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Supercharge Your Automation for Bigger Cost Savings & More Efficiency
Chances are your company has already spent time and money automating business processes that were once done manually. But that’s not enough to deliver the best customer experiences, biggest cost savings, long term growth, or greatest efficiency. What is? Intelligent automation.
What is intelligent automation?
Intelligent automation combines robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, data, and more to create an end–to-end process that can learn and adapt on its own. Organisations that have already moved beyond piloting intelligent automation achieved an average cost reduction of 32%, according to Deloitte’s most recent automation survey.
Here we’ll cover how you can bring next-level efficiency to your business.
Two-thirds of companies have implemented some task-based automation, which is the fairly simple automation of a single process within one business unit. For example, creating a service ticket, automatic credit approval, or automated email promotions.
According to Matt McLarty, global field CTO and VP of the digital transformation office at MuleSoft, the task-based automations used at many companies today aren’t reusable, scalable, or sustainable enough to deliver the value that’s so important right now. That’s because they lack the context and sophistication that businesses need to truly transform their business and serve customers better.
Some examples:
a chatbot that doesn’t recognise a customer or their order history, and offers automated responses that don’t address the customer’s problem
a meal kit service that can’t say why your box hasn’t been delivered because it has no visibility into the logistics provider
an automated HR system that’s siloed from an employee success system.
“A lot of the RPA solutions are very much focused on recording how a process works, and automating it,” McLarty said. “But if there’s an exception in that process, as there often is, all you’ve done is delay solving the problem by putting a bot between me and the person who will actually resolve my issue.”
Intelligent automation provides context
Intelligent automation provides context around your data so you get a deeper understanding of what’s happening. The context, which gleans meaning from images, text, and speech, detects patterns and can make recommendations, predictions, and decisions.
Real-time connected data is a key to contextual automation, whether it’s internally automated business processes, or the ways in which companies automate interactions with partners and customers.
We are in the relative early stages of this advanced automation, but it’s on the radar of many organisations. Deloitte’s survey found that AI is the next most desirable automation technology, with 46% planning to implement it in the next three years.
How to identify new intelligent automation opportunities
Once a company has delivered a handful of automations, the dividends tend to level off. That’s because the company is not able to easily identify new processes to automate, said Joe Surprenant, sales leader across Deloitte’s AI and Data Ops practices. Companies need to mine their data and processes to uncover these new opportunities.
“Once you’ve exhausted heat maps and the idea box from process owners, you need a hybrid approach that includes both digital discovery tools and process expertise to identify the gaps,” he said.
The technology that makes that possible is called process intelligence. It’s the data that’s collected to analyse the individual steps within a process or workflow, and can help an organisation identify bottlenecks and improve efficiency. While only about one in five companies surveyed by Deloitte use process intelligence (PI) today — several companies develop PI technologies — it is a fast-growing sector.
“Process intelligence has opened up the eyes of many of our clients to show them things they did not know,” Surprenant said. For example, he said, one large company used process mining technology to analyse its end-to-end direct material purchasing process. The analysis identified steps in the purchase order maintenance process which had a higher manual activity and rework rate. This insight led to the development of a maintenance automation solution using a combination of RPA, business process management (BPM) workflow automation, and analytics, ultimately driving $40 million in annual savings.
Another retail client used PI to uncover the root cause of a disconnect between the sales, payment, delivery, and return functions within its supply chain. These insights were leveraged to create a consolidated customer journey app to quickly trace and resolve issues across these functions. This led to a 23% reduction in order returns, $46 million sales risk mitigated, and 7% improvement in net promoter score.
Process intelligence is beneficial in three ways:
It digitises and accelerates the discovery of automation use cases. In effect, it automates automation.
It provides an additional data point for what some business users suspect may be an area ripe for automation.
It saves companies the time and money of hiring consultants to interview process owners to identify automation opportunities.
What you need to think about
Implementing more sophisticated, contextual automation is about much more than technology. Success requires a fundamental rethinking and re-engineering of your processes, all centred around your customers’ needs.
McLarty, who works closely with customers on their digital transformations, suggested these first steps:
Consider the end-to-end customer experience
Map the entire customer experience, from end to end, how all those pieces are interconnected, and what customers need at each step. Most companies, he said, consider just one piece of the puzzle — commerce, service, or marketing, for instance — and automate just that one element.
Real-time, connected data is a game changer in contextual automation. Next-generation customer data platforms integrate data from every customer interaction, from any system, channel or data stream, into a unified customer profile. Having this 360-degree view helps you see your customers in totality. For example, it helps you see how a service interaction with a customer impacts a marketing promotion for that customer.
Meet your customers where they are, like never before
With a real-time CRM, you can connect all customer data at scale, from any system or device, and harmonise it into a single view.
Consider the technology that underpins a great solution
Is your technology repeatable and scalable? You should seek tools that can uncover different processes to automate in your organisation. These tools extract the metadata from the process, and turn it into an automated workflow.
MuleSoft is the enabling technology connecting data from any system or channel.
“The automated solution has to have connections into the predictive analytics that are synonymous with artificial intelligence and all the data sources, so it can tell you everything you need to know,” said McLarty.
It’s hard to overstate how transformative AI-based contextual automation will be. Surprenant said it will be equivalent to the cloud.
“We’re not there yet,” he said. “But when we get over the curve to where companies are automation-first when they design business processes, and they’re truly embracing a digital worker mindset, it will be as big if not bigger than cloud.”
Infographic: 3 Strategies That Will Engage And Wow Your Customers
In our latest State of Marketing report, CMOs cite customer preferences and expectations as the #1 factor influencing their digital strategy. Customers are constantly changing how they interact with businesses, and the things they care about are also evolving. According to the report, 71% of marketers say that meeting customer expectations is more difficult today than it was a year ago.
Keeping your customers engaged is an ongoing challenge for marketers, and we spend a lot of time and resources trying to keep our audiences loyal to our products. As shown in the State of the Connected Customer report, from here on out, customer engagement is digital-first. It’s estimated that more than 60% of customer interactions were online last year, up from 56% in 2020, and that trend is continuing.
Engaging customers across the channel mix
Your customers’ preferred channels are likely to be a mix of the old and the new. Email is still the most popular method for getting your message across — the number of outbound emails increased by 15% last year, accounting for around 80% of all outbound messaging. However, It’s not the channel that saw the fastest growth. Adoption of TV and over-the-top streaming platforms has grown by 27% since 2021, likely due to people spending more time at home in recent years.
On average, consumers use nine different channels to interact with businesses. Delivering engaging and relevant messages across all these channels is a challenge many marketers are facing now. Here are some ways you can boost customer engagement in old and new channels:
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3 Steps To Increase Your Contact Centre Revenue
Your Contact Centre Can Earn Money for Your Company, Too
In today’s changing economy, companies are seeking ways to optimise spending and do more with less. That’s especially difficult at contact centres, where siloed data, disconnected systems, and labour shortages already lead to long wait times and higher costs for your business. While these challenges may affect your contact centre revenue, they also significantly impact customer experience.
The good news? A few practical steps can help you increase customer satisfaction and turn your contact centre into a revenue generator. Here’s how.
1. Reduce call handling time with tools for service agents
The cost to operate a contact centre can reach US$5.60 per 3-4 minute direct consumer call. One of the best ways to cut costs and boost contact centre revenue is to reduce call length and ensure that customer requests get resolved in just one phone call. This requires equipping your service agents with the proper tools.
For starters, a 360-view of the customer — including order history and relevant profile information — will ensure that agents have all the data they need to understand each customer’s unique experience or issue. Collaborative tools like a digital HQ can also help speed up resolutions by removing team silos and streamlining communication between sales, service, marketing, and other teams.
One of the most common reasons that customers contact support is to check order status. With self-service options and order management tools, you can eliminate most of these calls — and save a significant amount of time and money. If customers do call to check on their order, a connected order management system can streamline the request. In fact, one report found that the right order management tools can improve first-call resolution by up to 20% and reduce call handling time by 25%. Connected tools give service agents a comprehensive view of order and inventory data, better equipping them to quickly handle customer requests.
2. Implement self-service to save time and money
Technology, including chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI), can handle straightforward questions, requests, and transactions so agents can prioritise high-touch matters. During Cyber Week 2022, global chatbot usage grew by 57% year over year as retailers used automation to keep the biggest shopping week of the year running smoothly. In fact, 88% of service organisations that use automation technology reported benefits such as reduced errors, more time to help customers, and more time to tackle new projects.
Technology also frees up time for service reps to help new customers configure products, up-sell and cross-sell shoppers who have complex requests, and more. The result: higher average order value, increased customer satisfaction, and lower call volume — which all add up to more contact centre revenue.
You can also implement digital knowledge centres so customers can quickly find answers to frequently asked questions without calling a rep. Online communities where customers offer each other advice and discuss your products is another way to reduce call volume while driving brand loyalty.
Contact centres are a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to customer experience. Customers want a genuine human experience with your brand. It’s just important to ensure that calling a contact centre isn’t the only way to reach your company for answers or help.
3. Focus on the post-purchase experience to drive loyalty
Customer acquisition can be a major cost for companies. Fortunately, contact centres can turn every call into an opportunity to retain customers and drive loyalty. This is especially impactful during post-purchase calls.
Common post-purchase transactions include exchanges, returns, modifications, and even discounting. These types of transactions can be a make-or-break moment when it comes to retaining a customer. One study found that more than three-quarters of shoppers (76%) who highly rated their returns experience with a retailer said they’d shop with them again because of it.
So, how do you ensure reps can make the most of these valuable moments? Start by making sure every customer feels heard. The contact centre is an important part of your feedback loop, and it’s critical to give service reps the right resources to flag any issues with product quality. Returns reporting tools can help you track patterns over time, which means you can course-correct as quickly as possible to ensure customer satisfaction and avoid boomerang products.
Boost cost centre revenue by unifying marketing and customer service
Your marketing and customer service teams share the same goal: to deliver exceptional experiences for every customer, at every point of contact. The key to unlock these experiences? Give your sales, service, and marketing teams the right resources to make every part of the customer journey feel seamless. This will do more than just improve your customer experience: it will reduce costs and drive contact centre revenue.
Stay on top of the latest service trends. Find out how to take your contact centre customer experience to the next level from our State of Service report.DOWNLOAD NOW
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Infographic: Boost Sales Productivity With Tips That Work
As we enter 2023, sellers are facing a world in which they are being asked to deliver more, using fewer resources. Supply chain issues, inflation, and shifting regulations are just some of the factors that are making the job of a sales professional more difficult. In fact, 82% of sales reps say they’ve had to adapt to new ways of selling, and they’ve had to adapt quickly. Sixty-nine percent of reps say that this has made their job harder than it was before the pandemic.
Sales teams are also finding they have less time to sell than they used to. According to the latest State of Sales report, the average rep spends only 28% of their time on actual selling. The rest of their time is spent on time-consuming admin, data entry, and prioritisation of leads, among other tasks. This can lead to a hurried sales process and less time to hit quota.
Recent history has permanently changed the way that our customers expect companies to behave, and the ways they want to interact with sales reps. The latest State of the Connected Customer report showed that 57% of customers prefer to engage with businesses through digital channels. The proportion gets even higher for younger customers. Most customers don’t limit themselves to a single method of communication, either – the average customer will use nine different channels when communicating with companies.
The road to sales success
So what can sales reps do to succeed in sales today? Part of the answer lies in the tools that we use to sell. Technology is an essential part of selling, and using the right apps can reduce costs while also boosting productivity and helping you save time.
