them what they’re going to see and suggest the insight you want them to take away. A good title should describe the insight the chart shows — this could be in the form of a short phrase or question. Getting in the habit of making good titles also forces you to be sure you know why you are making the chart in the first place.
In this example, I’ve created an effective 2-level title on the right. This allows a clear intro (“Who are our top 2 sellers?”) with a sub-heading for added context.
Tip #5 – Show the right number
My final tip is possibly the one you should consider first. Are you even showing the correct number to your audience? So far, we’ve been looking at sales by Account Executive. It looks like Christine and Andrea are our leaders. However, sales success is measured against a quota, not the actual sales value themselves. Have we been charting the wrong number all this time? Let’s take a look at the data:
We can see Christine and Andrea ranking top, but look across to the target and percent of target values: they’re behind their quota! Perhaps, then, we’ve been visualising the wrong value all along. Let’s take a look at the account execs ranked by percent of target. It turns out that Dan, Allie, and Wanda are the superstars who are above quota. Dan’s way ahead, even though his actual sales value is the lowest in the team.
These tips will help improve your charts, but they are just the starting point. You can accelerate your learning by joining thousands of other data-inspired people in our Tableau Community.
Get smarter about data
Get insights 29% faster with analytics*. Learn to interpret, explore, and communicate effectively and efficiently with data.
Build your data literacy with Tableau analytics
Drive your business growth with data analytics. Learn the data and analytics trends and insights shaping the digital marketing landscape.
DOWNLOAD REPORT
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
*Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
How PETRONAS Wows Its Customers With Digital Transformation
How do you turn a staple purchase like petrol into a positive customer experience? That’s one of many challenges PETRONAS has overcome while shifting from a product-centric business to one that’s customer focused.
Established in Malaysia in 1974, the progressive energy and solutions provider is now one of the world’s most recognised brands. It has a presence in over 100 countries and a global workforce totalling more than 46,000 employees.
Aadrin Azly, Chief Digital Officer at PETRONAS, joined us at Dreamforce to share how the business is transforming for the future with LIKE.TG Customer 360. Here are highlights from Aadrin’s session, including best practices on how to move from vision to value.
Kick-start your transformation journey with early wins
PETRONAS’s journey with LIKE.TG began with a project to improve the experience of retail customers. The project included the implementation of Service Cloud to manage the resolution of equipment failures within petrol stations.
With support from LIKE.TG Professional Services, PETRONAS completed the project 100% on time and on budget. This was in spite of the project kicking off just weeks before the pandemic and everyone pivoting to work virtually.
“LIKE.TG sent in their A team and stuck by our side. They were there with us for every call and every stand-up and we navigated every challenge together,” said Aadrin. “We are now reaping the benefits, including reduced downtimes and an increase in resolutions from 76% to 94%.”
Put customers at the centre of your business
The success of the retail project led PETRONAS to think about what to do next. PETRONAS’s customer interactions inside petrol stations represent one of many touch points it has with its wider customer base. In fact, the diversity of its portfolio means that some business customers interact with many people and departments.
“I once visited a customer who told me that they couldn’t see me until 4pm because they were too busy. It turns out they were busy with PETRONAS. They had a total of four meetings with us that day which is something that should not have happened,” said Aadrin.
PETRONAS realised it needed to stop looking at the business from a supplier point of view and start seeing things from a customer point of view. This gave rise to the PETRONAS360 vision which puts the customer at the centre of the business.
PETRONAS360 brings together customers, partners and employees across the enterprise to provide a single source of truth to deliver innovative and sustainable solutions and grow new markets that create exponential value at scale.
Aadrin shared the process PETRONAS and LIKE.TG went through to co-create the vision for its digital transformation and secure internal alignment.
“Digital transformation is not easy. You need a seat at the table or sponsorship from management to drive it through. At the same time, you need people on the ground who will feel the program hits their pain points. So we spent the first part of our journey speaking with stakeholders and staff to co-create our vision,” said Aadrin.
Stay on track with clear and measurable goals
PETRONAS wanted to avoid a never-ending transformation. So once the business had clarity on its vision, it set very granular and measurable KPIs. These included a US$43M increase in revenue over five years, a 15% reduction in customer churn, and a 33% uplift in productivity.
Aadrin shared that the clear KPIs acted as a North Star for PETRONAS’s digital transformation, helping everyone to stay focused on what they needed to achieve.
“Breaking things into bite-sized pieces meant we could quickly pivot when things went wrong and celebrate when things went right. And celebrating those small wins created unstoppable momentum to drive our transformation.”
Take a data-driven approach
PETRONAS has applied a data-driven approach to its entire transformation and tracked results every step of the way. This has involved breaking KPIs down into more tangible and measurable goals.
“You sometimes see big value goals like $16B or 42x and they are impossible to track. I think it’s more important to identify the enablers behind the value you want to create and track those religiously,” said Aadrin.
The focus on measurement is reflective of PETRONAS’s wider commitment to becoming a more data-driven organisation. Work is beginning with MuleSoft to help PETRONAS unlock data from various on-premise and cloud-based systems, including LIKE.TG. The data will be orchestrated into functional data hubs with APIs to enable easy reuse and consumption. Data will also be protected from vulnerabilities with standard security policies and governance across all APIs.
On top of this, PETRONAS has started to train teams on no-code and low-code data visualisation with the goal of democratising data science.
Drive digital adoption with human-centred design
PETRONAS’s digital transformation is ongoing. Since launching Service Cloud, the business has deployed a dealer portal on Experience Cloud and adopted Sales Cloud for management of accounts and opportunities. It is also set to go live with a number of other LIKE.TG solutions, including Energy Utilities Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, Tableau, and Marketing Cloud.
Asked how PETRONAS drives adoption of new technologies across its diverse range of businesses, Aadrin highlighted the importance of human-centred design.
“You need to start by identifying who will use the solution and understanding their pain points. And you can’t just ask them about their pain points as they will provide a list of a thousand things and the solution will become too expensive. So observe and understand their pain points because the moment you understand those pain points, driving adoption becomes easy.”
PETRONAS service transformation with LIKE.TG has heightened customer experience and productivity.Chief Digital Officer Aadrin Azly demonstrates how PETRONAS is executing on its vision to deliver in this video. WATCH NOW Learn more about how LIKE.TG Professional Services helps customers move from vision to value and deliver proven ROI. Download “The Total Economic Impact™ Of LIKE.TG Professional Services”, a 2022 Forrester Consulting study commissioned by LIKE.TG.
Your First-Party Data Strategy Matters — Especially During Tough Times
As budgets tighten, marketing departments may shift their focus toward efficiency. Here’s how a smart customer data-led strategy can hit both targets.
When businesses see signs of economic uncertainty, the natural reaction is to cut costs and try to do more with less. However, there’s one area where your marketing team shouldn’t look to trim: harnessing the first-party data you collect directly from customers.
This information gained through call center interactions, mobile app behaviour, and loyalty programs, among others, can be very helpful during lean times.
Let’s take a look at three areas where these data assets offer a boost:
1. You can reduce cost per acquisition (CPA) economic uncertainty
With an unpredictable economic future, limiting the CPA for new customers only becomes more important. Focusing on marketing campaigns fuelled by that first-party data can reduce your CPA — improving cost efficiency and growth.
CPA is calculated by dividing the cost of your marketing campaign by the number of customers (or conversion events) that you can attribute to that spending. But for many organisations, optimising this formula has felt like a never-ending quest.
So what does first-party data have to do with reducing a company’s overall CPA? A lot. When you have a better understanding of your current customers — with data, you’ll know how to speak to future ones. This first-party data comes directly from your customers, going right into channels you own.
Tapping into this data means understanding which channels, campaigns, and offers work for your customer base as a whole and across key segments.
And in the (almost) post-cookie age of limited online tracking, these insights are even more valuable. Anyone who has unlocked the power of lookalike audiences within advertising platforms can attest to the value of first-party data.
The improved performance on your advertising campaigns can be dramatic. But even a small increase in the number of customers acquired per dollar spent is a powerful way to drive efficiency during economic uncertainty.
2. You can increase customer lifetime value
Many times the quickest path to greater overall growth and efficiency is deepening the relationship with your current customers. Facing slowing economic growth, CFOs and investors focus on maintaining current levels of profit or operating margin. This means keeping costs in line with slower revenue growth.
But an effective way to maintain cost discipline without sacrificing growth is enticing your current customers to spend more.
The additional revenue generated from increasing the lifetime value and average order value of your current customers costs less than acquiring new customers. That’s because you’ve already paid to acquire these customers.
Look for ways to offer greater value to your current customers, such as targeted messages and interactive email forms to provide real-time feedback. Engaging customers you already have a relationship with — and using personalisation to give them exactly what they want — is the ultimate efficiency. And you’ll likely get more business from them in the short and long term.
3. You have an always-on focus group
There’s one more important benefit of focusing on first-party customer data assets: the ability to test and learn from your customers efficiently.
The marketing examples around things like message testing and discount offers might be obvious, but there’s also a giant opportunity for the entire organisation to learn and improve.
For example, imagine allowing your product team to A/B test versions of a new concept with your customers before a launch. They could gain valuable feedback on things like pricing, packaging, and design. And this can also give your marketing team a better view into how campaigns might perform.
Just because you’re facing economic uncertainty doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice growth for efficiency. If your organisation pushes for cuts because the economy starts to slow, know that investments in customer data capabilities are not at odds with discipline and efficiency. They are indeed a big part of it.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Automate Your Customer Data and Help Your Commerce Business Grow
The latest State of Commerce report shows that high-performing commerce organisations around the world are seven times more confident in their preparedness to use data to personalise the commerce experience.
They’re also 1.6x more likely to rate themselves as effective at automating processes. Customers who have used LIKE.TG Customer 360 have seen automation of business processes speed up by 27%.
When you have your customer data on one trusted platform, with automated processes handling your day-to-day operations, you can focus on your customer and grow your business.
Automation is critical in the drive for efficiency
Automation allows you to create a more efficient and productive workforce.
In a recent LIKE.TG Success Metrics study, companies across industries and regions reported seeing, on average, a 26% increase in employee productivity* using LIKE.TG automation, plus an estimated 25% savings on IT costs*.
Other benefits of automation are described in the State of Service report — top of the list is time saving, with 98% of those surveyed describing it as a benefit, and 50% saying that it’s a major benefit to their business.
The report also includes benefits such as connection with other departments, reduction of errors, and time for new projects. All of these factors contribute to a more productive organisation — and that’s not all. Forty-seven percent of service professionals also said that automation helped them focus on their customers.
Lower your ordering costs
To meet new challenges and keep customer satisfaction at the forefront, businesses need to streamline operations to reduce costs, improve customer experience, and earn loyalty. That means streamlining order management and automating repetitive and tedious processes.
Order management system in Commerce Cloud Genie enables businesses to grow revenue with intelligent insights and build trusted relationships with real-time data. We’ve seen companies achieve a reduction of 26% in ordering costs* and boost productivity with Einstein AI within the Commerce Cloud. With commerce automation, 89% of LIKE.TG customers achieve positive ROI in only nine months.*
Customers demand personalised digital experiences
Your customers are more online than ever. As reported in our State of the Connected Customer report, customers worldwide expect more than 60% of their interactions with companies to be online this year.