Sales Cloud users have seen a boost in sales productivity of 29%* – achieved through automation of everyday activities. At the same time, Customer 360 provides real-time customer data, speeding up the sales timeline and allowing you to focus on high-value activities.
Here are just some of the ways you can find sales success today:
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*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.
Increasing Pathways for Students To Join LIKE.TG in Singapore
The last few years have rapidly accelerated the shift to digital-first experiences and the adoption of new technologies. According to SkillsFuture Singapore, the demand for digital skills, such as software testing and experience design, has doubled over the past 4 years.
Worryingly, this is creating a growing digital skills gap. According to LIKE.TG’s Global Digital Skills Index, more than three quarters (76%) of global workers say they don’t have the skills they need for the future of work. To close this gap will require vast amounts of reskilling and career shifting on the part of companies, educational institutes, and policymakers.
LIKE.TG has always been committed to workforce development programmes focused on training, reskilling, and helping people get hired for the jobs of the future. For example, our free online learning platform, Trailhead, allows people to skill up for jobs within the LIKE.TG ecosystem. To date, more than 3.9M learners have skilled up on Trailhead and 1 in 3 say they found a new job with the skills they learned.
Doubling down on our efforts to close the digital skills gap in Singapore, LIKE.TG will be collaborating with The Institute of Technical Education (ITE) to train 7,500 ITE students on digital customer relationship management (CRM) skills over the next 5 years. LIKE.TG’s Trailhead Academy will work with ITE to provide an enhanced curriculum and a new mentorship programme, equating to approximately S$8.7 million in value.
(L-R) Mr Sujith Abraham, Senior Vice President and General Manager, LIKE.TG ASEAN, Ms Cecily Ng, Senior Vice President and General Manager, LIKE.TG Singapore and Taiwan, Mr Tan Kiat How, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Communications and Information, Ms Alice Seow, Principal, ITE College West, Mr Alvin Goh, Director, School of Business Services, ITE College West at the MOU Exchange Ceremony for LIKE.TG and ITE
Building a strong foundation for a career in tech
As part of this new collaboration, LIKE.TG will customise and embed guided learning paths from Trailhead into the ITE curriculum across all three colleges in Singapore. The courses provided will focus on LIKE.TG administrator and developer roles. They are projected to provide at least 7,500 ITE students with the skills and credentials required to kick-start their career in the technology industry or generate pathways to further tertiary education.
A dedicated mentorship programme will also be introduced for the first time. For each cohort, 60 ITE students will be mentored by LIKE.TG employees and supported by trained ITE lecturers, and will undergo exams to obtain resume-worthy certifications such as LIKE.TG administrator or developer. The students will be given case studies to apply their skillsets and hands-on case competitions simulating real-world environments to gain practical skills. Under the MOU, Trailhead Academy will also partner with youth development organisation, Halogen Foundation Singapore to provide these students with soft skills training.
The mentorship programme seeks to empower ITE students to connect to opportunities and eventually land a role in the LIKE.TG ecosystem, which is projected to create 18,600 jobs in Singapore by 2026. This includes roles such as LIKE.TG administrators and developers within companies that use LIKE.TG, or as independent consultants to companies that are looking to implement LIKE.TG solutions or seeking digital transformation strategies for their organisations. The program is slated to start in October 2023 alongside ITE’s official curriculum.
Enhancing student training to provide holistic education experiences
Beyond contributing to ITE’s curriculum, LIKE.TG will conduct Train-The-Trainer sessions with ITE staff to equip them with the expertise in emerging CRM trends and new LIKE.TG technologies.
By providing more opportunities for holistic educational experiences and training for the younger generation, we hope to be able to propel Singapore’s digital talent pool and democratise the access to education.
Did you know that you don’t have to be a student to join the LIKE.TG ecosystem? Anyone can create a Trailblazer account via Trailhead. Click here to find out more!
4 Ways These Two Businesses Improved Efficiency Through Automation
“I would say automation now is a must for all companies.”
That was the opinion of Khun Gigs-Kasin Suthammanas, CEO and Co-Founder of Finnomena Group, in a recent discussion on the State of Service.
And he’s not alone. Businesses around the world are looking for ways to automate, improve productivity, and reduce costs. In the face of increasing costs and evolving customer demands, organisations are turning to trusted tools and platforms to help them with their automation requirements. According to a recent study, LIKE.TG customers who use Customer 360 are achieving 27% faster automation of business processes, and a 26% increase in employee productivity. At the same time, by consolidating the apps they use, they are reducing IT costs by 25%.*
Khun Gigs was joined for the conversation by Konlawachara Trakulsuk, known as Khun Bank, General Manager for Product Management at Central Group, and Dr Ruthairat Protprakorn, Regional Sales Director at LIKE.TG.
The group discussed the various ways that Finnomena and Central Group have been able to automate their operations across service and sales.
Automated contact centre tools make things easier for agents
Khun Gigs explained how automated call routing has cut down on admin time for service agents, and also led to more customer satisfaction.
Many calls that Finnomena deals with involve personal customer data, information about savings and revenue. “We have 200,000 customers and 300–400 new customers daily,” said Khun Gigs. “What if you called in and our contact centre recognised you and directed your call to the advisor you talked to previously. How great would that be?”
By routing customers to an agent they have encountered before, Finnomena can reduce admin time and increase customer confidence. In fact, LIKE.TG customers have reported that automation tools provided by Service Cloud have led to a 27% reduction in service and support costs.*
LIKE.TG tools for contact centres extend beyond simple call routing. Khun Bank gave an example related to Central Group brand PowerBuy.
“When someone makes a purchase from PowerBuy, there will sometimes be after-sales activity when there are cracks, defects, or repairs. Sometimes customers can’t explain the situation via voice and text services, and it consumes a lot of the agent’s time.”
Central Group would find that service agents were using their own devices to receive photographs or make video calls so they could better understand the issues the customer was facing. Of course, this was not a secure way of communicating, either for the agent or the customer.
But, using Visual Remote Assistant in Service Cloud, Central Group empowered their service agents to communicate using photos and video functions within the app, speeding up the entire process and creating a happier outcome for the customer.
“We have closed the gap. All the data is secure and in the right place for future investigations. We have reduced the handling time and connected better with customers, and we can close the case successfully,” said Khun Bank.
Automated account creation and verification speeds up the customer experience
Another innovation that benefits both customers and service agents is the automation of account creation and verification at Finnomena.
In the past, customers would register and have to wait two days before they received a call from the Finnomena agent.
“Our process took two days to work over data on the cloud, to identify if they were an existing customer, and to find out who they had spoken to in the past. All of that before the sales assignment stage,” says Khun Gigs.
“I knew that wasn’t right – when customers express their interest it means they want the product or service straight away.”
LIKE.TG helped customise all Finnomena’s customer journeys. After the LIKE.TG implementation, data within applications became real-time. Today, if you register with Finnomena online, an agent will call you back within 2 hours.
“I’m so happy with this solution. We have seen a better conversion rate. And we can serve customers when they want us,” said Khun Gigs.
Automated cross-sales and lead scoring increases sales productivity
As seen in our State of the Connected Customer report, customers expect more than 60% of their interactions with businesses to be online. At the same time, nearly half of all customers said they have switched brands in search of better customer service.
To stay ahead of this trend, Central Group has introduced its Chat Shop service. It’s a multi-channel digital assistant, accessible through social media channels, the Central app, and online stores. When Chat Shop customers want to go shopping, but don’t have the time — the service offers a personalised service, suggesting products and services the customer may be interested in.
The Chat Shop team gets 10,000 to 20,000 contacts monthly, either through ads or via direct message. LIKE.TG technology has helped Central Group agents increase the conversion rate, closing more deals and offering suggestions for upselling and cross-selling.
“LIKE.TG is very important in helping our customers and streamlining our processes. We can use our sales data across channels, and for customer segmentation. This is our plan to improve customer service,” said Khun Bank.
There’s even more on the horizon. Finnomena is exploring how it can leverage Sales Cloud’s automated lead scoring capabilities to make its sales pipeline even more efficient.
Finnomena is receiving as many as 400 new leads per day, says Khun Gigs.
“We have a data team that analyses the data — that team is working on a lead-scoring model that will allow us to automatically prioritise the best of these 300–400 new leads,” he says. “We’ll use LIKE.TG to automate the referrals to the right sales advisors, which leaves our team more time to sell.”
Employee happiness = customer happiness
Back to that quote that we started this article with, when Khun Gigs said that “automation now is a must for all companies.”
In our State of Service report we learned that 85% of service decision makers agreed that there was a direct link between employee experience and customer experience. One way of improving the employee experience is to ensure that they have the tools and information they need to serve the customer effectively and quickly.
“It is not right to make your employees suffer with manual work when you have a lot of customers. Many tools are available now,” Khun Gigs continued.
The good news is that high-performing organisations are already providing their teams with the tools and data they need. Eighty-eight percent of agents at high-performing service organisations agree that they have access to complete information about customers’ sales interactions.
Scale Service Efficiency To Reduce Costs And Grow Customer Loyalty
Service organisations are striving to meet heightened customer expectations in increasingly uncertain economic conditions. According to the State of Service report, 60% of service professionals stated customer expectations increased during the pandemic. Customers also value the experience offered by businesses much more than they did before. In 2022, 88% of customers said that their experience of a brand mattered as much as its products, compared to 80% of customers in 2020.
Service leaders are faced with the challenge of meeting growing customer expectations in an increasingly uncertain economic climate. They don’t just have to plan for service success, but they also have to do it more efficiently while cutting costs. This pressure to do more with less can impact service quality – with 78% of service agents in 2022 saying it was difficult to balance speed and quality, up substantially from 63% of service agents in 2020.
So how can service professionals grow customer loyalty by delivering faster, more personalised service? How can they scale service efficiency while achieving cost savings?
Maximising service ROI
Delivering a superlative customer experience can build strong customer connections and increase loyalty. According to the State of the Connected Customer report, 94% of customers stated that good customer service makes them more likely to make another purchase. This means customer service can actually be a revenue generator rather than a business cost. With the right technologies, a business can empower their service professionals to become frontline brand ambassadors – who can identify and maximise revenue opportunities.
Let’s look at a few ways to achieve service success efficiently and at scale.
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Stats shown as ‘ASEAN’ reflect the responses of 2,000 survey respondents from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, out of a total of 8,050 responses across 36 countries used in the report.
Want a Golden Hoodie? ASEAN Trailblazer Shibu Abraham shares top tips
When Shibu Abraham started out on his LIKE.TG career more than 15 years ago in Malaysia, a Golden Hoodie was the last thing on his mind. But after a career marked by a dedication to passing on his knowledge and a passion for lifelong learning, he was honoured at Dreamforce 2022 with his very own Golden Hoodie.
“I’ve never spoken at an event like Dreamforce,” says Abraham, “and initially I thought I was speaking at a smaller breakout session. But then my session got moved to the main keynote stage, and I started to get really nervous!
“I was rehearsing all the time – just to make sure I didn’t embarrass myself on stage. When I was watching the main keynote session, I was sitting there thinking ‘that’s where I have to stand tomorrow!’”
Abraham had no idea that he was receiving the coveted Golden Hoodie award.
“After I’d given my presentation, they asked me to stay on stage for a second – I wondered whether I’d forgotten something,” he said. “But I turned around, and there was Guilda Hilaire holding the hoodie.”
What is the Golden Hoodie?
The first Golden Hoodie was awarded in 2016. The LIKE.TG community already loved the iconic black Trailblazer hoodie, so a gold coloured version was created to celebrate special stories.