The report also highlights three important considerations:
88% of consumers say that the experience a company provides is just as important as the product or service it provides
73% of customers also say that they expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations
56% of customers still think that companies treat them as a number, rather than an individual.
The State of Commerce report told us that, after revenue growth and expanded customer base, the greatest concern for most industries is deepening customer relationships.
Leaders in the world of commerce are nearly 1.7x more likely to rate themselves as ‘effective’ when it comes to personalised experiences. They’re also 1.5x more likely to be effective when it comes to understanding customer behaviour.
For your business to thrive, you need to create smoother journeys with highly personalised and intelligent shopping moments that make your customers feel truly understood. These insights present an opportunity for any company to offer a personalised digital service to wow your customers with great experiences and drive business growth. And this can be done with a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ needs – which comes from a complete set of customer data.
New channels = more opportunities
One of the keys to digital success is expanding into new channels. As shown in the State of Commerce report, 69% of digital commerce leaders are already investing in new digital channels. These new channels include mobile apps, online marketplaces, and social media platforms like TikTok.
Fifty-seven percent of customers prefer to engage with companies through digital channels — that number rises to 65% for younger generations. Online comes out on top even when it comes to the final purchase — 63% of millennials and 58% of Gen Z prefer buying online over going into a store.
The time to start automating is now
The stakes for not automating the way you handle data are high — even among leaders. In fact, leaders who report that they aren’t effective at using their data are 37% more likely to report not being prepared to handle rising inflation.
More than 60% of customers are already telling us that the majority of their interactions with companies will be online in the coming years. From LIKE.TG Cyber Week 2022 shopping insights, global online sales and digital traffic broke records. The numbers hit an all-time high of USD$281 billion, up 2% compared to 2021, and USD$68 billion, up 9% compared to 2021. If the trend continues, that number will only get higher.
Prepare your automation strategy now, and you’ll be ready to grow in the future. The second edition of the State of Commerce contains analysis of buying data from over 1 billion customers worldwide. Download the report today to find out how you can handle your data to grow your commerce business more efficiently.
*Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across Singapore, the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
How To Drive Efficient Growth and Scale Your Startup
As startups in Southeast Asia face significant market opportunities, many are looking to accelerate business growth and scale across digital marketplaces. But successfully transitioning from a startup to scaleup mindset — in a global climate of uncertainty — presents some major challenges.
As customer expectations are rising, there is a growing need for startups to invest in the relevant technology stack to build customer loyalty. Here are some of the challenges and opportunities that startups need to be aware of to drive efficient growth and build lasting customer relationships.
Growth challenges for startups
Scalable businesses are built on future-proof processes. From agile internal workflows that enable organisation-wide collaboration, to delivering personalised customer journeys across all channels — your business processes are the engine of your growth.
Then there’s funding to think about. Access to a constant source of funding will help put your startup on the growth highway. But how do you attract real interest from venture capitalists and investors? And where do you spend that funding to achieve maximum growth?
Startups also need to build an employer-of-choice workplace culture that drives talent acquisition and retention, and prioritises collaboration and innovative thinking.
Critical growth drivers for startups
These can be difficult challenges to overcome on your own. But you don’t need to face them alone. Expert insights from trusted mentors can help fill your scalability knowledge gap and accelerate your growth.
With capable mentorship and careful go-to-market planning, startups are better placed to develop an effective growth strategy that prioritises three critical growth drivers.
Customer centricity: Put your customers at the centre of everything you do to drive personalised, intuitive customer journeys.
Smart investment: Allocate resources to key growth enablement areas, while avoiding investing in blackholes that don’t impact revenue.
Process optimisation: Improve your business productivity with automation and tools that optimise your workflows and reduce operating costs.
Process optimisation is key here. As startups continue to grow, it is important to focus on growing efficiently. Your technology stack is the foundation of all three growth drivers.
From a CRM that delivers a 360-degree customer view, to real-time reporting that informs investment decision making, and automation tools that optimise business processes — the right tech stack can take your business from a high-potential startup to a rapidly-growing scaleup.
LIKE.TG research has shown that by consolidating systems together in Customer 360, it lowers IT costs by 25%*, increases employee productivity by 26%*, and customer satisfaction by 32%*. With LIKE.TG, companies can grow efficiently by improving productivity and automation, reduce the number of technology providers they need to manage their business, save time and money, and reduce complexity.
Accelerate your growth with LIKE.TG’s MasterClass
Sounds great? But how do you actually get it done?
LIKE.TG’s MasterClass Accelerator 101 webinaris helping to connect startups with the expert mentorship you need to successfully navigate Southeast Asia’s vibrant USD$360 billion (SGD$500 billion) internet economy.
In this webinar, I joined other industry experts to discuss how you can innovate, grow, and scale your startup with the right tools from the right people.
Daisy Hoang, SVP of Sales and Success at KatalonDaisy is a senior revenue generation and management executive with extensive experience scaling go-to-market strategies for SaaS technology companies. She spoke about how an efficient technology stack is the foundation of hyperscaling at Katalon.
Danny Chong, Senior Investment Director at Gobi Partners ChinaDanny is a highly successful venture capital professional with a focus on funding early-stage startups in Greater China and Southeast Asia.
Growth insights from startup experts
In the webinar, Daisy, Danny, and I set out a roadmap to help startups move from exploring your potential to scaling your company across countries.
We discussed how to gain access to the opportunities that enable startups to accelerate their growth, and how to use the right technology to create a competitive edge in the digital-first future.
In our discussion, Daisy speaks about building a tech foundation ahead of the curve. “Some of the investments [Katalon] made last year, we actually thought were a bit early for us to make those investments. Maybe six months early. But it is now paying off big time by helping us really scale and onboard the team.”
“I encourage everybody, as part of your scale up journey, to proactively identify areas that are prime for automation. Pulling tech resources early to help scale, record, document, and then at the end bring up the ROI, is extremely important,” she advises.
You’ll learn from this masterclass how to view digitisation as an opportunity to grow faster in Southeast Asia’s digital economy, and how to build a tech stack that will help to:
Optimise your operational processes
Deliver personalised customer journeys
Support an employer-of-choice workplace culture
We also talked about how to best navigate the funding journey, including current trends venture capitalists are seeing in successful startups, and how to get noticed by investors.
Small business is big business
If there’s one key message that I’d love for you to take away, it’s that small business is big business. The right tech stack can give an early-stage startup the agility and competitive power of a large enterprise player. I see it happen every day at LIKE.TG. We’re constantly helping our customers to drive cost savings and scale their business efficiently. Many of our customers use Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to create a single source of customer truth, break down departmental silos, deliver personalised customer journeys, and create collaborative workplace cultures that drive efficient growth.
This is how high-potential startups become highly-successful companies.
For more growth insights from startup up experts, watch MasterClass Accelerator 101: How you can innovate, grow, and scale your startup now.How can a CRM help startups and SMEs grow more efficiently? Get the recipe for success now.
Why Website Personalisation is Your Best Friend in a Changing Economy
When the economy shows signs of slowing down, marketing budgets are often the earliest casualties. However, not all marketing investments are created equal, and website personalisation will help you regardless of the economic climate.
There are several reasons why your business should focus on website personalisation. The first is customers now expect personalised experiences from nearly every brand they engage with. Over the last decade, companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix have shown how technology and data can create seamless and often delightful customer experiences.
It’s not just that Netflix has thousands of shows and movies for us to watch. It’s that the streaming service’s homepage is curated and ever-evolving with our tastes. That’s website personalisation at its best and something we come back for (and expect).
According to LIKE.TG’s State of the Connected Consumer report, customers say that being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business. 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Customers are less forgiving about a disjointed experience or having to make a big effort to find what they want. And since websites have become the most essential digital experience for many businesses, they are among the first places where customers will form impressions about your brand.
Customers are using their high standards for experience to judge whether to do business with you. So personalising that experience should seem like a no-brainer for most organisations, right? Not always.
Here are three more reasons why website personalisation is important in a shifting economic climate.
1. Website personalisation can make up for stagnant advertising budgets
For most brands, the biggest percentage of marketing spend is allocated to top-of-the-funnel activities, which centre on boosting brand or product awareness to new customers. This includes advertising or sponsorship campaigns.
These often are the first marketing cuts during slow economic periods.
Many executives believe that if customers aren’t currently in the mindset to spend, it’s better to reduce the outbound marketing used to acquire them until the storm passes. This is an effective cost-saving measure when economic growth slows, but the cuts reduce the number of prospects seeking out your brand and going to your website.
Since there are fewer visitors to your site, each one increases in value. Simple maths says you need to convert more of these customers to make up for the drop you’re experiencing in overall site visits. Personalisation will help you improve your site’s overall conversion rate and overcome the traffic drop by giving those users more reason to come back.
2. Website personalisation automates a shorter path to conversion
Leaner times result in leaner marketing teams. Companies will ask their marketers to do more with less. Efficiency and streamlining processes should be your business priorities.
There’s no better way for marketers to address this new directive than by automating how we engage with every customer. Creating an automated website personalisation experience is a highly visible way to show your commitment to efficiency. And it’s way better than making frequent updates to pages and design templates.
Automation is a more efficient path to conversion and upsell in a single site visit versus waiting for conversion across several visits or never experiencing it at all. For example, LIKE.TG uses personalisation to create a tailored experience for every customer who visits our website. Visitors are shown content based on their interests. The experience is relevantand appropriate, designed to meet their expectations each time they come back.
3. Website personalisation helps you build better relationships
When budgets for new customer acquisition are trimmed, there’s more value in deepening relationships with your current customers.
You probably already have good relationships with many of these people. Now you should be doing all you can to extend them. The best way to show your current customers that you’re invested in the relationship is demonstrating your understanding of them.
This can be as simple as showing relevant content and offers whenever they arrive on your site. Providing a personalised experience to returning customers is the modern equivalent of saying “welcome back” in a bricks-and-mortar store. This goes a long way in driving up each customer’s total lifetime value.
To go even deeper, ensure that this personalised experience stretches across all customer touchpoints, including service and sales. Sharing this critical customer experience data across your organisation is a bridge to building long-lasting relationships.
Keep these website personalisation points as you drive forward in stiff economic headwinds. Your organisation will see fiscal and relationship benefits in the short term and in the years ahead.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Spending Smartly on Tech Is Key in Times of Economic Uncertainty
This article was written in partnership with Sushil Panta, Senior Director of LIKE.TG Business Value Services.
Are you taking a hard look at your budgets? You wouldn’t be alone. With all the talk about economic headwinds, many companies are pausing new programs, focusing only on what is essential to keep the business afloat. But there’s a better way to navigate economic uncertainty: find ways to become more efficient, like automation, and invest in them smartly.
Even when you’re understandably cautious about spending overall, investing in the right technology can actually save time and money in the short term. That’s even more true over the longer term, because whatever the future holds, you can bet digital transformation will be key to navigating it successfully.
One thing we know is that every recession is followed by an expansion. The latter often lasts much longer than the former, as was the case after World War II, the dot-com bubble, and the Great Recession. The trick, then, is not to run away from all new investments, but to run toward the right ones.
But how do you know which are the right investments? The answer is simple: The right investments create the greatest benefits at the lowest relative cost, while maximising speed for success now.
I’ll explain each of those components below and give your business a better framework through which to make some of your most important spending decisions.
How do you measure the benefits of your tech investments?
The best way to define the benefits of any investment is through the eyes of your customer. Be clear on the pain points you need to address and the outcomes you seek to reduce complexity for them.
Using your current processes and performance metrics as a baseline, and by making a reasonable estimate about your future improvements as a result of new technology, you can then estimate quantifiable benefits. These could include incremental revenue growth and hard-to-quantify but highly strategic benefits such as employee engagement.
Let’s explore these sources of benefits in more detail:
Grow revenue through current and new streams
Revenue growth is not just about selling more of the same products to the same customers. It is increasingly about activating new revenue streams that might be more predictable and profitable, acquiring new customers, and entering new markets. However, you need to know when to send what offers to whom to maximise conversion. Technology can help with that.
For example, you don’t want to send a marketing offer for a new product when the customer hasn’t heard from your service department on a pre-existing issue, or to a customer who may be behind on an invoice payment. On the other hand, good application of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help uncover a customer’s changing buying patterns or identify “at-risk” customers.
Simplify + streamline + automate = more efficiency
Efficiency gains are about simplifying and streamlining complex processes, automating manual tasks, and removing redundancies. The average enterprise uses a whopping 976 applications. Vendor and system sprawl, often the result of adopting point solutions to fill immediate needs department by department, create far greater inefficiencies down the road. Vendor consolidation is one important way in which companies can reduce these complexities, both for their IT infrastructure and their bottom line.
Here’s an example of what that can look like: RBC Wealth Management, a division of RBC Capital Markets, LLC, is a values-driven financial institution providing clients with customized strategies to grow, preserve, and share their wealth. By consolidating 26 systems into one, RBC Wealth Management reduced maintenance costs by 50%, while continuing to deliver on client and advisor expectations.
Create better productivity pathways
Productivity gains are about getting more outputs for the same inputs or the same output for less inputs. In today’s constrained supply chain and volatile labour market, the need for improving your forecasting, supply chain planning, and employee engagement has never been greater. These are all areas that the right technology, combined with the right strategy, people, and processes, can improve. The right technology allows you to do more with the data you have, driving productivity and better results with intelligence and automation.
So what does a productivity benefit look like?
Take ADT, for instance, a leader in home and commercial security that strives to deliver safe, smart, and sustainable security solutions. ADT leverages automation and intelligence to drive cost savings, deliver faster customer support, and increase agent productivity. In fact, ADT has been able to move 40% of service appointments to virtual.
Remember, your goal is to maximise ROI
New revenues? Increased efficiencies? Productivity gains? They all sound great, but what will that cost? Of course we all want to keep costs low, but it’s important to remember the overall goal is not to minimise investment per se, but rather to maximise return on investment (ROI).
Take it from Schneider Electric. The global leader in energy management and automation is transforming the way the world uses energy. Schneider Electric drives efficiency across the company — enabling its sales reps to close deals 30% faster and save $2.7 million in IT costs over a three-year period.
Or consider the path taken by GE Appliances. With Service Cloud, the company’s agents have a single source of truth to clearly see where customers are in their ownership journey. Plus, the company can handle more calls at less cost by pairing Service Cloud Voice with partner telephony from Amazon Connect, increasing first-call resolution and decreasing handle times by up to 12%.
“The return on investment for the technology we’ve employed is really agent efficiency and the ability to connect with the owner and create that human experience,” said Angie Corbett, senior manager of ecommerce sales and digital engagement. “That’s priceless.”
We see the right technology will deliver the greatest benefit at the lowest relative cost. That being said, maximising your benefit at a manageable cost is essential. Here are some best practices:
Select a cloud-first CRM strategy, which is supported by the fact that more software spending is moving to the cloud. With a cloud-first approach, you can manage costs more effectively through lower maintenance costs, a pay-as-you-go model, improved security, and better enablement of a mobile workforce.
Pick a single, integrated CRM platform rather than a patchwork of expansive point solutions that require a great deal of custom integration. Those patchwork solutions not only cost a lot of time during setup but are also hard to maintain, brittle, and less scalable. A platform mindset supports building integrated, end-to-end customer journeys, which is essential to close the divide between many enterprise IT platforms and their customer expectations.
Pick pre-built industry solutions, which will help you accelerate time to value and reduce implementation costs, by introducing industry-specific objects, real-time data insights, workflows, and analytics, all out of the box, thus minimising the need for custom developments.
The value of maximum speed for success now
Speed is about how quickly you can go from buying a product to using it to drive business outcomes.
For your CFO, it might mean the payback period. For your IT executive, it might mean the time between the implementation planning and phase 1 rollout. For your customers, it might mean the ease of doing business with you anytime, anywhere, and through any channel. Whatever your success measurement system, speed is integral to achieving it – now more than ever. Speed gives you adaptability, and adaptability gives you the power to not only survive but thrive.
Ideally, you end up with the kind of impact seen by SmartRent, a leading smart home solutions provider that focuses on driving automation and efficiency for its customers. SmartRent leverages automation capabilities to eliminate manual tasks and streamline processes, increasing employee retention by 92% and saving employees 120 hours in onboarding time. Speed-to-impact is essential for getting employees onboarded to deliver customer value quickly.
It is possible to cut costs and reduce complexity while creating resilience within your company. You can do this without compromise by consolidating systems and investing in the right technology for your business. With automation, intelligence, consolidation, and self-service, you can maximise value and create customers for life.
Boost Your Employee Experience to Improve ROI on Customer Experience
It goes without saying that customers are at the heart of organisational success. A positive customer experience translates into strong customer advocacy, better return on investment (ROI), and recurring revenue.
Successful organisations have found a key element to delivering great customer experience —excellent employee experience. Many customer-centric companies vouch for astrong correlationbetween happy employees and satisfied customers.
TakeM1as an example. This Singapore’s telco empowers its employees to work more efficiently with new tools and applications. With LIKE.TG technology, training time is 50% faster for new sales and service employees. It eliminates repetitive and mundane tasks, making it easier for them to serve customers better. In the long run, efficiency and productivity gains in operations lead to cost optimisation.
Why does a happy employee equal a happy customer?
In his book ‘Customer what?’, customer experiences (CX) specialist and author Ian Golding talks about howempathyis the biggest factor in creating a positive customer experience. However, empathy should not be limited to the customer and must also be directed at your staff. If you don’t get it right for your team, they won’t direct it toward your customers.
Customer experiences frequently mirror how employees feel about their work; thus, happy and supported staff are more likely to facilitate excellent customer experiences. Employees who are happy and engaged at work are more likely to have a positive outlook, be more attentive, use innovation and creativity in their interactions with customers, and represent your business to them in the most favourable manner.
So, how can you ensure a great employee experience?
Build your Digital HQ on Slack to help teams break down internal silos, foster cross-functional working relationships, and provide the right people with the right information at the right time.
1. Remove barriers in communication
Frequent and effective communication is one of the first steps to an enhanced employee experience, whether in a physical, remote, or hybrid setting.
In aresearch conducted by LIKE.TG, connected tools and communication methods improve return on investment (ROI) greatly. Marketing teams on Slack experience 16% faster campaign execution and carry out 8% more campaigns per year. Sales teams using Slack saw an average 13% increase in deals closed and reduced onboarding costs by 39%. Service teams experience an 11% average increase in customer satisfaction and a 9.2% average increase in a company’s net promoter score with Slack. Overall, there is an increase in employee productivity by 26%* using Slack. In return, companies saw an increase in ROI from improved customer satisfaction and reduced cost of customer service tickets.
How can your teams leverage the power of real-time communication with Slack?
Slack allows your employees to discuss specific projects and issues in one-on-one conversations or within small groups. Urgent request? No problem, just tag the person to get their attention instantaneously.
You can also create separate channels for different topics, teams, or groups – to which access for employees can be extended or restricted as needed. Invite people from outside the company to these channels.
For brief meetings, Slack provides huddles, either within a channel, between coworkers, or for the entire team. And if you need to provide context — exchange files, documents, images, and videos from your device or directly from the cloud within a message.
No time to send a written note? Start a video or voice chat within Slack. In fact, Slack supports all the widely used video conferencing services.
2. Make it easier to find information
Searching for a particular message from hundreds of email threads and private conversations requires a lot of time and effort. In Slack, you can simply pin messages to designate which ones you wish to find later. Or use the search function to find specific chats or messages, or even to analyse archived conversations. There is a wide variety of modifiers available in Slack that you may use to focus your search and locate the particular note you’re looking for. This allows your teams to spend their time more productively on value-added tasks.
3. Enable seamless collaboration across teams and time zones
Need to speak with someone, but they’re out of the office or in a meeting? Schedule the message to be delivered when they come back online. While sending a message, Slack will suggest times and let you know what time it will be in the recipient’s time zone. Or you can also set a custom time for message delivery if you know when the recipient will be back at their seat. This ensures important messages are not misplaced, while ensuring that they don’t interfere with an employee’s me-time or focus hours — a foolproof way to nudge those employee experience scores higher.
4. Let go of the surveys for a bit!
It is quite possible that the employees do not open or fill in the feedback surveys designed to boost employee engagement rates. The reasons could be many — lack of time, lack of interest, or complicated process. But in the process, you are losing out on valuable information such as which workers feel appreciated and engaged, who needs training programmes, what are the possibilities for skill development and so on.
Make Slackbot your friend. Get the friendly assistant to ask your employees some relevant questions on a weekly basis. These could include something along the lines of “Are you satisfied with the recognition you get for your work?”, “Are you happy with how frequently your direct manager provides feedback?”, “Do you recognise how your efforts support the objectives of my organisation?”, etc.
Employees can complete this in just a few minutes, encouraging regular feedback cycles across the organisation. Additionally, Slack also lets you run employee appreciation programmes to recognise and reward excellent work and high-performing individuals.
5. And finally, leverage technology to take the struggle out of work
Leveraging technical solutions is almost always good for increasing the employee experience. You can simply automate routine, repetitive processes inside and outside Slack simply by using clicks rather than extensive coding. Plus, your team can access almost any app from where they work, thanks to the more than 2,400 apps listed in the Slack App Directory.
Technology + engaged employees = Satisfied customers
Employees can make or break your success story no matter how great your customer-facing app is or how resilient your supply chain is. Engaged, motivated employees go the extra mile to serve the business, providing better customer service and keeping customers satisfied. Thus, it is important that employers put in place the right processes and tools that empower employees to do this.
WithLIKE.TG and Slack, you can take multiple steps to enhance employee experience. Choose from the countless ways to tailor Slack to your remote team’s needs, and establish a strong remote work culture that keeps employees engaged, and empowers them to provide great customer experiences.
Learn more about how LIKE.TG + Slack can help you empower your teams and build your Digital HQ.
DOWNLOAD GUIDE
Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics. This post originally appeared on the I.N.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Get Insights Faster With Winter ’23 CRM Analytics Release
With our CRM Analytics Winter ’23 release, you can tap into insights faster and make real-time predictions with external Snowflake data. According to a recent survey of over 3,500 customers, organisations using LIKE.TG estimate significant cost saving, efficiency, and productivity benefits. On average, organisations get insights 29% faster with CRM analytics*. This release will help you get the most from Einstein Discovery models and make analytics easier to access.