You can’t buy a Golden Hoodie – they are only awarded to Trailblazers who have shown dedication in teaching others, used LIKE.TG to make a difference, or overcome the odds in their LIKE.TG career.
“Usually the Golden Hoodie is given to someone with a really inspiring background – never in my dreams did I think that I’d be in that league,” says Abraham.
A dedication to learning and sharing knowledge
Abraham was first introduced to LIKE.TG in 2007 by his manager, Prasan Vyas.
“He’d attended Dreamforce, and he already loved the LIKE.TG platform and the ecosystem,” Abraham says. “When I joined his team, he told me ‘LIKE.TG is the next big thing.’”
Abraham remembers it wasn’t long before a big client asked for help on a LIKE.TG implementation.
“After that, customer demand started to increase,” he says. “We were a pretty young business then, and were trying to grow as a practice. As soon as our customers started asking for LIKE.TG, that was a turning point – there was no going back.”
As part of his long career in the LIKE.TG ecosystem, Abraham has dedicated his spare time to sharing his knowledge with his network. It’s for this reason that he’s now wearing the Golden Hoodie.
The power of the LIKE.TG Community
Through his involvement with local user groups, the wider Marketing Cloud community, and his popular blog and YouTube channel, Abraham has spread the word about the power of LIKE.TG, and helped many people on their own journey.
“The LIKE.TG community is one of the best out there,” he says, “and it’s driven by its members. We’re a bunch of passionate people.
“Find out if you have a local user group you can join – almost every city has one. When you’re starting out, it’s good to have someone you can ask for advice, who can offer a helping hand.
“There’s also the Trailblazer Mentorship program. There are experienced people who have been through the exact same journey that you’re going through, and they can’t wait to pay their knowledge forward.”
Knowing which questions to answer
So how does he choose what knowledge he needs to share?
Again, Abraham goes back to his beloved LIKE.TG community. “People will send me questions on my social profiles, or in the comments on my YouTube channel,” he says.
“So I start to see patterns in what people are asking about. Then I can build content to answer those questions.”
Encouraging women into the LIKE.TG ecosystem
Abraham says it’s important to him that women are encouraged to pursue tech roles – something he puts into practice in his day job.
“Most of the leads in my team are women,” Abraham says, “especially on the architecture and technical side of things. One of them, Meera Nair, is also a LIKE.TG MVP.
“Their stories are very inspiring. Some of them are coming back to work after extended career breaks, and the beauty of a cloud-based system is that they can work from home on a flexible basis. At UST, we take every opportunity to encourage women to grow their careers with us.
“LIKE.TG itself is committed to equality, and it makes us very proud that we can align with that value too.”
Advice for your LIKE.TG career
“I would always tell my team that they should make sure that they are developing their careers,” Abraham says, “and they would often say to me ‘we don’t have time for that.’
“So I decided that I had to take my own advice, and show them that with a little balancing of your time, it’s possible to work on your career progression while keeping up with your full time job.”
Abraham says there are two things you need to focus on:
Upskilling
“Never stop learning – there is always something that is changing. LIKE.TG regularly releases new features, and you need to make sure you’re on top of them. I always say that if you don’t keep yourself updated, you’re outdated.
“So I tell my team to use T-shaped learning. You can build your specialist knowledge – that’s the vertical of the ‘T’. But you also need to have knowledge of what’s going on around you, so that you can talk to people. That’s the horizontal bar in the ‘T’. You need both to succeed.”
Market yourself
According to Abraham, personal branding is very important in today’s climate.
“I don’t think people market themselves enough,” he says.
“Marketing yourself can start in your own team – by establishing your abilities, you will gain a reputation for expertise in that area. That brand recognition will go a long way in your career roadmap, and help you get promotions, new roles, and so on.”
The Dreamforce experience
Even though he’s been passionate about LIKE.TG for over a decade, 2022 was the first time Abraham had a chance to visit Dreamforce.
“In one word, Dreamforce was overwhelming,” he says.
“I actually went into the venue on the day before the big event, and it was nice and quiet,” he remembers. “But on the day of Dreamforce, it was something else. It was so busy! People from the LIKE.TG community lined the streets, inside the buildings – everywhere.”
Of course, Abraham’s experience of the event was a little different from most Trailblazers.
“Straight after I received the Golden Hoodie, I didn’t know what to say. People were coming from left and right congratulating me, and I was still trying to take in what had happened. It took a few days for it to really sink in,” he says.
Not everyone knows what a Golden Hoodie represents, though.
“After I got off stage, I called my wife and told her that I had received a Golden Hoodie,” Abraham says. “But of course she doesn’t really know what that means. The next morning, when I was able to explain its significance, she was very proud.
“There was another funny moment, straight after I got the hoodie. My friend Scott took me to a restaurant round the corner. When we got there, a man said, ‘nice hoodie, where can I buy one?’ and I had to explain that he couldn’t!”
How to Close More Sales Deals While Saving Time and Costs
In today’s changing economic landscape, businesses need solutions that can boost productivity while saving time and cutting costs. As customer expectations continue to evolve, sales teams in particular need to do more with less.
The pressure is on to close more deals and meet sales targets today. But at the same time, sales teams also need to identify opportunities for tomorrow. Tiffani Bova, Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at LIKE.TG, calls this dual challenge the ‘seller’s dilemma’.
So how can sales professionals focus on the near-term while also planning for the future? To drive long-term growth and success, they need to rethink their sales strategies to adapt to new ways of selling.
Optimise, transform, innovate
According to our State of Sales research, 72% of sellers’ time is spent on non-selling activities during an average week. These activities often comprise critical but tedious tasks like deal management and data entry. As a result, their ability to meet sales targets is being impacted – 83% of sellers expected to miss their quota in 2022. When sales operations help sellers reduce their number of non-selling tasks, they can help optimise the time available to sales teams to connect with customers and close deals.
To enable this optimisation and improve selling efficiency, sales processes may need to be transformed. This can mean automating tasks which sales teams may be completing manually. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can also mine customer data to help with sales forecasting and territory mapping to further free up time for sales teams to focus on selling. Adopting these transformative technologies can provide data-driven insights to help teams have meaningful conversations with customers. It can reduce the time spent on sales management, while allowing them to focus more on their own core skills and be innovative in addressing customer pain points. This can make selling a more rewarding experience while also helping them achieve sales growth.
Boost efficiency and cost savings with AI and automation
Sales automation can boost productivity. Deploying a platform like LIKE.TG Sales Cloud can help automate and streamline workflows to make sales teams more efficient. For example, when a sales representative books an order in, it is automatically sent to the customer and upon receiving their e-signature, an auto invoice is generated. Such streamlined order management and centralised view of customer data enabled by LIKE.TG have helped Browzwear reduce the manual handling of each order by 65%. The company’s use of Tableau for data-driven decision making has helped save time spent in verifying numbers and data, thereby improving data transparency and efficiency. This has accelerated their digital transformation and helped Browzwear scale up efficiently to achieve 60% year-on-year business growth.
When automation is paired with AI, it can help significantly reduce manual work like lead scoring. By carrying out a sales analysis of past deals, AI like Sales Cloud Einstein can help prioritise the leads most likely to convert. This can keep sellers focused on meaningful conversations to close deals faster with customers. As the State of Sales reveals, eight in 10 leaders and sales operations professionals say AI has improved the use of sales representatives’ time.
Unlock your sales superpower
As sales representatives hone their skills to beat the ‘seller’s dilemma’, Bova says it’s important for them to understand their own strengths. Instead of trying to do too much, they should focus on their own ‘selling superpower’.
“If sellers feel they are good at something, say at understanding customer pain points, I say do more of that,” says Bova. “When sellers try to be something that they’re not, it comes off as inauthentic. They never really feel comfortable and confident with it.”
While building relationships with customers will always be important, Bova believes the successful sales reps of the future will be those that use technology better than their competitors.
“At the end of the day, this is about human and tech – not tech or human alone. Whether you’re using a CRM or chat, email or video, you are using tech. And those that really lean into using tools like AI and machine learning for lead scoring and forecasting, will really build on their own strengths.”
So, how can sellers go about using technology to build long-lasting relationships and boost their sales?
Set up for sales success
To achieve long-term sales success, it is important to have a strong digital foundation. This enables sellers to be agile and innovative by tapping into the power of technologies like automation and AI.
Streamlining your tech stack to support your sales strategy can help deliver improved efficiency and cost savings. But where can you start?
This e-book offers guidance on using the right technology and human skills to achieve sales success, now and into the future.
Download it now for:
✔️ Success tips from LIKE.TG experts, partners and Trailblazers
✔️ Effective techniques to refresh your sales strategy
✔️ A sales readiness checklist – to get you ready for the future of sales
Achieve sales success by downloading your free Selling Smarter Not Harder e-book now.
How HEPMIL Media Group Drives Efficient Growth With Real-Time Data
HEPMIL Media Group strives to engage millions in Southeast Asia through thought provoking and entertaining content. The network of technology-driven media companies boasts a weekly reach of more than 50 million people across multiple content platforms. It generates more than 3 billion monthly views via the HEPMIL Creator’s Network (HCN).
But that’s only the beginning. HEPMIL has also helped leading global brands including McDonalds, Disney, and Starbucks connect with GenZs and Millennials in Southeast Asia through effective social media campaigns.
It all started in 2012 when HEPMIL Co-founders Karl Mak and Adrian Ang turned a viral meme about the McDonald’s curry sauce shortage into SGAG — an influential comedy platform in Singapore. The company replicated its success in Malaysia with the launch of MGAG in 2015 and in the Philippines with PGAG in 2018.
Also in 2018, the company launched cross-platform tech channel SGEEK. It then expanded its regional presence in 2021 with HEPMIL Media Indonesia, HEPMIL Singapore, and HCN in Malaysia and the Philippines.
Tackling the reliability challenge
The company’s revenue is predominantly generated through sponsored brand content and client campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Michelle Tan, General Manager at HEPMIL Singapore, says customer engagement and building long-term client relationships has been critical to the company’s rapid growth — particularly in the short-term world of social media.
“Our goal is always to be authentic and trustworthy partners to our clients, mainly because in the social media space there are so many creators and younger startups that are very focused on short-term goals,” she explains. “But we strongly believe in building and maintaining long-term client relationships. To achieve that, we need to be reliable and transparent.”
That was a challenge in the early years of the company. Michelle says quick access to up-to-date client data is essential to building trust in customer relationships — and online spreadsheets were not a suitable tool.
“We started with Google Sheets, and there were definitely instances where people didn’t fill out mandatory fields, which led to missing client data. As the business grew, we also started to lose track of the master document, so updating Sheets was a problem. That meant up-to-date client data was often difficult to find or not available.”
Michelle says this lack of reliable, real-time data also made reporting to senior management and shareholders inefficient. “Whenever a request came from senior management or shareholders, we’d have to spend a lot of time crunching numbers and checking that the data had been updated. We needed intelligent automation software that would solve this.”
The power of data-driven decision making
Sales Cloud was the solution the HEPMIL team needed. Chiang Ling Yi, Regional Product Lead at HEPMIL Media Group, says the company is now using Sales Cloud to manage the entire client lifecycle — from leads to project closure.
“Enquiries submitted via all our brand websites now flow directly into Sales Cloud, and the Business Development Lead in each country assigns different team members to follow up,” he explains. “Then there’s a customer discovery process, a proposal stage, and finally moves into an active project. This is all managed in Sales Cloud.”