Let’s look at some of the exciting features in this release:
With Live Prediction on Snowflake, you can make real-time predictions using external Snowflake data
Accelerate time to insights with new enhancements in UI
With the new enhancements in CRM Analytics Home, unify all your analytics assets in one place and easily discover insights using contextual capabilities
Get a deeper understanding of your model with new and improved metrics and variable importance with Model Inspector
Make more informed predictions with your live Snowflake data
Within CRM Analytics, you can now deploy models to make real-time predictions with live Snowflake data.
LIKE.TG and Snowflake share native integration that lets you access, combine, and analyse your data to grow your business. This release takes that integration to the next level, allowing you to create real-time predictions in Einstein Discovery — integrating live data outside of LIKE.TG with data from Snowflake.
One advantage of CRM Analytics and Einstein Discovery is that no other machine learning platform can combine incredible LIKE.TG Customer 360 data with external datasets to boost your predictive models. You can join live data seamlessly, like any other traditional dataset, and boost predictions with minimal effort.
In the demo below, see how you can get real-time predictions by creating a story from a deployed model that uses live product usage data and training data from Snowflake.
The insights you want — where you want them
Another major upgrade in the Winter 2023 release: you can unlock insights faster and within a more user-friendly experience.
You can now move between pages with a single click — no more multi-selection is needed. It’s as simple as creating a flow and selecting that action. You can easily navigate to any detailed page that you want.
You will find a new Interaction tab in the widget panel that allows you to create a selection interaction and add a navigation action. These updates transform a static dashboard into a powerful asset. You can also link a page, component, URL, and lens.
You can also bring in filters for deeper explorations to integrate your content together, allowing you to do more with just one click.
For example, you can access your team member’s profile by clicking on their image and navigating to an opportunity page by selecting it from the account. You can also drill down from a country to a state to a city to get granular insights.
In future releases, we will add more widgets and actions to the interaction framework. Till then, learn more about our user interface improvements in the overview demo video below.
Unify your CRM Analytics assets and content
We’ve completely redesigned CRM Analytics Home to give you one central place for creating, finding, and sharing Dashboards, Lightning Reports, and all your CRM Analytics assets.
We’ve enhanced the user analytics experience with powerful contextual search capabilities, such as browse and find to uncover insights faster and to manage your content easily.
You can easily narrow your search to a specific dashboard type, report, or lens that was last modified by you with new filter capabilities. Using filters, you can manage all CRM Analytics assets, Lightning reports, and dashboards in one place.
And the good part is if someone does not have CRM Analytics, they can still find, access, and manage all their operational analytics content through the Analytics tab.
Check out the demo video to learn more.
Analyse your machine learning models better with Model Inspector
We’ve added Model Inspector to Einstein Discovery to help you better understand machine learning model quality and to analyse models more easily.
Model Inspector allows you to easily evaluate your model and quickly identify which variables are influencing the model’s predictions with an importance score.
Previously, only correlation scores were displayed. Now, we can also look at importance scores. In terms of predicting an outcome, importance shows how much the model relies on the variable.
With new and improved model metrics, you can analyse your model’s performance by comparing it with “No model” or “Theoretically perfect model” from the Gains chart. Additionally, we’ve included predicted versus actual and new residual charts to better understand the model. The predicted versus actual chart is available for all regression models.
The confusion matrix is now much easier to interpret as it shows the labels of the two classes in the outcome variable. This eliminates the need to remember what is positive and what is negative.
You can see these new enhancements to the model evaluation feature in action below. Explore a Binary Classification model that predicts win probability for sales opportunities and a Regression model that predicts quantity sold daily in stores.
The CRM Analytics Winter ’23 release is available now. To learn more about all the new features in this release, visit theCRM Analytics Winter ‘23 release notes.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
*Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
These 4 Marketing Trends Are Reshaping How We Connect With Customers
We surveyed 6,000 global leaders to find out how new technologies and expectations are changing the way businesses build relationships with customers. Here are the key findings and tips for success from our newest State of Marketing report.
Over the past few years, marketing trends have forced brands to navigate uncharted waters. Shifts in customer behaviours, an economy in flux, and emerging technologies are all rocking the boat.
You can help your company weather the storm by embracing tech tools, personalising your customer interactions, preparing for a cookieless future, and prioritising collaboration with remote teams. The key is to focus on the right solution for right now.
We’ve identified four major marketing trends from LIKE.TG’s latest State of Marketing report. These trends are changing the way we work and how we connect with customers.
Trend 1: Tools and trust are ASEAN marketers’ priorities and challenges
New challenges call for innovative solutions. As customer expectations shift, marketers are adapting to meet audiences’ new demands. More than 90% of CMOs around the world say they must continually innovate to remain competitive. Over the past year, marketing organisations have changed their top priorities to make this happen.
As businesses are charged with doing more with less, many ASEAN marketers are looking to leverage marketing tools and technologies. The ineffective use of these tools and technologies is also the top challenge for marketers in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.
Trust is another major concern — consumers are growing increasingly uncomfortable with the way their data is handled. Many marketers are working on ways of reassuring their customers and using data responsibly. Marketers in Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand listed issues relating to trust as their top priority.
Marketing tools
Technology adoption, vanity metrics, and a disconnection between marketing and sales can slow marketers down. Many marketers are further prioritising the modernisation of their tech stack, with significant numbers around the world investing in automation and employee productivity solutions. We’ve seen customers experience a 26% boost in productivity* thanks to Slack.
Customer data
The growth of martech tools has created more data than marketers can know what to do with. With more data generated than ever before, businesses are able to target customers with personalised experiences with much greater precision. However, marketers must manage the deluge of data types that come in and balance how to personalise without crossing the ethical line.
Quick tip
If you’re implementing new tech, make sure you don’t end up using it in the same way as the old solution. Martech data is only as good as how it’s shared and implemented. To translate technology investments into business value, you should focus beyond the platforms you’re using and ensure clear, cross-team visibility of your data. Ultimately, this will unlock your tools.
Trend 2: Marketers are redefining customer engagement with smarter, targeted interactions
Data has gone from being a supporting player in a marketer’s toolkit to a critical component in marketing strategy. Marketers need to get the most from technology that uses data to provide more personalised interactions. At the same time, you may find that costs are lowered and processes become more efficient. In fact, customers have told us that LIKE.TG marketing tools lower their customer acquisition costs by 27%*.
Marketing organisations around the world use the following technologies:
90% use a customer relationship management (CRM) system
89% use an account-based marketing (ABM) platform
62% use artificial intelligence (AI)
According to our report, 80% of marketers around the world say customer experience is a key competitive differentiator. They also say that they are hungry for more connected data in order to deliver better experiences. Marketing trends show that organisations continue to increase the number of data sources they’re using each year — with a projected total of 18 in 2023.
Marketers are using technologies like CRM systems and ABM platforms to unify data and deliver targeted campaigns, while leaning on AI to integrate automation into their marketing activities. Three of the top four AI use cases are related to automation, highlighting the importance of scaling up speed and effectiveness with existing resources.
Marketers are also focused on getting the most out of limited budgets and resources to meet audiences where they are. We found that 83% of marketers around the world say their marketing organisation engages customers in real time across one or more marketing channels.
Quick tip
If you want to fully understand your customers’ demands, you’ll need a new way of using the data you have. This is why integrated tech like customer data platforms (CDPs) are more relevant than ever. Using the insights provided by these platforms will help you optimise the critical moments in your customers’ journeys and build better marketing strategies.
Trend 3: The cookieless future is pushed back, but marketers continue to prepare
The decline of third-party cookies has led marketers to look for other sources of customer data. They’re pivoting to data given freely by customers (zero-party data) and data collected directly from customers (first-party data). Marketers we surveyed in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand all said that they are providing incentives to their customers to share data. In contrast, marketers in Indonesia are concentrating on investing in new technologies.
As deadlines to phase out third-party cookies continue to be delayed, 75% of marketers worldwide say they still rely on third-party data. However, they aren’t allowing this to impede progress.
Our study shows that 68% of marketers around the world have created a fully defined strategy to shift toward first-party data as they adapt to changes in privacy regulations and calls for data transparency. Streamlining the number of data sources will also help marketers be more efficient and reduce costs.
While not all third-party data is cookie-related, marketers will need to reconcile this strategy with future changes in privacy regulations. Strategies such as providing information-sharing incentives for customers can help bridge the gap by enriching customer data profiles.
The growth of data sources in the near term highlights the need for technology that will help marketers combine multiple data sources into a single view of the customer. Current marketing trends back this up: Around the world, 32% of B2B marketers say that sharing a unified view of customer data across business units is a challenge. The numbers across our region paint a slightly different picture, with some marketers struggling more than others. Only 28% of marketers in Indonesia and the Philippines say that sharing data is a challenge, for example. The number climbs to 32% in Thailand, 35% in Singapore, and up to 45% in Malaysia.
Quick tip
As we approach a future without third-party cookies, you can start to incorporate more inbound marketing into your strategies. You can offer value through content and digital experiences in exchange for your audience’s consent to use their data. After years of investing in brand marketing across various platforms, this approach may feel like a complete turnaround for B2C marketers. But building owned digital experiences will still allow you to access valuable data — with complete control as an added bonus.
Trend 4: It takes more than an investment in tools to unlock collaboration
Remote work has fundamentally changed the marketing landscape, making collaboration that much more difficult. We found that 69% of marketers around the world say it’s harder to collaborate now than before the pandemic.
Many marketers continue to juggle communications, processes, collaboration, and problem solving, all while working in a hybrid world. And they believe this marketing trend is here to stay — 70% expect investments in remote technologies to be permanent. In response, marketers are investing in collaboration technologies to ensure that work gets done, regardless of location.
Marketers who said they use the following collaboration technologies:
Video conferencing: 46%
Channel-based collaboration platform: 45%
Instant messaging or chat apps: 45%
Enterprise social networks: 44%
Email: 43%
Shared documents: 42%
Voice messaging: 41%
Phone: 38%
Virtual whiteboards: 36%
Marketing organisations have adapted to the shifting needs of their workforce, adopting an average of four collaboration technologies to unify global marketing teams.
Taking the lead are technologies like video conferencing, channel-based collaboration platforms like Slack, instant messaging or chat apps, and enterprise social networks. While email makes it into the top five, it’s clear that communication tools that enable instant, asynchronous work are preferred when interacting with one another.
Quick tip
Integrating one platform that streamlines multiple applications and workflows can break silos and better coordinate marketing efforts. But it’s the adoption of the platform that can actually empower teams. Is the leadership team encouraging teams to use collaboration platforms, but are not actually using it themselves? Are content teams using one tool, but designers using another? To thrive in a work-from-anywhere world, collaboration requires an all-in approach to tools and processes that make teams agile and aligned.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog. *Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
Meet the New CFO — Your Most Important Leader in This Economy
Who has the most influence in a company? Increasingly, it’s the chief financial officer.
More CFOs are being promoted to CEO than ever before, according to new research. Approximately 8.1% of sitting CEOs came directly from a CFO chair.
The modern CFO manages more than just money. CFOs are taking broader leadership responsibilities, such as managing customer experiences, hiring and retaining talent, and leading strategic shifts into automation and other areas.
The CFO is a lifeline for company health — and becoming more critical as we head into a time of economic uncertainty. What does this mean for today’s CFO? How is this role evolving as businesses face ongoing disruptions and instability?
Changing characteristics of the modern CFO
CFOs are far more diverse in gender and race than CEOs (and the rest of the C-suite). This year, 16% of CFOs are women, up from 9.7% a decade ago. And 10.9% are racially or ethnically diverse, up from 3.6% a decade ago.
CFOs also have staying power, according to LIKE.TG research. CFOs remain in their positions for 4.8 years, on average — second only in tenure to the average 7.2 years notched by CEOs.
And they have more responsibilities in their evolving roles. For example, they must be:
Complex problem solvers
(Well informed) fortune tellers
Self-aware leaders
Expert delegators
“Traditionally, people have thought of CFOs as a steward” and that includes “running a tight finance ship,” Susan Li, Meta’s new CFO, said at a recent summit sponsored by Fortune. But today, CFOs wear many more hats, like “the efficient operator hat. The CFO is really a partner in steering the business direction and product vision for the company.”
At some companies, the expanding role of the CFO is removing the need for a chief operating officer, added Tracey Travis, executive vice president and CFO at The Estée Lauder Companies, who also attended the summit.
CFO challenges in 2023 — and beyond
The C-suite has relied heavily on CFOs in recent years to help lead in times of economic turbulence, and that will continue in the future. In fact, 75% of CFOs say economic disruption is 2023’s biggest challenge.
Another challenge is how to invest wisely in a downturn, especially in technologies that can help companies become more efficient as budgets tighten. The modern CFO who understands the potential of strategies like automation and platform consolidation can positively affect the bottom line.
The average company uses 976 applications to run its business and store customer data. This isn’t efficient, effective, or affordable.
If CFOs don’t have access to data across the whole business, how can they make informed decisions? The modern CFO must be a digital native — and that comes from deep understanding and partnerships with the CIO and tech team.
The key is focusing on technology investments that deliver value, long-term cost savings, and ultimately, solid ROI. How can companies make the right technology investments during a downturn to deliver long-term value? LIKE.TG COO Brian Millham suggested the key is to lean into efficiency — simplifying complex processes and creating better productivity pathways.
“It is possible to cut costs and reduce complexity while creating resilience within your company,” he added. “You can do this without compromise by consolidating systems and investing in the right technology for your business.”
Skills for the modern CFO
Spreadsheets are still important, but today’s CFO needs to communicate beyond the numbers.
“CFOs are viewed as kind of a deputy CEO,” Alyse Bodine, global head of the financial officers practice at recruiting firm Heidrick Struggles, told Fortune last month. “The ability to lead a diverse set of individuals, both finance and non-finance, across the organisation takes people skills. So, there’s definitely a heightened demand on that skill set when it comes to the finance population.”
LIKE.TG completed hour-long interviews last year with 10 CEOs across enterprise and commercial business. Many said they expected to replace current C-suite team members with leaders who had higher emotional intelligence (EQ) and were better equipped to handle not only stressed employees but a more socially engaged workforce.
This isn’t new news. In 2020, Summit Leadership Partners found that 80% to 90% of high performers in the C-suite were differentiated by high EQ. According to their research, EQ is twice as important for predicting performance in executives than technical skills or IQ.
And EQ could bridge the Great Disconnect between employees and the C-suite.
How CFOs can evolve
It’s no longer enough to steer a finance ship well. As CFOs develop new leadership styles, they should ask themselves the following questions:
Is the way I lead:
making the company stronger?
true to who I am?
necessary to get the job done?
It takes a different lens to solve today’s — and tomorrow’s — problems. The modern CFO who can think creatively and differently, and develop thoughtful strategies for investing, is well poised for the road ahead.
Ultimately, it’s the CFO who signs off on major investment decisions and takes the risk of investing in innovation versus tightening belts. Leaders should bet on the CFO that invests in the future versus pausing progress.
Download our ebook to learn how toPrepare your Business for a Digital Futuretoday.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Drive Cost Savings for Your Business With These 5 Winter ’23 Innovations
Innovation is a top priority at LIKE.TG. In fact, innovation is one of our core values, and it’s reflected in everything we do.
We release new innovations three times a year, many of which come from ideas and feedback received directly from our customers via the IdeaExchange. And we know that there’s no better time to listen to our customers than right now.
In a time of economic uncertainty, our customers told us that getting the most out of their LIKE.TG investment is more important than ever. So, we’ve put together a list of ways you can use our Winter ’23 innovations to drive cost-saving and efficiency for your business. This new release will also help you maximise your LIKE.TG investment.
Guide
Guide to data security and governance
GET THE GUIDE
Guide
IT leader’s complete guide to low code
GET THE GUIDE
1. Create preventative maintenance plans
Service Cloud Preventative Maintenance enhancements let you create preventive maintenance plans for equipment based on usage. This keeps your customers updated at all times. The next maintenance can either be determined by fixed cadence or it can be automatically adjusted based on the usage when the previous work was completed. These enhancements will enable better maintenance planning, repair time, and integration into the scheduling process, significantly reducing unnecessary spare parts expenditure and labour costs. window.SfdcWwwBase && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent.updateChapter(document.scripts[document.scripts.length - 1].getAttribute("data-uuid")); if(!window.vidyardEmbed){ window.videoUtils && window.videoUtils.loadScriptOnce("https://play.vidyard.com/embed/v4.js", "Vidyard", true); } else { window.vidyardEmbed.api.renderDOMPlayers(); } (function($) { // Add 'Configuration' global object with details of our Adobe Analytics instance window.Configuration = window.Configuration || {}; var rsid = (typeof Server !== 'undefined') ? Server.getAccount() : ''; $.extend(window.Configuration, { PUBLISHER: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', MCID: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', NAMESPACE: 'LIKE.TG', CHANNEL: 'LIKE.TG', RSID: rsid, TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.sc.omtrdc.net', HEARTBEAT_TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.hb.omtrdc.net', DEBUG: false }); }(jQuery)); // End of IIFE
2. Enrich profiles with cloud storage
CDP Connector for Google Cloud Storage, a new Marketing Cloud feature, reduces integration and maintenance costs. It leverages a pre-built connection to bring data from Google Cloud Storage into Customer Data Platform. Now, you can leverage cloud storage attributes to enrich customer profiles and optimise segmentation and personalisation.
Deliver success now
Learn how Customer 360 helps you increase efficiency, improve results, and lower costs.
Start now
3. Do more with commerce
New enhancements to B2B and B2B2C Commerce help you:
Enable recurring revenue models for B2B and B2B2C using Subscription Management’s pre-built integrations that connect Revenue Cloud to Commerce Cloud.
Enable shoppers to quickly search for products on B2B websites and gain more insight into shopper intent with Semantic Search.
window.SfdcWwwBase && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent.updateChapter(document.scripts[document.scripts.length - 1].getAttribute("data-uuid")); if(!window.vidyardEmbed){ window.videoUtils && window.videoUtils.loadScriptOnce("https://play.vidyard.com/embed/v4.js", "Vidyard", true); } else { window.vidyardEmbed.api.renderDOMPlayers(); } (function($) { // Add 'Configuration' global object with details of our Adobe Analytics instance window.Configuration = window.Configuration || {}; var rsid = (typeof Server !== 'undefined') ? Server.getAccount() : ''; $.extend(window.Configuration, { PUBLISHER: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', MCID: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', NAMESPACE: 'LIKE.TG', CHANNEL: 'LIKE.TG', RSID: rsid, TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.sc.omtrdc.net', HEARTBEAT_TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.hb.omtrdc.net', DEBUG: false }); }(jQuery)); // End of IIFE
4. Spot bottlenecks and collaborate from anywhere
Users can now collaborate faster by completing tasks in Experience Cloud using Flow Orchestration enhancements, specifically Flow Orchestration’s Work Guide. In addition, admins can empower other users to help spot bottlenecks and fast-track work using supervisor permissions. You can now allow anyone to participate in workflows from anywhere. window.SfdcWwwBase && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent.updateChapter(document.scripts[document.scripts.length - 1].getAttribute("data-uuid")); if(!window.vidyardEmbed){ window.videoUtils && window.videoUtils.loadScriptOnce("https://play.vidyard.com/embed/v4.js", "Vidyard", true); } else { window.vidyardEmbed.api.renderDOMPlayers(); } (function($) { // Add 'Configuration' global object with details of our Adobe Analytics instance window.Configuration = window.Configuration || {}; var rsid = (typeof Server !== 'undefined') ? Server.getAccount() : ''; $.extend(window.Configuration, { PUBLISHER: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', MCID: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', NAMESPACE: 'LIKE.TG', CHANNEL: 'LIKE.TG', RSID: rsid, TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.sc.omtrdc.net', HEARTBEAT_TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.hb.omtrdc.net', DEBUG: false }); }(jQuery)); // End of IIFE
5. Increase automation and customer retention
Enterprise Self-Service for Communications Cloud allows you to eliminate steps, scale transactions, and improve customer satisfaction. It automates move, add, change, or delete services (MACD) for bulk and multi-site subscription management. In turn, this will help you reduce cost-to-serve, while increasing automation and customer retention. window.SfdcWwwBase && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent.updateChapter(document.scripts[document.scripts.length - 1].getAttribute("data-uuid")); if(!window.vidyardEmbed){ window.videoUtils && window.videoUtils.loadScriptOnce("https://play.vidyard.com/embed/v4.js", "Vidyard", true); } else { window.vidyardEmbed.api.renderDOMPlayers(); } (function($) { // Add 'Configuration' global object with details of our Adobe Analytics instance window.Configuration = window.Configuration || {}; var rsid = (typeof Server !== 'undefined') ? Server.getAccount() : ''; $.extend(window.Configuration, { PUBLISHER: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', MCID: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', NAMESPACE: 'LIKE.TG', CHANNEL: 'LIKE.TG', RSID: rsid, TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.sc.omtrdc.net', HEARTBEAT_TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.hb.omtrdc.net', DEBUG: false }); }(jQuery)); // End of IIFE
Drive cost savings and transform your business using brand new features from theWinter ’23 release.
Find out more
Check out these other posts to learn more about our products:
What is LIKE.TG Genie?
What Is a CDP?
What is LIKE.TG Customer 360?
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
10 New Findings Reveal How Sales Teams Are Achieving Success Now
Our recent State of Sales survey, featuring insights from more than 7,700 sales professionals, shows how teams are maximising value amid economic headwinds.
There’s one thing that’s certain in sales: things are never certain. That’s underscored in our latest State of Sales report, which found 72% of sales professionals don’t expect to hit their annual quota. Why? Challenges like inflation, the continuing effects of the pandemic, and supply chain breakdowns are ever-present.
The good news is sales teams are finding ways forward by maximising efficiency, cutting costs, and boosting sales rep productivity. Here are ten stats from our State of Sales report that tell the story of sellers adapting to meet the moment.
State of Sales highlights
1. 70% of sales leaders say their company takes fewer risks now than before the pandemic
Despite economic uncertainty, companies still need to hit their targets. Instead of gambling on higher-risk strategies and tactics, sales leaders are focusing on what they know works. In fact, 55% of sales leaders say they’re prioritising low-risk initiatives with guaranteed modest growth. The headline message is that sure bets are preferred over bigger, but more uncertain gains — especially in rocky times.