Ling Yi says Sales Cloud has also transformed the company’s reporting capabilities. His team has customised more than 10 Sales Cloud dashboards that enable real-time data reporting across departments.
“For example, a business team might use a dashboard to look at what projects are in the pipeline, what’s still in proposal stage, how long each project has been running, what is in each team member’s workload, and what revenue their team is bringing. On a senior management dashboard, we’re looking at things like revenue per country and revenue distribution across regions.”
The company is also using LIKE.TG Inbox for client-facing roles, and Sales Cloud workflow automations are integrated into legacy project management software. “Whenever the business development team updates Sales Cloud, new information is automatically updated on our project management platform,” says Ling Yi.
Real-time insights drive business growth
Michelle says LIKE.TG has delivered significant business value on multiple fronts. “Many hours have been saved in crunching numbers because we can now rely on our customised dashboards. This alone has improved productivity by about 5 percent, and we can spend the saved hours on more productive work.”
Access to reliable, real-time data through Sales Cloud dashboards has also enabled the HEPMIL team to take a more targeted, proactive approach to customer engagement.
“We can now track whether a client’s spend has increased or decreased over time, which enables us to identify areas for change and open up conversations with the client,” Michelle explains.
Perhaps most significantly, Sales Cloud data also enables Michelle to track trends in client demand, and to resource projects appropriately to cut waste and reduce costs.
“With LIKE.TG, we can identify client demand and forecast future customer demand to make important business decisions. For example, one year ago the demand may have been for three-minute videos that needed a 10-person crew. However, now the demand may have pivoted to one-minute videos that require a much smaller crew. I can restructure our creative and production teams based on the current demand. This has contributed to an approximate 20 percent increase in business growth.”
Michelle adds that LIKE.TG has also helped to power HEPMIL’s rapid regional growth. Data insights through Sales Cloud have helped teams in other countries identify and target potentially high-value clients.
“When we use Sales Cloud to track deal size in Singapore, it gives teams in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia insights into which clients they can potentially reach out to and spend time nurturing a relationship with them in their own region,” she concludes. “LIKE.TG has been critical to achieving that.”
4 Ways to Make AI the New Team Member Your Sales Reps Will Love
For many businesses, AI is like a new star recruit who everyone feels nervous around and cautious about. This is largely because of the myths that still persist about AI taking jobs, requiring employees to become data scientists and machine learning experts.
And yet an AI-enabled sales strategy has the potential to enable sales professionals and drive performance. From sales analysis and forecasting to lead management, AI can help improve efficiency in the sales process. What AI needs then is a proper introduction, not a sudden announcement at a staff meeting or hastily circulated memo that makes sales — arguably one of the lively parts of any business — feel like it’s turning into a technical process rather than a valuable and talented team. The results can be damaging if those on the sales team fail to adopt or take advantage of the AI capabilities in their CRM, or try to find ways to work around it.
So rather than letting your technology investment go to waste, it is beneficial to figure out an approach to AI onboarding that isn’t threatening. This can help integrate these sales or prospecting tools usefully and naturally into day-to-day work.
1. Build trust before the introduction
If you were introducing a new team member to a client, would you bring them to a meeting unannounced? Would you simply tell everyone their name and expect the relationship to thrive? Probably not. Instead you would lay the groundwork — selling your new hire to the client before they ever meet.
Similarly it can work better to lay the groundwork first instead of calling your sales team into a meeting to tell them AI is now part of their toolkit. Start by discussing the team’s own data and sales performance: win rates, losses, goals, and progress. These should be sales KPIs and numbers the team already trusts and values, so they’ll be sure to pay attention.
Only then should you move the discussion into a business case about how AI sales tools might help improve those numbers. Develop your best sales forecast or estimate based on how AI could identify additional opportunities, avoid costly mistakes or predict otherwise unforeseen events. This positions AI as a sales tool useful to the team’s success — not something that will undermine their success.
2. It’s always a race — demonstrate AI’s time-saving benefits for sales reps
Sales reps don’t love administrative work, whether it’s creating and submitting reports, scheduling meetings, answering emails or updating customer records. The reality is, admin work in the sales process also takes them away from the one thing they’re all good at and the very thing they earn commission on — selling. In fact, the average sales rep spends less than one-third of their time selling.
It can really help if sales operations can show, not tell, your team how powerful reclaiming some of that time back would be. Most sales reps love a little competition — they thrive on achieving a goal! So set up a game with reps racing each other and the clock. Choose two competitive reps and give them a pile of data to input into a spreadsheet to create a sales report, and a number of emails to answer and correlate with calendar information to book meetings. Ask them to ensure they update customer records as they go. Use a stopwatch and give them 20 minutes to complete the task. Meanwhile, have a third rep complete the same task using Einstein GPT— you’ll need to make sure they’re familiar with using it.
When time’s up, congratulate the sales rep who accomplished more of the tasks. But before declaring them the winner, talk about how AI can help improve sales management – by automating processes , updating your CRM and eliminating much of what we use spreadsheets for today. And ask the rep who was using AI what they would do with the extra time they didn’t spend on admin. The whole team will see for themselves that the right technology can free them up to do higher-value tasks and achieve sales growth.
3. Make AI the new member of your sales team
When technology behaves like a person — hello Siri and Alexa — it feels less intimidating. So why not give your new AI capabilities the same advantage?
Connect with your marketing department to develop a representative image you’ll use to associate with your new AI capabilities. Show the AI persona’s face on screen in your team meeting, and talk about them as though you are introducing a new admin assistant who will be helping out the team.
Say you were launching an AI chatbot – introduce its persona like any other member of the team. Speak about the AI skills it offers, such as answering common customer questions and managing enquiries, at the same time freeing up the customer service staff to handle the more complex cases that require a human touch.
The point is to demonstrate that if the AI were a high performer with exceptional capabilities, they would be enthusiastically welcomed. So why not do the same for the technology that can deliver those capabilities?
4. Transform your critics into advocates
Getting the new technology’s harshest critics to pitch it can be a great way to turn a sceptic into a fully-fledged AI advocate.
Salespeople thrive on competition and on coming up with ingenious ways to convince even the most resistant customers. You can turn that to your advantage as you bring in AI.
After walking through your business case and demonstrating AI’s ability to supercharge CRM, challenge members of the team to do an on-the-spot pitch as though they needed to convince the company to try the technology out. Offer a real prize for the rep who delivers the most convincing pitch, and maybe add bonus points for those who would characterise themselves as uneasy or doubtful about AI’s abilities. It’s a useful technique to help the team get comfortable with the benefits of AI features in their CRM and can turn sceptics into fans.
Getting fully comfortable with a new team member can take time. But when that new team member is AI, it’s worth putting effort into introducing and onboarding it with an awareness of your sales team’s potential reluctance and a creative approach to overcoming it.
How To Improve Customer Focus: 6 Tips and Strategies
In 2007, after delivering close to 1 billion DVDs into customers’ mailboxes, Netflix realised its customers would prefer something different — inexpensive, simple-to-access entertainment they could watch on demand. Netflix recognised it needed to be more customer focused, even when it meant disrupting its own business model. What is customer focus? Obsessive knowledge of both what your customers need, and how to deliver it.For Netflix, it was a smart move. The company’s video streaming service not only proved to be hugely popular, it also changed how we consume television and movies altogether. Rival DVD rental business Blockbuster failed to adapt to meet the changing market. The rest is history.In an era of changing customer expectations and increased market competition, it’s more important than ever for businesses to have razor-sharp customer focus.What is customer focus?Customer-focused businesses are built around customers’ needs. Becoming one involves concentrating on how every interaction helps the customer, rather than how it helps your business.Putting customers at the heart of everything you do as a business places you in a better position to build relationships, help customers to achieve their goals, and increase customer satisfaction (all key benefits of a robust CRM).Yet many companies are falling at the first hurdle, as they fail to understand customers’ needs and expectations, or to adapt to their actions and behaviours.According to LIKE.TG’s “State of the Connected Customer” report, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, but only 51% believe companies generally do. Similarly, 62% of customers expect companies to adapt based on their actions and behaviours, but just 47% believe companies generally do.What are some examples of a customer-focused organisation?Fast food giant McDonald’s is known for listening to what customers want and responding accordingly. The restaurant chain introduced an all-day breakfast after feedback on social media and through online surveys suggested widespread interest in breakfast items all day. The company has continued to let a customer-focused mindset guide in-store innovation, rolling out easy-order kiosks to reduce waiting time, and partnering with delivery service Uber Eats.Dollar Shave Club is another company that turned a simple insight — consumers found buying razors expensive and a hassle — into a clever business idea. Subscribers of the service receive razors on a regular basis for a set monthly fee. The company launched in 2011, receiving a major boost in 2012 when a YouTube video starring co-founder Michael Dubin went viral. Unilever has since acquired it in a deal reported to be worth $1 billion.Even small ideas can make a big difference. When designers at GE Healthcare realised that children were terrified of the company’s magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems — with as many as 80% needing sedation before a scan — they set out to make them less frightening.Unable to redesign the multimillion-dollar machines, they focused on the experience, transforming the MRI suite into a kids’ adventure story. They applied colourful decals to the surfaces of the machine, and machine operators were given a script to lead their patients through the adventure. In one version, the MRI is a pirate ship. In another, the MRI is a spaceship transporting the patient into space. Since the redesign, the number of children needing sedation has fallen dramatically and patient satisfaction scores have increased to 90%.How do you build a customer-focused culture?To build a truly customer-focused culture, you first need to ensure you understand your customers and their needs. This involves collecting disconnected sources of customer data into a single, 360-degree view of your customer and, of course, being able to put that data into action to deliver better experiences.These six tips will get you started:1. Listen to your customers2. Make space for ideas3. Break down internal barriers4. Unlock your data5. Appoint a customer-focused advocate6. Create opportunities for learning1. Listen to your customersTo really get to know your customers, put yourself in their shoes and ask:What are their needs?What’s driving their decision-making?’What are their goals?What are they feeling?For example, knowing that a customer’s primary goal is to save time at work and spend more time with family can help you find them the right solution.Enabling a sense of customer empathy. Take a walk in your customers’ shoes to help you gain a new perspective on aspects of your business you’re not close to. For example, you may believe focusing on a product’s high-tech specifications is the best way for a sales representative to seal a deal. But customers may be more interested in hearing how it will help make their life easier.Although sales and customer service staff are on the front line dealing with customers, improved customer focus should be a company-wide priority.Create opportunities for non-customer-facing staff across the business – from the CEO down – to spend time with customers or handle service calls to learn from customers firsthand. Gather and analyse data — such as web analytics, attrition rates, and product use patterns — to gain insight, and invite customers to provide feedback.Surveys are a great way to find out what your customers really think about your business. Or set up a customer advisory board to meet several times a year and discuss industry trends, business priorities, and strategy. Share results of customer feedback throughout your business.Social listening — monitoring what’s said about your brand online — can also be a useful tool for building a customer-focused mindset. Look for direct mentions of your company or products on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media, andtry these strategies for social listening.Check for direct mentions and hashtags featuring your brand and products. Don’t forget common misspellings. You know how to spell your company or product name, but customers may not.Monitor the hashtags your customers use. The terms you use may not reflect how your customers discuss your company or industry. Follow thought leaders, industry influencers, or companies who represent your ideal customer. Track the hashtags they use.Track competitors’ activity. Do you know what customers are asking your rivals? If the same questions keep coming up, consider whether you should address them in your own blog or marketing content.Ask your audience for feedback. Want to know something specific? Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all have polling tools. Or, simply ask your followers open-ended questions.2. Make space for ideasAccording to the “State of the Connected Customer” research, 62% of customers now expect companies to adapt based on their actions and behaviours. This increases to 67% among Millennials and Generation Z.Many businesses have traditionally left new ideas to a select group, but great ideas can come from anywhere. In fact, organisations including Unilever, Ikea, and Lego now actively involve customers in problem-solving and new product development through co-creation platforms and initiatives.As organisational consultant Simon Sinek said, “The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.”3. Break down internal barriersSilos, swim lanes, bubbles. Organisational experts may use different terms, but the core problem is the same: Customer data lives in multiple systems owned by different departments, which leads customers to have a disconnected experience when dealing with your business.While 78% of customers say they expect consistent interactions across departments, their expectations are falling short: 59% said it typically feels as though they’re communicating with separate departments, not one unified organisation. About two-thirds (66%) of customers said they often have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives.Disjointed data is a significant barrier to creating the more valuable, personalised experiences customers are looking for from businesses these days.Breaking down silos is easier said than done. But to be truly customer-focused, businesses need to work toward building a complete 360-degree customer view. In doing so, they will be able to deliver unified cross-channel customer engagement.4. Unlock your dataTechnologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) raise the bar for business. Many consumers and business buyers are prepared to pay a premium for differentiated, first-to-market products and services, putting businesses under pressure to get ahead.Seventy-five percent of customers expect companies to use new technologies to create better experiences. A similar proportion (74%) expect companies to use existing technologies in new ways to create better experiences.This might mean using a customer’s browsing and purchasing history to make personalised recommendations. Or sending push notifications to a customer’s phone offering a discount on products they’ve browsed. It could also mean using chatbots to collect and qualify information so agents have more time to spend solving customers’ problems.5. Appoint a customer-focused advocateCustomer focus can get lost in the day-to-day business of, well, running a business. That’s why appointing a chief customer officer (CCO) is a great idea.The CCO’s role is to be the voice of the customer and ensure that customer focus is maintained throughout your organisation. They use data and research to champion customers’ needs, help guide the design of products and processes, and identify where teams need to improve their customer focus skills.They also ensure that having a strong customer focus results in tangible benefits to your business, including increased customer satisfaction, less customer churn, and greater revenue.6. Create opportunities for learningAlthough building a customer-focused culture isn’t something you do overnight, implementing these strategies will set you on the path for success.Keep employees updated on progress, invite their ideas and feedback, and provide access to resources such as LIKE.TG Trailhead training modules to help them develop customer-focus skills. Options are many, including the basics of customer journeys and improving customer service agents’ communication skills.Ultimately, by creating a culture where customers’ needs are at the heart of every interaction, businesses create a compelling offer for customers and a significant competitive advantage. But there is another reason businesses should make customer focus a priority.Technologies are disrupting whole industries at an unprecedented pace. Understand what your customer needs to anticipate disruption, or even drive it. As history has repeatedly shown, it’s better to disrupt yourself than drag your heels while someone does it to you. Just ask Blockbuster.