2. Sales reps spend only 28% of their week selling — down from 34% in 2018
Sales teams are being asked to cope with too much manual work. Sellers want to sell, but they spend nearly three-quarters of their time distracted by admin. This includes tasks like record keeping, solving broken processes, tool management, data entry, and lead management. This creates a hurried sales process and less time to hit quota.
3. 66% of sales reps say they’re drowning in tools
Jumping between different sales tools is a big reason reps don’t spend enough time selling. On average, sales teams use 10 tools to close deals. Many of these have a role to play in the sales process, but they can be costly, hinder productivity, and take reps away from connecting with prospects and customers that move deals forward.
4. 94% of sales organisations plan to consolidate their tech stack in the next 12 months
To address tech overload, sales organisations are looking to streamline their stack. But the way forward isn’t simply ditching tech. It’s about optimising critical tools and removing nonessential or redundant ones. Sellers indicate there’s plenty of opportunity here — only 37% strongly agree that their organisation takes full advantage of their CRM.
George Carrera III, Senior Manager of Systems Technology at Mitsubishi Elevators, emphasises the importance of both consolidation and optimisation, “As sales teams look for new paths toward efficiency, endless technical solutions are often viewed as silver bullets. But you have to analyse your process to see what’s really needed, make the most of tools you need to keep, and cut legacy tools that don’t help.”
5. 97% of sales leaders and sales ops professionals say AI has improved use of reps’ time
Not only are sales organisations working to consolidate tech stacks to boost efficiency, they’re also keen to remove the manual work that keeps sales reps from spending time selling. Artificial intelligence (AI), paired with automation, removes admin tasks like updating deal records and scoring leads. This keeps sellers focused on conversations with buyers. This isn’t just a theoretical productivity booster, either — as our report reveals, high-performing reps are 1.9x more likely to use AI.
6. 90% of high-performing sales reps say their leadership encourages them to prioritise long-term customer relationships over short-term wins
Facing uncertainty, sales leaders are looking for revenue they can rely on. That’s why they’re emphasising customer relationships over quick deals, allowing reps to build solid connections that foster loyalty, leading to cross-sells, upsells, and renewals. All these lead to more predictable revenue.
To establish these relationships, reps are increasingly acting as more than just transactional salespeople. In fact, 82% of sales reps say their company enables them to act as trusted advisers to buyers, helping them solve complicated problems and address their customers’ specific needs.
7. 81% of sales representatives say team selling helps them close deals
Sellers are also adapting to increasingly savvy buyers. 81% of sales reps say buyers are increasingly conducting research before they reach out, which means sellers must pool resources and knowledge to address questions that go beyond basic product functionality.
Unfortunately, cross-functional alignment could use some work. Most reps agree team selling helps them close deals, but say it’s tricky for everyone to sync up. Addressing this will be top of mind for sales leaders, who say cross-functional alignment is the #1 tactic for driving growth.
8. 85% of sales leaders say they’re struggling to get budget for needed headcount
Tight budgets are increasingly an issue for sales leaders, which adds stress to teams asked to hit revenue targets without added headcount or resources. This can lead to frustration and, in more than just a few cases, turnover.
That’s why it’s important to make sure every rep has the resources and support they need to be successful. Leaders are keeping employee experience and engagement top of mind, offering regular one-on-one coaching, increasing tool training, prioritising work-life balance, and offering more benefits.
9. 81% of sales reps say they get valuable coaching from their manager
That’s the good news. The problem is one-on-one coaching is relatively infrequent — only 26% of sales professionals say it occurs weekly. And when managers do sit down with reps, they likely have a lot to cover.
One possible solution is enablement technology that automatically surfaces big-impact areas for training. It’s a big area of opportunity, as only 53% of sales leaders say they use coaching solutions like this.
10. Only 28% of sales professionals expect to meet or exceed quota in the following year — but sales organisations are offering support
With so much global economic uncertainty, sales professionals worry about hitting revenue targets. But it’s not all bad news. Even facing very real financial difficulties, 75% of reps have confidence in their organisation’s ability to prepare them for the current selling landscape.
Sales statistics to drive success in a new era of efficiency
Winning sales leaders know they can excel in lean times if they emphasise efficiency and productivity. Our State of Sales report underscores this, with sales leaders saying their focus over the next 12 months will be on:
Embracing hybrid and virtual selling for more flexibility
Improving cross-functional alignment
Maximising the use of tools and technology
These will be key to driving success in 2023 — and are instrumental in ensuring success now.
4 Steps to Help You Build a Resilient Marketing Strategy
Nearly every business is worried about — or already facing — slowing or declining revenue growth, as many experts feel we’re heading toward challenging times. With this, the “growth at all costs” mantra of the past decade is quickly shifting to one of business resiliency and sustainable growth. Resilient marketing focuses on the ability to absorb stress, maintain healthy business operations, and adapt to new conditions.
Businesses that focus more on long-term sustainability can emerge from the current economic climate stronger than they were before.
These are 4 ways leaders can build resilient marketing in their organisations.
1. Realise how resilient marketing helps optimise your marketing spend
Marketing budgets are often under increased scrutiny during economic uncertainty. You’ll need to defend your marketing efforts by validating their impact and demonstrating clear results.
Yet, 80% of marketers say their ability to track return for each marketing investment needs improvement. Investing in data analytics capabilities can help you:
Make the most of your marketing budget
Reallocate spend from low-performing campaigns
Quickly adjust current campaigns
Suppress marketing messages for customers with open service cases
Clearly demonstrate your team’s impact on revenue
2. Evaluate the efficiency of your current systems — and cut what doesn’t work
You’ve probably already felt the increased pressure to more strictly control — and in many cases — reduce marketing costs. Marketers are looking to reduce their spending on campaigns that aren’t resonating with customers and move that money toward bigger initiatives.
A great place to start is by evaluating your marketing technology tools to see how well they’re still working for you. Has this become increasingly complex and bloated over the past decade? Marketing teams use 23 different marketing systems, on average. Begin by evaluating your tech stack to identify redundancies, inefficiencies, and tools that your team doesn’t really use anymore. Identify areas where you can:
Consolidate systems and contacts
Eliminate inefficient tools
Reduce maintenance support costs
3. Find more efficient ways to achieve your goals, despite shifting budgets
Most marketing organisations are not growing as fast as they previously hoped, and in many cases they are shrinking. You may be grappling with how to make your department more efficient and agile in these rapidly-changing times.
For example, 29% of marketers spend at least one week or more every month preparing data — that’s time that could be better spent developing and executing resilient marketing strategies. To remain agile as marketing budgets shift, you need to make every marketing moment count:
Automate time-consuming, error-prone tasks like Excel-based data integration and reporting, so your team is free to focus on bigger problems
Identify strategies to scale personalisation efforts, like using AI to tailor newsletter content to each reader, improving campaign effectiveness
Hold a call with your marketing team to identify bottlenecks like requiring IT to make basic changes to campaigns, so you can improve speed of campaign execution
Explore ways to better collaborate with remote teams, ensuring everyone is on the same page
Find ways to streamline your operations, placing a focus on agility. This way, you’ll be prepared — not panicking — when things change.
4. Lead with the value to the consumer
As new customer acquisition becomes more challenging during economic uncertainty, marketers should adopt a strategy that focuses on retaining current customers and making sure they feel they’re getting the most value. This helps protect existing revenue and is one of the surest paths to continued growth during times of uncertainty.
To help customers get the most value from your products, you should consider investments in the following areas:
Developing a first-party data strategy, making better use of data you collect from customer interactions
Making sure customers have what they need after the sale, anticipating needs such as onboarding, education or complementary products
Identifying and re-engaging customers who are undecided about purchasing
Improving customer experience through real-time personalisation
Starting a customer loyalty program
Building immersive and customer-first experiences, such as augmented and virtual reality
Keep your focus on moving forward
It can be tempting to pause innovation during times of economic uncertainty. However, research from McKinsey says otherwise. They found that organisations that maintained their focus on innovation throughout the 2009 financial crisis outperformed the market average by more than 30% in the following three to five years.
Marketing leaders need to act now to optimise marketing spend with a slimmer budget, improve adaptability, and work to keep current customers. Resilient marketing helps grow revenue and profitability while also giving your team the ability to innovate and outperform your competition in the long run.
Dive deeper into all the trends and insights shaping the marketing landscape.
Download the Marketing Intelligence Report. This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
LIKE.TG Live: Asia — It’s a New Day for Customer Magic
It’s been a year of change for LIKE.TG, and for our customers, but now it’s a new day. We have an opportunity to reflect on how we’ve been doing and also look to the future.
LIKE.TG Live: Asiabrought the best of Dreamforce right to you. It’s your chance to hear from Trailblazers from all over the region, learn from industry experts, and find out the latest product innovations that we have for you.
We’ve brought together the whole LIKE.TG family — including Slack, MuleSoft, and Tableau — to help you grow your business. You’ll discover exciting new ways to build a more resilient business by increasing efficiency and productivity — all with the power of LIKE.TG Customer 360.
Watch LIKE.TG Live: Asia on demand for our amazing showcase. Together, we’ll learn, be inspired, and discover new ways of working.
What’s happening at LIKE.TG Live: Asia?
Dreamforce 2022 was a celebration of learning, connection, and change. We’ve collected together the highlights, including inspiring customer stories and product demonstrations. By the end of the show, you’ll know how you can combine data, innovation, and a digital HQ to take the next step toward delivering customer magic.
Here’s a quick list of what you can expect to see:
Magical innovation with Genie and Customer 360
Introducing LIKE.TG Genie — the real-time platform for customer magic.
LIKE.TG Genie is a gamechanger for Customer 360. We’ll show you how it can bring real-time data to your CRM, providing the most up-to-date picture of your customers, across every single Cloud in the Customer 360 platform.
There will be demonstrations of how Genie can transform how you provide personalised sales experiences for your customers, segment your marketing data for even better campaigns, and revolutionise your reporting in Tableau.
You’ll also see how Customer 360 powers everyday business in several customer demos, including Singtel, Aureus Group, and Starbucks.
Inspiring Trailblazer stories
We’ll be sharing inspirational stories from Trailblazers who are helping others to learn, connect, and give back.
We’ll be talking to Joanna Teo, Managing Director of Attribute Data, who will share her journey as a Trailblazer, including advice for Trailblazers who are just joining the community.
We’ll also talk to three customers as part of our panel on Innovation as a Growth Strategy:
Jessica Noble, GM IT Business Partner, International SOS
Wan Irfan Wan Ismail, Head of Corporate Platform Services, PETRONAS
Umesh Ramakrishnan, Data Manager, Traveloka
Innovation is often seen as a critical strategy in driving growth, but it can be difficult to find the time and focus needed to make it happen. Our guest Trailblazers will describe how:
Their organisations have embraced innovation as a growth strategy
Data has played a role alongside innovation
They keep innovation on the agenda in a world of competing priorities
Help the planet with Net Zero Marketplace
Sustainability is at the heart of what we do at LIKE.TG. We need to take action now to ensure that we can tackle climate change together. We can’t do everything, but together, as Trailblazers, we can combine our efforts to help our planet.