7 Winning Steps for Effective Objection Handling
I’ve led teams of over 100 employees through recessions, corporate pullbacks, and market turmoil. As you can imagine, selling was a struggle through all of it. We learned very quickly that the biggest obstacle to closing new business isn’t the objections themselves, it’s how the team manages the objections.The key to effective objection handling is using a question-based framework that puts the prospect at ease. When done tactfully, the prospect will come to their own conclusion that moving forward is the best decision to make. I’ll walk you through all the steps to managing common objections, including diving deeper with a simple questioning framework, and following objections with gratitude and empathy.First, let’s tackle a few basics:What is objection handling?Objection handling is how a seller addresses a prospect’s concerns about purchasing a product or service during the sales process, often related to timing, price, or stakeholder buy-in. We commonly think of objections surfacing after the sales pitch, but they can happen as early as a cold call and as late in the process as contract negotiations.Why is objection handling important?Without objection handling, deal opportunities (and, ultimately, revenue) would disappear at the first mention of a concern or problem. When reps are trained to handle objections successfully, it’s more likely that deals will continue to move through the pipeline and close.It’s also critical for building trust and long-term relationships: “An objection shows that the prospect is not ready to buy and you need to build more trust,” sales coach Niraj Kapur said.Successful objection handling addresses their fears and concerns, creating loyalty that can lead to multiple sales.What are the main types of objections?While customers may object for many reasons, here are the most common ones:Limited resources: “We don’t have budget for this.”Insufficient buy-in from stakeholders: “I need to check with a decision maker.”Competitor: “Another company has a better solution.”Redundancy: “We already have a solution in place for this.”Bad timing: “This isn’t a priority right now.”The reality is that when prospects give you an objection near the close, the first objection is usually a superficial objection with other potential underlying concerns. The mistake many reps make is then trying to handle what they believe to be the objection and then getting hit with multiple other objections following it, leading to increased sales resistance.Get articles selected just for you, in your inboxSign up now7 steps to perfect objection handlingThe steps below work for all of the common objections. I’ve used them for years, and they always deliver. Start by uncovering key motivations and hurdles for your prospect, then dive deeper with the right questions to uncover their “why.” Pair this with gratitude and empathy to show you’re committed to finding a way forward. When you know their unique problem or need, you can deliver a solution that works and overcome the objection.Here’s how it plays out:Step 1: Run an effective discovery process before closing objections ariseBefore you even get to the demo or ask for their business, spend time on strong, thoughtful discovery that will set you up with a virtually objection-less close. Even if you do get objections at the end, you are now armed with intel that you can use to manage them.It’s important to utilise a framework because it becomes a “cheat code” to close at the end. I use my P.O.W.E.R.F.U.L. framework to guide this, outlined below. Dive deeper into your prospect conversations by asking about:P – Pain. Is it so deep that they have to take action immediately? Or maybe it’s latent pain, meaning they know the pain is there, but they’re not thinking about it. Ask the right questions to get them to level 10+ pain.O – Opportunity costs. What are the opportunity costs? Let’s say they don’t take action for a year — what would the implications be?W – Wants. What company-related wants does your prospect have and how do these tie into business goals? Maybe the CEO wants to be in the INC. 5000 or triple the size of the company. Uncover these, so you can tie your solution to those goals.E – Executive-level influence. Who are the decision-makers? Know who is in the buying process, who the stakeholders are, what’s important for their level of clout and influence, and what they really want.R – Resources. Who controls the budget? That person can change the budget in your favour if they see the value of your solution.F – Fear of failure. Does your prospect fear that their current solution will lead to failure? Meaning, if they do absolutely nothing (status quo), do they believe they will be in trouble?U – Unequivocal trust. What does the prospect need in order to trust you and your solution? How do you provide value and service to earn that trust? This is important because at the heart of any sale or relationship is trust. If there is no trust, deals stall and relationships stagnate.L – Little things. Are you letting little things distract you from securing executive buy-in? A lot of salespeople get caught up in the specifics like, “We have this feature. We could automate this,” and so on, but execs might not be impressed by these. How do you show value and impact instead?Now with a baseline discovery framework, you’ll follow the rest of the sales process to the point of asking for the business. That’s when the closing objections start coming. Use the remaining steps to overcome them.Step 2: When objections arise, thank your prospectAn objection is better than a flat “No,” so when you get one, reply with a “Thank you.” This acknowledges the prospect’s concerns, which builds trust and rapport, while opening the door to additional conversation about their needs and pain points. Keep it simple, like: “I really appreciate you sharing that.”Step 3: Empathise to put your prospect at easeSay things that validate their objection, like: “I hear this a lot. I’m sorry you feel that way. It sounds like this has been very frustrating,” or “I hear what you’re saying and I think I can help.” By empathising with the customer, they’re more likely to open up and share information that can help you frame a valuable solution.Step 4: Ask open-ended questions to uncover the root cause of the objectionIf you’ve successfully executed steps 2 and 3, the prospect should feel more at ease and you want to now take time to uncover what’s really going on. Don’t ask yes/no questions — you want the prospect to share as much information as possible, and one-word answers don’t give you much to work with. Ask open-ended questions that will help you understand what’s on their mind, and use what you learned in step 1 to guide your questioning.For example, if the objection was “I can’t get approval on this,” you might ask, “When you say ‘I can’t get approval on this’…what do you mean, specifically?” Next, you want to make sure that once you overcome this specific objection that they do not come back and hit you with another objection, forcing you to go back and forth with them. This can be as simple as “Aside from X concern, is there anything on your mind that’s holding you back from being less than 100% certain this is the exact solution your company needs?”This is where you want to spend the majority of your time. Imagine the objection is an onion and your questions are like a knife that is peeling the layers back to show you the core of the onion.Once you feel that you truly understand what’s on their mind, head to the next step.Step 5: Urge the prospect to tell you what they like about your productYes, you read that correctly. You’re going to re-clarify the value, but you’re going to have the prospect do it. It goes like this: “Remind me again: What did you like most about our solution?” That’s it. Stop talking. Once they start telling you what they like, it will help reframe their mind. And you’ll see if you’ve done a good job on the front end articulating the value your product or solution offers and how it aligns to what you uncovered in your discovery phase.Step 6: Tie it all togetherFill in the blanks and connect the dots. If they forgot something that they liked but noted earlier, bring it back up. Reiterate some of your key talking points. Show them how your product will address pain points articulated in step 4, or get them to their desired result.Step 7: Back your claims up with proof and customer referencesClaiming your product is the perfect solution is one thing, but backing your statements in step 6 with industry research, customer references, social proof, or case studies is more effective. The more tailored these are to the needs of your prospect, the better. Show them that your product will actually work for their use case and show them why their objection should not exist.Improve your objection handling todaySuccessful objection handling is easier said than done. But at the end of the day, it’s about putting the customer first. Take it from Dini Metha, a former chief revenue officer with 15 years of experience: “Be a person before being a salesperson.” In other words, focus on making a genuine connection. That wins out every time.
3 Service Investments To Help You Thrive In an Uncertain Economy
Trying to figure out how to guide your business through an uncertain economy? Start by investing in customer support.
Macroeconomic conditions like inflation, supply chain challenges, labour shortages, and rapid changes across industries have all disrupted business as we know it. How can you keep up as the global landscape constantly changes? The answer is to invest in customer support.
When your team has an efficient platform — not just a mashup of different tools acquired over the years — they can focus on delivering empathetic, effective customer service.
By going with one comprehensive and connected platform, you can eliminate spending on mix-and-match products. The experience can be streamlined for both your employees and customers. When it comes to investing in customer service, you have to provide your team with the right tools.
As the CMO of Service Cloud, I was excited to sit down with Amy Weaver, LIKE.TG’s president and CFO, at Dreamforce 2022 for the CFO Talk: The Value Customer Service Brings to Your Business, where she gave sound advice to leaders navigating their teams during these uncertain times.
Right from the start, Weaver said, “There is this idea that CFOs are looking to cut costs and that’s not always true. I am really looking for just three things right now: growth, cost-savings, and efficiency.”
Since Dreamforce, I’ve had time to reflect upon my discussion with her. Here are three ways that investing in the right tools and the right actions can help you weather economic uncertainty.
1. Focus on efficiency in your contact centre
As you invest in customer support, one of the first things to consider — especially during an unpredictable economy — is how to create efficiency. The challenge is to become more efficient while continuing to deliver seamless and connected experiences.
When everyone is talking about saving on costs, you can drive efficiency and productivity with things like automation and AI.