Sujith Abraham will describe how Net Zero Cloud can help your business go carbon neutral faster with state of the art data tracking. He’ll also introduce Net Zero Marketplace — a new way for organisations to trade carbon credits.
A new approach to teamwork with Slack Digital HQ
In a recent Bloomberg poll, more than 40% of respondents in Singapore said that they would turn down a job offer if it didn’t include the chance to work from home.
This new way of thinking about how we work requires a new approach to team collaboration. As individuals, we’ve changed the way we approach our work, and it’s time for organisations to change the way they think too.
The answer? A Digital HQ, powered by Slack. We’ll reveal new integrations and functionality that is making Slack simpler, more productive, and more enjoyable to use.
We’ll also show you exactly how these new capabilities will fit into your Digital HQ with a full demonstration from Slack’s Lead Solution Engineer, Shankar Krishnamurthy.
Make data-driven decisions with MuleSoft and Tableau
More than 80% of CEOs have told us that they want their organisations to be more data-driven. But only around 30% of employees think that their company is using data to inform decision making.
There is clearly a gap between ambition and execution. Data can be hard to access, and even harder to understand. MuleSoft and Tableau can help, first by connecting all your data sources with your single source of truth, and then empowering you to share insights in an easy-to-understand format.
Tune in to learn more about how these tools can take your data-driven decision making to the next level.
Small Business Showcase
LIKE.TG Live: Asia doesn’t end there. We are excited to share our Small Business Showcase, with advice on how to find, win, keep, and grow customers.
LIKE.TG expert Stoyan Licina will be on hand to show you how you can put customers at the heart of everything you do with Customer 360.
Licina will share how you can leverage marketing automation to:
Find more qualified sales leads with smarter lead generation
Win more deals with an end-to-end customer view and make your sales teams more productive
Keep your customers happy by providing exceptional customer service at every touchpoint on their journey
Grow your customers with AI-data-driven decisions insights
And to finish the day, Gerald Tjan, Manager Small and Medium Business at LIKE.TG, will sit down with Ying Da Teoh and Ivy Wu from Aureus Group. They will talk about the power of technology to transform the way small and medium sized businesses can work. They’ll also be sharing a demonstration of how they use LIKE.TG to offer exceptional experiences to their 18,000+ students.
Want to know more?
No matter where you are on your journey, LIKE.TG Live: Asia will show you how to ‘wow’ your teams with transformational ideas and be the changemaker who delivers success.
Watch on demand:
LIKE.TG Live: Asia –It’s a New Day for Customer Magic (Main)
LIKE.TG Live: Asia –Small Business Showcase
3 Ways To Promote Efficient Growth With Resources You Already Have
“Our selling motions may never be the same.”
“Competitive intensity is only going to increase … we could fall behind.”
“We will have to do more with less given hiring and spending freezes.”
Those are among a handful of common concerns we hear from sales leaders these days — many of whom are responsible for promoting efficient growth, even as we face economic uncertainty.
Sales leaders will need to zero in on where they and their teams can increase efficiency, manage risk, and most importantly, drive revenue. They will need to relentlessly prioritise, deploy effective tools for sellers, and train their sales reps on new skills required in the current selling environment.
The following are a few strategies our customers use to meet the challenge:
1. Promote efficient growth by focusing on high-potential and high-revenue accounts
Sales is all about telling the right person the right story at the right time. In a “do more with less” environment, sales teams must focus on the best markets, accounts, and decision makers to pursue.
This prioritisation requires an intelligent approach that relies on data. Some customers leveraged predictive insights to determine which deals might get pushed into the next quarter. They then developed recovery plans to speed up deal closures and capture millions of dollars in revenue in the current quarter.
Here’s how it works:
Regrade and rescore your accounts based on current revenue and future potential. Plot each of your accounts on a 2×2 matrix from low to high, with future potential on the vertical axis and current revenue on the horizontal axis.
Determine your highest-priority accounts. From the matrix above, your main focus should be on the top two quadrants: customers with high future potential and high revenue. For each of those quadrants, you want to determine if you have the right sales coverage and resourcing, which might require rolling out new sales or communication channels for easier customer engagement and folding in more reps to handle complex accounts.
For high-priority accounts, develop strategic account plans to uncover new sales opportunities. The account plan doesn’t need to be lengthy, but should include an executive-level account overview, key sales goals and objectives, top opportunities for the year, and a relationship plan (how you intend to communicate with account stakeholders). From a plan execution standpoint, you should include the account team roles and responsibilities, a meeting cadence, and an overall action plan. At a minimum, sales leaders should review the plan on a monthly and quarterly basis.
Leverage an integrated tool with automation, AI, and real-time data to track account progress and performance. The tool should include insights across marketing, sales, and service — or at least seamlessly integrate with tools used in these departments. To make it as effective as possible, make sure it automates manual tasks and communications, and offers intelligent insights so sellers can prioritise the best opportunities as soon as they arise. If you already have a CRM, check to see if it has this functionality — some include it as part of the core platform.
2. Simplify your sales tech stack
Our latest State of Sales report revealed something alarming about sales reps: most of them spend only a third of their time selling. The other two-thirds is spent juggling manual tasks like data entry and deal record management in outdated CRMs and countless other, disconnected tools. The solution? Streamlining and optimising tech. Some of our customers have reduced costs by hundreds of millions of dollars by standardising and simplifying their systems.
To do the same for your business, consider taking the following steps:
Outline each system or tool involved in the sales process.
Determine how much each tool is used during the sales process as a proxy for value. Generally, unused tools — or tools with a lot of unused features — signal low value.
Create a plan to sunset systems and tools that add little value to the seller or process.
A tool by itself will not drive results, but seeing a rep in action, powered by their systems, can drive the kinds of impact leaders are looking for.
To commit to long-term and lean productivity, strengthen your sales operations — if you haven’t already. With a keen eye on process efficiency and streamlining technology (leveraging the latest in automation and AI), sales ops teams can make sales predictions more accurately.
(Also, read about how startup Anduin Transactions approached streamlining its sales operations.)
3. Minimise business risk by focusing on customer and employee satisfaction
Without surplus financial resources, risk can increase. You lack the room for error to make a bad acquisition or launch a nice-to-have marketing campaign or product. That surplus is only possible when revenue is stable, and stable revenue is only possible when customers are satisfied and top-performing talent is retained. That’s why you need to make sure both customers and your employees are happy. Here’s how:
For your talent: Survey your sales teams to gauge levels and areas of dissatisfaction. As needed, execute any necessary retention strategies that address these areas of concern. For example, if your reps are frustrated with low pay, consider multi-year bonuses. If sales reps are wondering how to progress in their careers, roll out new professional development opportunities like classes and seminars.
Also, be sure your reps have everything they need to succeed in their day-to-day work by setting up enablement programs with the right onboarding, coaching, training tools, and resources. Studies show that if you give them everything they need to sell more, faster from the get-go, they’re more likely to stay.
For your customers: First and foremost, train your reps to engage customers beyond the sale. Give them ownership over the customer relationship so they track progress both up to the sale and after the deal is completed — ensuring service, billing, and all other team interactions are exceptional. Encourage regular check-in calls or communication, even if the customer doesn’t reach out with an ask. This makes them feel valued, which encourages loyalty and creates lasting relationships.
To get a sense of customers who might be ready to leave for the competition, look at data such as past buying behaviour or service issues. For example, a customer who stops buying as frequently or as much as they once did may be at risk of defecting. They may also be contacting the service centre more and have an increasing number of support cases. Be proactive about addressing these issues — prioritise reaching out to customers whose behaviours have changed or who need some extra help.
Next steps for efficient growth:
Driving efficient growth in times of change is ultimately achieved by returning to the basics. Most importantly, remain focused on the accounts that fuel revenue, cut back on tech that doesn’t serve you, and take care of your customers and employees. Also, be ready to adjust strategies and processes when they aren’t working. If you can achieve this, not only will you perform better during a downturn, but you will set yourself up for efficient growth whenever market conditions fluctuate.
Meet Vishal Salunkhe: Creating Magical Customer Experiences
At LIKE.TG, Nichola Palmer works with customers to bring their stories of innovation and transformation to life. In this blog series featuring Trailblazers, Nichola introduces Vishal Salunkhe,Vice President Regional Head of Sales Strategy Operations at Carousell Group. Vishal has spent his career helping companies create intuitive customer experiences that put the magic back in the sales process. Vishal Salunkhe has been fascinated by technology for as long as he can remember. Growing up in Bombay, he was an early adopter from childhood, and remembers his desire to be the first in his class to own a mobile phone.
“I saved my pocket money for six months, and I’m sure I skipped meals to get that phone,” he laughs. “Whether it was arcade games, or new apps or even MySpace, I was always very technologically curious.”
Vishal puts his childhood fascination with technology down to the magic of user experience. Understanding the mechanics of that experience has been a theme that has run through his career.
“In my early adulthood, I began to understand that technology is all about solving user problems in a meaningful way,” he says. “That’s the most attractive part of technology for me. There’s an ‘a-ha’ moment that comes when you see how technology is used to solve a problem that you didn’t even know you had.”
Building a strong foundation
As a student, Vishal was interested in economics. He attended the Indian Institute of Planning and Management for his postgraduate studies, and completed a Master of Business Administration (MBA) at the International Management Institute.
“I was lucky to join a business school that had one of the most intensive and diverse economics curriculum,” he says. “We studied everything from behavioural economics to business economics, and I still see that play out in the foundation of a lot of things I do today.”
Vishal also developed an interest in philosophy. He was particularly attracted to objectivism and the work of Ayn Rand.
“Objectivism essentially frames achieving our own happiness as the moral purpose of our lives, and productive achievement as our noblest activity,” he explains. “I feel these ideas are the foundation of my life and work philosophy.”
Putting philosophy to work
It’s no surprise that Vishal excelled in his first professional role as a Sales Operations Analyst at one of the top-five tech companies in India. His grounding in technology, economics and philosophy proved to be an ideal formula for the budding young sales professional.
“I realised that I could only become a good salesperson by solving customers’ problems versus the hard sell,” he says. “Selling becomes very easy because when you are just trying to solve a problem for the customer it’s not really a sale. It becomes a partnership, and the sale is just the output of a successful partnership.”
Vishal wanted to work across a spectrum of different big-tech software companies, and that journey led him to sales operations and service improvement roles at IBM, A.P. Moller – Maersk, and Red Hat. Today, as Vice President Regional Head of Sales Strategy Operations at Carousell Group, Vishal has shifted his focus to the consumer space.
“Carousell was a pivotal shift in my career,” he says. “I felt that I had achieved everything I could in sales operations at an enterprise level, and Carousell was an opportunity for me to switch focus from the B2B enterprise space to B2C.”
Solving user problems
Vishal’s transition to Carousell also came with a move to Singapore, and the opportunity to set up the company’s sales enablement and CRM processes. The role aligned with his core passion for the problem-solving magic of good user experience.
“Accepting the role was a no-brainer for me,” he says. “It is an opportunity for me to create, rebuild and polish our solutions to deliver that magic user experience in ways that solve user needs, and are successful for the business.”
But Vishal knows you need the right tools for the job. He says the pandemic taught him about the need for collaboration — and the importance of having the tools that make organisation-wide collaboration possible.
“I joined Carousell in March 2020, and within one week half the world was locked down,” he says. “There was so much behind-the-scenes strategy and go-to-market collaboration that needed to happen to get to a point where we could be meaningfully solving user problems.”
Finding the magic
Vishal says LIKE.TG has been instrumental in fostering this kind of organisation-wide collaboration. Customer 360 has replaced disparate sources of data to align employees around a single view of the customer, and streamlined the workflows that deliver magic user experiences.
Vishal’s first experience with LIKE.TG was during his time at A.P. Moller – Maersk where he helped migrate a legacy CRM into LIKE.TG. He was hooked on the ease of working with the platform and with the insights it provided. “LIKE.TG is a breath of fresh air in terms of its user experience. The dashboard interface is so intuitive, and it’s so fast to build processes for our sales leaders. You need those kinds of tools in order to deliver the magic moments to your customers. In fact, some of my career choices have been led by whether my potential employer uses LIKE.TG.”
LIKE.TG’s user experience, says Vishal, is an example of the intuitiveness Carousell is building into the company’s own user interface.
“That’s the other piece of the puzzle,” he concludes. “You can build a very beautiful product that meaningfully solves customer problems. But if the user doesn’t intuitively understand how to use it, then it’s worthless. The user should be able to intuitively use 70 percent of your product in a matter of seconds, without training. That’s where the magic lies.”
How PPIS Is Using LIKE.TG To Build Stronger Communities in Singapore
Persatuan Pemudi Islam Singapura (PPIS), or the Singapore Muslim Women’s Association, (PPIS) has been empowering women, children, and families since 1952. The non-profit organisation is striving to build stronger, more supportive communities with a range of services including childcare support, early childhood education, after-school care and enrichment, family casework and counselling, and fostering.
That’s an ambitious mission, and PPIS has embraced digital transformation to achieve it. The organisation is using LIKE.TG to optimise and automate donation, volunteer and event management workflows to increase productivity, boost efficiency, and get the most value out of its resources.
Transitioning from manual paper-based workflows to digital processes has required an organisation-wide shift across a network of 17 PPIS centres spread throughout Singapore. It’s a project that Thariq Aziz, Senior Manager IT Facilities Department at PPIS, says needed to start with basic digitisation.
“When I joined PPIS in 2019, the workflows were very manual and paper-based,” he explains. “It required lots of filling out physical forms and signing off with wet ink. There was no such thing as digital signatures, and no Zoom. Donations, volunteers, and counselling were managed in Excel spreadsheets.”
The transformation journey begins
For the organisation’s digital transformation to be effective, Aziz knew processes need to come before tools. So he took a step back and put time into researching departmental workflows and identifying where and how digital tools could add value.
His first stop was the Human Resources (HR) department. Digitising forms and signoffs with web-based applications achieved early success transitioning away from manual, paper-based workflows. But that was only the tip of the iceberg.
“That early digitisation led us to LIKE.TG’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP),” Aziz says. “Our first deployment was a client management system (CMS) for SYM Academy that’s responsible for all our family counselling and therapy services. Prior to LIKE.TG, clients were tracked in Excel and session notes were recorded in Word. LIKE.TG enabled us to bring this all onto a single CMS platform.”
The new Salesforce-based CMS gave Aziz the proof of concept he needed to expand the organisation’s digital transformation. So he hired Farique De Silva, Project Manager CRM at PPIS, to lead the next major LIKE.TG deployment. That came in the form of a new customer relationship management (CRM) platform for the donations department.
A single source of donor interaction
Farique explains that donation volume is seasonal, so PPIS needed a CRM that could effectively manage bulk donation periods. LIKE.TG replaced the organisation’s existing government-provided tool for donation management, and De Silva and his team spent two months migrating the data into the new CRM.
“Contact 360 now provides a single source of donor interaction across the organisation,” he explains. “This helps the fundraising team engage with the most active donors. We then deployed the Opportunities module for end-to-end donation management. So if a donor submits a donation via our website, they are now interacting with LIKE.TG end-to-end.”
Stripe and PayPal are also integrated with LIKE.TG for transaction management, and customised automations are used to create, update, and cross-check donor records. “All those steps used to be manual,” De Silva explains. “If a donor had made donations a year apart, it would have depended on the memory of the team. Now all that is managed in LIKE.TG.”
The LIKE.TG CRM is also significantly boosting efficiency for the finance team. Before LIKE.TG, every month a member of the finance team would spend a whole work day reconciling donation receipts for annual submission to the tax authority. That process is now completely automated with LIKE.TG.
“A customised report is generated in LIKE.TG to submit to the tax authority, and the finance team looks at it at the end of 12 months,” De Silva says. “Just automating that one process with LIKE.TG has saved us 12 work days per year. And in 2021, we only had to manually tweak two records out of more than 7,000.”
Increased productivity with automated workflows
PPIS now also runs volunteer and events management through LIKE.TG. De Silva explains that automated volunteer applications through LIKE.TG enables a single volunteer manager to oversee more than 800 volunteers.
“To work with children, our volunteers need to go through additional screening, so the application process is not simple,” he says. “New applicant records are automatically created and cross-checked in LIKE.TG, then tagged as volunteer applicants. Then our volunteer manager can simply search for volunteer applicants with the relevant interest or skill set for a particular campaign or event.”
At that point, the volunteer manager interviews selected volunteer applicants, and only successful candidates are updated to volunteer status.
“That means the organisation doesn’t have to immediately take on the workload of processing and interviewing every volunteer applicant,” De Silva adds. “That process only occurs when a volunteer is assigned to a campaign or event, which is a significant time saving for us.
“The idea is that we no longer run a collection of individual systems. Donations, volunteers, and events are all integrated into a single CRM and LIKE.TG is the backbone of it.”
Supporting people with technology
The organisation’s LIKE.TG transformation won’t end there. Next up, says Aziz, will be improvements to the CRM, and a new knowledge management system. He also envisions an integrated front-end platform to provide a simplified user experience for PPIS clients.
“Our main goal is to help people. That’s the bottom line,” Aziz explains. “We want to build a front-end platform that supports our clients’ progress through the PPIS lifecycle.
“We want to use technology to help our clients navigate many different issues and connect them with the support they need. I know we can achieve that with LIKE.TG.”
Learn how LIKE.TG’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) can help your organisation do more good.
Want To Be More Efficient and Productive? Automate More of Your Business
Imagine how much more productive and efficient your work would be if you could take all of the repetitive, routine, and manual work out of your day. Imagine if that kind of work were simply done for you, freeing up more time for value-added work that can drive success for you, your business, and your customers.
A growing number of companies are going beyond simply imagining it.
The big trend
Companies have been investing in business automation for decades to eliminate manual tasks and enable employees to focus on things that drive growth. Those investments have accelerated as automation has become more sophisticated and spread to every corner of the organisation. Eighty-five percent of organisations said in a2021 Deloitte studythey are rethinking how work gets done, and are moving from task-based automation to end-to-end automation. Thirteen percent said their organisation has implemented over 50 automations, up from just 4% who did so in 2018.
Why it matters
Business leaders are prioritising technology investments that drive efficiency and productivity, and business automation is at the top of that list. Companies that take a broad view of automation (beyond simple, task-based desktop automations) have saved a lot of costs and increased productivity.
What your company can do
Apply automation anywhere, and everywhere
Finance and accounting. Frees up time for more strategic things like analysis, strategy, and collaboration. One example, automated invoicing and approval routing.
Marketing. Helps you target customers with automated messages across channels. Identify audiences, design relevant content and automatically trigger actions.
Customer service. Next generation service automation, using AI, augmented reality and the Internet of Things (IoT) can predict service events and automatically resolve them through digital channels.
Human resources. Automate job application processing, response tracking and interview scheduling, onboarding and offboarding, payroll management and benefits administration.
Sales. A third of sales tasks, including strategy, planning, lead identification, qualification, configuration, pricing, and order management, can be automated.
Want to learn more? Here’s a deeper look
Automating tasks makes workers happier and more productive
Many knowledge workers spend a lot of time manually entering and retrieving information between multiple systems as part of a multi-step, manual process. This is not the best use of a person’s time, and could erode morale and employee engagement.
In the APAC Engagement Research conducted by LIKE.TG, 34% office workers strongly agree that outdated and inefficient technology makes them feel unhappy and unmotivated at work. And this lack of motivation adversely affects the quality of their work. They say their workplace experience could be improved with technology to help them with a variety of business tasks — particularly messaging or collaboration (49%), customer or client communications (45%), and client record management (39%).
When office workers were asked to nominate the issues that negatively affect their engagement at work, the top two were technology-related: when it fails or doesn’t work as it should (60%) and the quality of the technology (51%).
How can companies identify opportunities for automation? Global Field Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of digital transformation office at MuleSoft, Matt McLarty said one large financial services firm did it by asking employees a simple question: What’s the dumbest thing you have to do every day?
“They made it into a contest, with prizes,” he said. “People were so frustrated about wasting their time on this stuff that they volunteered all this information, which created a foundation for the company to automate those things.”
Business automation can be applied anywhere, and everywhere
You don’t need to understand exactly how automation works. You just need to understand its impact and how powerful it can be. Here’s how different departments can use automation to reduce manual processes, cut costs, reduce inefficiencies, and serve customers and employees better:
Finance and accounting
Automating financial planning and accounting functions frees up time for more strategically important things like analysis, strategy, and collaboration with stakeholders. One example is Accounts Payable. Data capture is automated (no more digging through miles of spreadsheets), invoices are automatically matched to relevant documents, and approvals are routed. This is not only more efficient but also reduces the risk of errors.
Marketing
There is no value in having to press “send” on every email, campaign, or social-media post you create. By automating marketing, you can target customers with automated messages across multiple channels. The best tools help you identify your audience, design the most relevant content, and automatically trigger actions like offers based on schedules and customer behaviour. These efforts can then be aligned with a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Customer service
It doesn’t take a human to answer basic questions like “How do I reset my password?” or “Where’s my order?” Chatbots, voice bots, and self-service are already in wide use, freeing up agents to help customers navigate more complex service situations. Next-generation service automation, using AI, augmented reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT), can predict service events and resolve them through digital channels. And it can give customers a total view of service activity for self-service support and automated monitoring.
Human resources
HR systems can automate a wide range of tasks, from job application processing, response tracking and interview scheduling to job offers, onboarding and offboarding, payroll management, and benefits administration. Using analytics, these systems can also provide insights into workforce sentiment, productivity, and engagement.
Sales
One management consultancy estimated that about one-third of all sales tasks can be automated, yet many business decision makers don’t take advantage of the capability. Sales strategy and planning, lead identification and qualification, configuration, pricing and quotation, order management, and post sales are all areas ripe for automation. Early adopters, the firm noted, consistently report increased customer-facing time, higher customer satisfaction, and efficiency improvements of up to 15 percent.
Leaders need to consider business automation a strategic asset
Like other digital transformations, the success of end-to-end automation relies on cultural changes driven from the top and executed in each function. Training, incentives, and key performance indicators are all essential.
Spending on automation, particularly AI systems in Asia Pacific will rise from $17.6 billion in 2022 to around $32 billion in 2025. The impact is profound, affecting the way we work, compete, innovate, and serve customers.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