“Efficiency has never been more important,” Weaver said. “Literally, every conversation I’ve had with a CFO in the last 6 months has been about driving efficiencies, especially when you’re in uncertain times.”
Companies are facing two situations: they’re either trying to moderate headcount or they’re trying to hire in an unpredictable job market. Both lead to the need for maximum efficiency.
To work efficiently service professionals need visibility into the entire customer journey — all in one place. With this clarity, you can automate repetitive tasks and remove inefficient workflows. You can also create the right workflows once, and deploy them across every need your agents and others across your organisation have.
For example, support engineers who don’t have the right technology to do their job aren’t productive or efficient in their roles. As a leader, if you’re leaving contact centre agents to hunt for information like order numbers and return policies, this can lead to a poor employee experience. These problems are solved by deploying technology that has all their tasks, communication, and collaboration in one place. Automation helped us save 75,000 employee hours on repetitive tasks last year, which enabled our teams to focus on what matters most – our customers.
It’s never been more relevant to enable digital transformation for service teams and the support experience. With the right platform, you can increase the productivity of contact centre agents, managers, support engineers, and frontline workers by giving them all the information they need when they need it, to deliver a personalised customer experience.
And we all know that when your technology investments make your customer service team’s lives easier, your customers’ lives are easier too. This is the magic of efficiency.
2. Empathy and kindness are wise economical investments, too
Being empathetic can help you retain your employees, fostering an attitude that leads to repeat customers through heartfelt customer service. You can invest in customer support by leading with empathy.
During these times, it’s more important than ever to include compassion in your management toolkit. Empathy for your team bridges the gap in trust and transparency between service teams and the customer.
Contact centre agents are on the front lines all day with customers, both the good and the bad. So, as a leader, providing ongoing training and support to your agents improves and builds a comfortable and trusted working environment, and creates an open culture of communication.
“Going back to service and looking at the uncertainty we have right now in the economy,” Weaver said, “we have to shift to look at how we are serving our customers, our employees, and how we are leading as a company. We have to lead with kindness.”
Her view is that this allows teams to further their careers for success because they know that their managers truly want to see them succeed.
In LIKE.TG’s Fifth Edition State of Service report, we talked to more than 8,000 decision-makers, contact centre agents, and customer service professionals. We found that connection and empathy are still at the heart of great service.
To manage what comes next, you need to invest in customer support by focusing on the employee experience. This means not only equipping them with comprehensive technology, but also focusing on your team’s well-being and balance, and the right tools needed to do the job efficiently. It’s a package deal.
3. Invest in customer support with the proper tech
When times change, we often re-evaluate our technology, finding ways to cut costs. But what we’ve found is that investing in technology that will carry you through uncertain times can help you future-proof your business.
One thing that Amy said really stood out to me. By taking the time to understand each team member’s skill set, the support channels, and the tools they use to perform their duties, you can truly understand what would make their life easier.
By understanding what your team needs, you can focus on how they can increase productivity and efficiency. It’s not about cutting costs, it’s about finding the right tool for the job.
When it comes to customer support, this means communication, collaboration, relevant and real-time data, which leads to faster resolution and a better customer experience.
You can do this through a connected service platform that can quickly and efficiently handle any customer interaction, from the contact centre to the field. We found that 80% of service pros say consolidating platforms and vendors drives efficiency and reduces risk. Making the right customer service investment means growth for your team and your customers.
The key takeaway is that you can invest in customer support by investing in your team — and a comprehensive platform that will put your customers first.
Doing this will equip your team with real-time data, automated intelligent workflows, and personalised interactions with customers. And you’ll build a future with cost savings in mind, while you deliver quality of service at scale.
We encourage you to listen to your team’s needs and ask them what they need to succeed. If the goal is to do more with less, find the right tool to do just that. Efficiency means scaling customer support by investing in your team, and the tools that they use, while setting your sights on the future by leaning into change.
This strategy will help you set your team up for success — no matter what comes your way. Automation takes care of the easy stuff for your agents. Intelligence lets you stay one (or many) steps ahead while being proactive about solving customers’ needs. Timely data ensures you have the right information, at the right time — all making for very happy customers.
And, as Amy would say, throughout it all, lead with kindness.
5 Ways to Measure Customer Experience And Drive Growth
Customer experience is not just a contributor to customer satisfaction. It is also a critical differentiator for businesses. Customer experience (CX) takes on new importance at a time when products are losing their unique selling points (USPs) like brand and price.
The LIKE.TG State of the Connected Customer report shows 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services.
To create those outstanding customer experiences, businesses must standardise customer service and evaluate customer feedback.
But first, why measure customer experience?
The advantages of measuring customer experience
Measuring customer experience lets you:
Define customer success standards and create consistent service quality
Use benchmarking to assess and improve performance and productivity
Uncover insights like competitive intelligence that can increase sales and enhance customer satisfaction
Easily identify new ways of increasing business efficiency
Use CX metrics to track return on investment (ROI) and set new goals
Measuring CX helps you learn what customers enjoy most about their experience and what needs to be improved.
How can you measure customer experience effectively?
Here are five ways to measure your CX to increase business efficiency and reach your sales goals.
Monitor customer experience metrics
Use customer-focused metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Efforts Score (CES) and Average Resolution Time (ART).
Look out for scores like Net Promoter Score (NPS), which let you know how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to someone they know. Similarly, Customer Effort Score (CES) can help you get a clear picture of how your customers feel about your business, based on their experience.
Too many numbers? An integrated platform, like the LIKE.TG Customer 360, can help you collate customer satisfaction data from different sources and create relevant custom metrics in seconds.
Collect direct responses from customers
A powerful way to measure your CX is to seek customer feedback with well-designed surveys, questionnaires, and polls. This will give you insight into their pain points and challenges.You can then use this feedback to identify inefficiencies across touchpoints and channels.
Analyse customer churn
It’s a reality for any business that you will sometimes see customers leave. If you can find out why customers have stopped using your services, it can help improve sales and service delivery processes. Customer data including average churn period, channels with maximum customer turnover, and purchase categories that see higher than average churn, can be revealing. Using an integrated service CRM will ensure all your teams can access insights from the CX data.
Study trends in support ticket volume
Customer support is an important part of the customer experience. To increase effectiveness, you can leverage support tickets to identify recurring issues, highlight them to respective teams, and smoothen customer journeys .This helps increase business efficiency and drive customer delight. For instance, if data from Service Cloud shows long wait times are undermining customer experience, you can invest in automated responses for common questions. You can also introduce a self-service portal. These portals can offer FAQs and ‘how-to’ videos or tutorials in the customer’s preferred language.
Map social media sentiment
Tracking customer sentiment on social media is a powerful way to strengthen your CX measurement framework. You can measure sentiment by monitoring brand mentions on social networks and analysing the words used to talk about the company. Identifying positive or negative words, following relevant hashtags, or tracking keywords to monitor your online brand perception are some effective methods. By following conversations related to your brand as well as your competitors, you can stay ahead of the curve in understanding and forecasting your CX score.
Use LIKE.TG Service Cloud to create delightful and cost-effective customer experiences
With Service Cloud, businesses can resolve issues quickly across any channel and provide connected, personalised experiences. Service Cloud helps you access intelligent, actionable data that can enhance customer experiences, reduce contact centre costs, and boost agent productivity.
The end result? Complete visibility into every customer interaction, standardised customer service and a reduction in overall cost.
Join us at LIKE.TG World Tour Essentials Asia and learn how LIKE.TG can help accelerate growth, drive productivity unite teams around a shared view of your customer. Register now
This post originally appeared on the India version of the LIKE.TG blog.
What ‘Real-Time Marketing’ Means? And How Can it Wow Your Customers?
Marketers know it’s important to reach customers in “real time.” But the phrase “real time” means different things to different people. We take a look at what that really means.
If you’re like most marketers, you’ve been hearing the term “real-time marketing” a lot lately. And you’ve probably been wondering, what is real-time marketing? Are we delivering content in seconds? Milliseconds? Even faster?
It can sound like marketers need to live in the world of the Oscar winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once. But that’s not necessarily the case. What matters is that you reach your customers when they need to be reached, with the right experience. Real-time marketing doesn’t mean having all the answers all the time – it’s actually about giving customers what they need, when they need it.
What can a customer data platform do?
A customer data platform can help take your marketing team to the next level, while keeping cost efficiency in mind.
Let’s look at the concept of real-time marketing and show some ways leading brands use it to win customers.
What is the difference between real-time marketing and real-time data?
If you search for “real-time marketing” you’ll find a variety of definitions. They range from the vague (“systematically responding to your customers”) to the prescriptive (“focusing on customer feedback”). It seems that no-one can agree what it really means.
Let’s start with the difference between real-time data and real-time marketing. Real-time data is processed and available for use right after it’s captured. That’s milliseconds. For example, the GPS on your phone captures your location and recommends a driving route in real time.
But while it’s important to capture and process data quickly, it’s not always necessary to act on it right away. This is especially true in marketing, when the customer drives the journey. Real-time does not have to mean right now. It’s delivering the information when the end user needs it. That could be seconds or even hours later.
Travel is a very time-sensitive business. If a customer’s digital profile isn’t accurate in real time, it can trigger unfortunate events. When a customer changes their seat or flight on an airline’s app or website, they expect it to show up in their profile right away. When they later go to a service counter, or call customer care, they expect — quite reasonably — that the service agent will be up to date. On the other hand, the customer is probably not expecting that the airline will send them irrelevant emails or offers.
This example shows us the difference between real-time data and real-time marketing. Real-time systems should update customers’ profiles right away. On the other hand, real-time marketing should happen at whatever speed is the right one for the customer — whether that’s today, in five minutes, or next week.
There are implications for the marketers’ back-end data processing systems and resource requirements.
When the customer is on the website or app, they expect their actions to be processed in milliseconds. But there’s no reason the contact centre can’t be updated in seconds and the email system within minutes.
Managing response rate requirements can lower costs and complexity, as long as this doesn’t impact the customer experience.
What do marketers mean when they say “real-time”?
On most occasions, when marketers say real-time, what they often mean is right-time. It means delivering the right data at the right time, to the right systems, to better connect with customers.
Right-time is doing what is needed to make each moment count for the customer
Real-time is collecting and processing data with no delay
The reason to make this important distinction is there can be major technical and organisational costs to imposing real-time requirements on the marketing team. Some teams have resources to handle it and some don’t.
It’s more important to make strategic investments into the systems that need to be real time — for example, your personalisation platform and customer data platform (CDP) — and understand what’s required elsewhere.
How can you set your real-time data priorities? It helps to remember that marketing has two basic modes:
Respond: You’re reacting to customers when they’re already engaged. They’re on your website, in your app, or visiting you in your store.
Inspire: You’re trying to get the attention of customers and prospects when they may not be thinking about you. You send emails with offers, or perhaps show ads on Facebook and Instagram, etc.
In most cases, it’s the ‘Respond’ mode that requires real-time handling of data. On the other hand, most ‘Inspire’ activities are pre-planned and benefit from complete and curated data. Of course, that data needs to be up to date, but it doesn’t necessarily need the lightning-fast response times of real-time data management.
In some cases, real-time responses can be counterproductive. Take an abandoned cart email. Not many of us would react calmly to a reminder email — or, even worse, a text message — a few milliseconds after we decided to leave. That’s what we mean when we talk about real-time marketing. Get the timing right, and you could attract a new customer. Get it wrong, and you might turn them away permanently.
What can you do with a CDP using real-time data?
When you’re making decisions based on real-time data, you’re able to respond to customers in ways that make sense to them. Upgrading your customer data platform to one built on real-time data can help make sure that you have the answers your customers want — when they want them.
Doing this not only means happier customers, but it also improves your bottom line in a cost-efficient manner, too.
For example, a customer might make a purchase on an e-commerce website that puts them into a high-value segment. The segment change can trigger — right away — that person’s entry into a journey tailored to high-value customers. You can then target them with the right ad the next time they’re scrolling through Instagram.
Recently, we announced Data Cloud, our CDP that uses real-time data to make real-time marketing easier for companies. Making the most of real-time data can help you improve customer journeys.
Anyone considering a CDP to support real-time data management should ask how well it will support their “right-time” requirements. Just having parts of the customer journey happen in real time may not be enough. For example:
First-party data: Many enterprises already have a trove of first-party data, and it should be easy to make use of it in real time with your CDP.
Data actions: Marketers have different ways to communicate with customers, and these different channels need to receive rapid signals from the real-time CDP.
Partnerships: Reliable and easy-to-use integrations with key partners also help eliminate friction in the data transfer process. For example, we recently announced integrations with Snowflake, Amazon SageMaker, Microsoft Azure, and others on the AppExchange.
Any confusion about what is and isn’t real-time fades in importance when we pose a better question: What does the customer really need from us right now?
This post originally appeared on the U.S. version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Infographic: Your Guide to Selling Smarter, Not Harder
The most successful sales people are always looking for ways to learn. Best practices in selling are always evolving, and with advancements in technology accelerating, there is always something new on the horizon.
Rapidly developing technology also means that innovation will become an important process for sellers. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, it’s vital tomake time for innovation.
As Vernon Cheo, Regional Vice President of Sales at LIKE.TG, says, “innovation is driving the future of sales. For example, using AI to automate your processes today is more affordable, faster, and available to everyone. If you’re not applying AI to your organisation right now, you might find you get left behind.”
AI technology isn’t the only thing that is changing the way we work. Customer expectations are driving change too. More B2Ccustomers are buying onlinethan ever before, and most expect personalised offers every time. Eighty-seven percent of B2B buyers told us they expect sellers to act as trusted advisors, but only 61% said they actually trust sales reps.
And your company’s values matter. Eighty-eight percent of customers expect companies to clearly state their values, but only 50% think that actually happens.
An evolving sales landscape
All this adds up to a changing and challenging landscape for sales teams. But how can you stay on top of the latest thinking, make time for innovation, and satisfy your customers? We have gathered advice and insights from Trailblazers, industry experts and our own LIKE.TG specialists into our latest guide,Selling Smarter, Not Harder.
In the guide, you’ll find:
The deal makers — actions you can take today to prepare for the future of sales
The deal breakers — what are some old sales habits that have no place in modern selling?
The future of sales checklist — are you really ready for the future of sales?
Here’s just a sample of what you can expect to find in Selling Smarter Not Harder:
Accessibility help: Read this content
These 3 Apps Help Your Business Automate Processes, Save Costs, and Improve Employee Experience
In today’s economic landscape, organisations face the challenge of doing more with less. The need for efficiency and productivity has become a top priority for businesses.
As a result, many businesses are now focused on optimising their operations to meet these demands. The complexities of sales, service, and marketing have prompted businesses to improve cross-functional alignment, enhance data quality and accuracy, and modernise technology.
According to theState of Marketing report, CMOs have identified the need to continually innovate to remain competitive, with 91% stating this as a priority. Additionally, 70% of marketers who invested in process/workflow automation view this as a long-term strategy shift.
By leveraging apps such as Slack, Mulesoft, and Tableau all within theLIKE.TG Customer 360, businesses will be better positioned to drive growth and improve both employee and customer experience.
Build your Digital HQ with Slack
Building a Digital HQ withSlackcan transform the way teams collaborate. It’s more than just a platform for communication — it’s a platform where businesses can streamline their operations and increase productivity.
The IDC Marketscape Reporthas positioned Slack as one of the leaders in worldwide collaboration and community applications. This is due to its easy integration of apps within the Slack environment, making it popular among developers. The platform’s low-to-no-code interface is also user friendly, allowing anyone to create custom workflows that automate routine tasks and improve efficiency.
AtAureus Academy, in addition to facilitating daily collaboration between departments, Slack is used to motivate employees and celebrate their achievements. By recognising employee contributions and successes, Aureus Academy creates a positive work culture and increases employee engagement.
Another organisation that has leveraged the power of Slack isIBM. With 3,500 apps integrated and 3,400Slack workflowscreated every month, the company has significantly improved its productivity and streamlined its processes. By automating routine tasks and enabling real-time collaboration, IBM has achieved faster time-to-market for new solutions and a more agile workforce.
With Slack, both Aureus Academy and IBM have created a more connected and productive workforce. This enables employees to work together in real time to solve problems, make decisions, and drive growth. This not only helps to improve team dynamics but also has a positive impact on the overall performance of the organisation.
Put enterprise-level analytics in the hands of everyone with Tableau
Data analytics can help organisations make informed and effective decisions. A global survey conducted by LIKE.TG reveals that73% of business leadersrecognise that data reduces uncertainty and drives better decision-making.
When it comes to choosing a data analytics platform, ease of use is a top priority for many business users. They want a product that delivers clear business value and empowers non-technical users to perform advanced analytics without the need for IT support.LIKE.TG Tableauhas enabled this.
Named a leader in the2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms, Tableau is a powerful data visualisation and analytics tool that helps businesses gain valuable insights from their data. As part of LIKE.TG Customer 360, it allows every employee in your company to easily connect, visualise, and share data across the entire organisation.
TakeM1as an example. Tableau allows its business teams to analyse data on their own and access real-time insights without having to rely on data analysts for reports. This results in faster decision-making and more efficient use of data. In the long run, it improves productivity and frees up employees’ time to focus on more meaningful work.
With Tableau, businesses can make data-driven decisions and gain a competitive edge in today’s fast-paced business landscape.
Integrate data from anywhere with MuleSoft
Part of LIKE.TG Customer 360,MuleSoftis a powerful integration platform that helps businesses connect, integrate, and unlock data from any system. A leader in theGartner Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide (iPaaS), it uses the power of AI to deliver real-time insights and personalised experiences.
In the latestState of Service report, 79% of decision-makers say new technology solutions result in faster time-to-market. 77% of decision-makers who partner with IT say it helps the organisation save on software costs. This is the case forM1.
MuleSoft has been critical in enabling M1’s IT team to bring legacy technology and modern platforms together. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform integrates its backend systems and automates its business processes. As a result, MuleSoft helped the team to go to market 25% faster than originally planned and saw a significant reduction in operational costs.
With MuleSoft, companies can streamline their workflows, reduce manual effort, and make better use of their data, enabling them to make informed decisions and drive business success.
Slack, Tableau, and MuleSoft are three powerful tools that can work together within LIKE.TG Customer 360 to help businesses automate processes, save costs, and improve the employee experience. With these tools, businesses can go to market faster and ultimately improve their bottom line.
Learn more about LIKE.TG Customer 360 at World Tour Essentials Asia on 25th May.
3 Ways Generative AI Will Reshape Customer Service
Customer service organisations today are fighting an uphill battle. Service agents face record case volumes, and customers are frustrated by growing wait times. Often, to manage the case load, agents will simultaneously work on multiple customers’ issues at once while waiting for data from legacy systems to load.
After an agent closes a case, she may enter case notes, but these notes can get lost in the ether and other agents may end up problem-solving similar issues from scratch, not knowing their colleague had already solved it. Withnearly halfof customers citing poor service experiences as the main reason they switched brands last year, the pressure is on for companies to find a better way forward.
Recently, there has been a lot of buzz around ChatGPT, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by OpenAI. GPT and other generative AI models like Anthropic and Bard are built on pre-trained, large language models that help users create unique text, images, and other content from text-based prompts. Combined with LIKE.TG’s long standing expertise in AI, generative AI models will change the game for customer service, helping companies operate more efficiently, develop more empathetic responses to customer requests, and resolve cases faster.
Here is a glimpse into some of the ways generative AI could transform service.
What generative AI for service could look like
We’ve already seen the impact of AIin service. Nearly seven years ago, LIKE.TG launchedEinstein for Serviceto give agents AI-powered capabilities. These have included recommended next-best actions and responses to customer inquiries, as well as automating case summarisation.
Generative AI is about to take service operations to the next level of efficiency and personalisation.
With generative AI infused into Einstein 1 Service, we’ll have the ability to automatically generate personalised responses for agents to quickly email or message to customers. We’ll be able to train the AI across all the case notes ever written by every agent at the company to automatically generate drafts of knowledge articles for human review, drastically cutting the time to create knowledge and making it easier to keep articles up to date. The enhanced relevance and quality of knowledge across the company will makeself-serviceportals and chatbots more valuable, freeing human agents to spend more time deeply engaging on complex issues and building long-term customer relationships.
We will also see benefits infield servicewithgenerative AIfor both frontline service teams and customers. Frontline workers will save time in the field with automated reports. AI-generated guides will help new employees andcontractorsto onboard quickly and brush up on their skills with ongoing learning resources. Customers will be able to troubleshoot common issues on their own withknowledge base articles.
The current wave of generative models are very powerful, but in a small number of cases, they can generate biased and even harmful outputs, as well as made-up facts (called “hallucinations”). This is why keeping a human reviewer in the loop, whether it’s a service agent or knowledge expert, will be important for the foreseeable future.
Given the extensive opportunities and challenges related to generative AI, LIKE.TG recently published the five guidelines fortrusted generative AI development, andexplained the potential for generative AI in enterprise techand how to balance this transformative tech with the reality and risks.
Super-powered chatbots
Layering generative AI on top ofEinsteincapabilities will automate the creation of smarter, more personalisedchatbotresponses that can deeply understand, anticipate, and respond to customer issues. This will power better informed answers to nuanced customer queries, helping to increase first-time resolution rates. With generative AI tapping into customer resolution data to analyse conversation sentiment and patterns, service organisations will be able to drive continuous improvement, identify trends, and accelerate bot training and updates.
Auto-generate knowledge articles
Over time, we plan to use generative AI to draft knowledge articles not only based on case notes but also Slack conversations, messaging history, and data across Einstein 1 to accelerate agent case resolution and shift even more support cases to self-service experiences. This will alleviate pressure on call centres and agents.
Fast-track case swarming
We’re already seeing many service teams work more effectively withcase swarming, where agents bring in experts from across their organisation to help solve complex cases or larger incidents. Now imagine how much more efficiently they could work if the lessons from previous case swarms could be shared and more broadly applied. We will use generative AI to identify similar past cases; identify who in the organisation has the best, most relevant skills to address the issue; and recommend resolutions and customer communications to fast-track and even automate many aspects of the case swarm.
We are entering an exciting new era of AI which will completely reshape the field of customer service. Guided by LIKE.TG’s long history of ethical product development, organisations will be able to embrace the power of generative AI to supercharge productivity, accelerate case resolution, and deepen customer relationships with greater personalisation and relevance.
This post originally appeared on the US version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Data-Driven Marketing: How to Spend Less and Deliver More
Data-driven marketing can help businesses of all sizes drive engagement, maximise ROI and get the most out of their resources.
Using data to inform your marketing decisions also helps you avoid wasting your marketing budget on creating impressions that won’t convert. Ultimately, data-driven marketing means targeting the right audience at the right time with the right message.
But while data can be every business’s most valuable resource, today’s customer is becoming more and more unpredictable. According to the latest State of the Connected Customer report:
The average customer uses nine different channels when they communicate with businesses
68% of customers have bought a product in a new way over the last two years
71% of customers switched brands at least once in the past year
In other words, it’s becoming increasingly challenging for businesses of all sizes to truly know their customers. The ironic part? Seventy-three percent of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
To meet these evolving expectations, you need precise control of your data. However, turning data into actionable information can be a difficult process. This is your guide on how to use your data to create a better roadmap towards your customer — and deliver the experiences they deserve.
Let’s look at the concept of real-time marketing and show some ways leading brands use it to win customers.
What is data-driven marketing?
Data-driven marketing is a way to use customer information to craft personal messaging and deliver better customer experiences. By having the right insights, you can anticipate the needs of your customer and deliver the right messaging and offers at the right time.
For example, imagine that you run a dog grooming business. Your data shows that the customers in one area don’t have a lot of disposable income and are likely to be sensitive to price. Your marketing message for this area could be tailored to focus on cost as your differentiator.
Meanwhile, the residents in another part of town could have higher household incomes, and be more concerned with bespoke service for their furry friends. Your marketing message for this area could be tailored to focus on your award-winning service or eco-friendly products.
If you were to ignore the data you have on the relative income for each area, you’d probably struggle with engagement. But by using data to address your audience’s priorities, you’ll see higher click-through rates and more conversions. That’s the power of targeted data — and why so many businesses are now writing data-driven success stories.
The benefits of data-driven marketing
It’s important to let go of hunches and gut feelings when it comes to marketing today. By letting your data lead you to your customer, you’ll discover a range of benefits. Some of these include:
Targeting well-defined audience segments and offering tailored communications means a higher conversion rate. In fact, 72% of customers only engage with brands that offer personalised communications.
Improved customer experience and trust. More than 60% of consumers are comfortable with companies using relevant personal information in a transparent and beneficial manner.
Increased ROI. A lower marketing spend and more personal engagement means that you can expect a better return on your investment, as well as increased lifetime customer value.
Improved campaign performance. Real-time campaign data allows you to keep up with customers’ evolving expectations.
5 tips for creating a data-driven marketing strategy for your growing business
1. Identify clear objectives for your data
Data is most effective when it’s powering a strategy. For example, you may want to use your data to drive ad impressions, increase your website conversion rate or lower your cost-per-click. Once you have clear goals in place, you’ll have a better understanding of how you can use your data to reach those goals.
But don’t just identify use cases — look at how you can create a more data-driven culture. According to Tableau research, 74% of employees say they’re more likely to stay with a company that provides them with the data skills they need.
2. Remove information silos and centralise your data
Without a single view of your customer, it can be hard to have the full picture of their needs. Centralising your data management will eliminate rogue data that could present an incorrect picture of your audience. Dismantling departmental silos and uniting disparate data storehouses can also improve trust in your organisation’s data. This lets your marketing team create more effective strategies based on reliable information, rather than assumptions.
3. Make sure that your channels match your audience
Your data will tell you where your audience likes to spend their time. Do they spend a lot of time on Instagram? What kind of ads do they respond to? Do they use self-service? Do they look at reviews?
Your data can help you look beyond marketing KPIs and get a more holistic view of your customer’s lifestyle. You can then adjust your strategy and offer an omnichannel experience to engage them more effectively.
4. Place ads more efficiently and reduce your marketing spend
Automation forprogrammatic marketing and ad buying can help maximise your marketing spend. By using granular data to automatically buy and sell digital ad space, you can create hyper-targeted ad campaigns that have high impact and provide maximum ROI.
5. Leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to personalise individual channel experiences.
AI is not just the future — it’s already here. In fact, the State of Marketing report shows that more than 62% of marketing organisations are already using AI. Additionally, 70% of high-performing marketing teams have a clearly defined AI strategy.
If you’re not already using AI, you may be asking your marketing team to do some unnecessary heavy lifting. You may also be using valuable marketing resources creating impressions that are unlikely to convert.
Build a toolkit for delivering better insights and turbocharging your marketing strategy
Once you have a good idea about how you want to use your data, you can make sure that you have the right tools for the job.
Tableau makes data visual, with customisable dashboards that allow you to view and share deep analytical insights. In order to act on those insights, you can use Marketing Cloud to create personalised journeys and track campaigns. And if you want to skill up the workforce to learn new digital skills, then check out Trailhead, an on-demand learning platform where you can create personalised learning journeys.
To see more about how you can manage your data to connect with the customer, download the CRM Handbook. And to take Marketing Cloud for a spin, check out the demo.
Join us at LIKE.TG World Tour Essentials Asia and learn how LIKE.TG Customer 360 can help to unlock the value of your customer data. Register now
This post originally appeared on the U.K. version of the LIKE.TG blog.
How to Create a Winning Customer Journey Map
To succeed in business, it’s important to understand how your customers’ needs and behaviours are changing over time. A transactional relationship is not enough anymore — you need to build long-term, trusted relationships. One way to do that is toput yourself in your customers’ shoesand understand how they interact with your business.
That’s where a customer journey map helps. An integrated customer journey map plots the various stages a person goes through when buying from your company. It lets you better understand the customer experience (CX), and will reveal where improvements can be made.
So how can you create a customer journey map and use it to improve your customer experience? Let’s start at the beginning.
Jump to a section
What is a customer journey map?
What does a customer journey map include?
What are the benefits of using customer journey maps?
How do you create a customer journey map?
Types of customer journey maps
Customer journey map templates
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What is a customer journey map?
A customer journey map is a diagrammatic representation of a customer’s experience with your brand. It helps you understand the various touchpoints that customers have with your brand. It also allows you to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
Of course, not every customer experience is the same. Your customer journey map will show a representative journey relevant to a group of customers with similar attributes. That means you may decide to create several maps if you have significantly different audience groups.
Once you have mapped your customer journey, you can analyse it for potential problems.
Start mapping the customer journey today with our free templates.
Get the templates
What does a customer journey map include?
Touchpoints– Channels and interfaces where the customer interacts with your business.
Moments of truth– High-impact experiences that define how customers perceive and relate to your brand.
Potential customer feelings– Alignment of customer experiences at every stage to the most likely customer sentiment.
A customer journey map typically includes a timeline of events that reflects the customer’s experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle. This timeline can include events such as:
The customer’s first visit to your website
Social media engagement
Marketing and sales communications
Their first purchase — online or in store
Product delivery
Post-purchase support
Interactions with customer service
When analysing your customer journey, make sure that you fine-tune it by researching and interacting with your target audiences. This ensures that the customer journey map accurately reflects their actual experience and needs, letting you create more relevant and personalised customer experiences. To achieve this, you need to combine first-party customer data and analysis with customer feedback and target audience research.
What are the benefits of using customer journey maps?
When designed using thorough research and data-led insights, a customer journey map is a powerful tool that helps businesses become more customer focused.
Here are some more benefits of using customer journey maps:
Enhances resilience and business agility
Understanding the customer experience and identifying pain points helps you develop strategies to build resilience in the face of unexpected challenges.
Customer journey mapping also helps identify the customer segments that are most impacted by disruptions like a changing economy. This helps you adjust your marketing and sales strategies to match.
Helps develop new products and boost sales
Even the most innovative products can’t help drive sales if they do not address customer needs. Customer-centric product development involves using customer feedback to create a product roadmap.
Mapping customer journeys helps you identify customer needs that are not being met by existing products or services, creating opportunities for new product development. It also enables businesses to prioritise product features and functionality based on their impact on the customer experience.
Improves customer experience and loyalty
Eighty-eight percent of customers agree that the experience a company provides isas important as its products and services.
Customer journey maps point to areas where customer experience can be improved, leading to increasedcustomer satisfaction and loyalty. For example, you can use your maps to compare the average time taken to resolve customer queries at different points of contact. This lets you identify where support can be improved and redesigned so that queries are addressed within consistent time frames across all touchpoints.
Helps understand evolving buyer behaviour
Mapping the customer journey allows you to track the behaviour of your customers at each touchpoint, providing valuable insights into how they interact with your brand.
Customer journey mapping is not set-and-forget. Continuous monitoring lets you identify changes in behaviour, preferences, priorities, and expectations.
Optimises the CX ecosystem
Customer journey mapping is critical for a high-on-ROI customer experience ecosystem. It lets you eliminate ineffective interaction points, break down information silos, and understand data irregularities. It also helps you increase employee accountability and assess ROI on future CX investments.
Improves customer engagement
By understanding the customer’s perspective at each touchpoint, you can create more relevant and personalised experiences that enhance customer engagement across channels.
How do you create a customer journey map?
Withsmart mapping tools, you can connect every interaction across email, mobile, advertising, and the web into a detailed, effective journey map.
Follow these steps to create your customer journey map:
Understand your goals
Align your customer journey map to your business goals to ensure valuable results for your organisation and your customers. For example, your goal in the current economic environment could be to identify touchpoints forintelligent automation, so you could reduce costs without impacting CX.
Conduct persona research
The journey belongs to the customer. Hence, it is vital to research persona-specific demographics and interests. It allows you to infer behaviour and patterns through the customer journey map.
Map customer touchpoints
Plotting various points of interaction in the customer journey involves tracking actions and their impact on customer behaviour. These activities could include online and offline ads,social media channels, website UI, or in-store interactions.
Map the current state
Wondering how to map the customer experience across the whole journey? Use data from anintegrated CRM platformto get insights into customer interactions, behaviours, preferences, and pain points. This helps businesses create more effective customer journey maps that accurately reflect the customer experience. It also reveals trends and patterns in customer behaviour that may not be immediately apparent, helping you identify areas of improvement. For example, data around cart abandonment rates lets you learn which stage of customer interaction needs maximum intervention to improve checkout rates.
Visualise your ideal future state
Once you have mapped the current state of the customer experience,define the ideal future state. This lets you direct customer journeys toward your goals. For example, if you aim to unlock greater sales, you may visualise an ideal future state where customer conversion increases by 5% across the top three touchpoints. To achieve this, you can implement different strategies such as optimising website design and streamlining checkout processes. The customer journey maps help measure the effectiveness of these strategies.
Types of customer journey maps
Eachcustomer journey mapserves a specific purpose and offers different insights. Choosing the right type will help you achieve your objectives more effectively.
A few of the most useful map types are:
Customer experience map:Lets you measure a range of factors, such as brand consistency, purchase convenience, and service efficacy. It allows you to identify your business’s weaknesses and strengths when offering a delightful customer experience.
Current state of the customer journey map:Beneficial for optimising operations across points of contact. It gives clear, visual insights into top-performing and least-performing touchpoints.
Future state of the customer journey map:Helps you lay the path for multiple teams regarding future performance. For example, it informs your marketing team about the type of digital assets they should build to support the ideal customer journey.
Empathy customer journey map:Understanding how customers feel, think, and act about your product, services, and brand is critical to business growth. This map lets you analyse customer sentiments at all engagement points and learn how and where you can make changes for maximum impact.
Device experience journey map:In a mobile-first environment, smooth UI and UX are critical to winning and keeping customers. What works on desktop might not work on mobile — a device-focused map lets you identify gaps and opportunities for each kind of device that your customers use.
Customer support journey map:Buyers increasingly associate customer support with the overall customer experience. This map is an effective tool for understanding the ease of access to customer support and the efficiency of your contact centre.
Path-to-purchase journey map:In an ideal environment, customers experience a smooth and quick path to purchase. This map lets you identify how your channels perform in this context, as well as opportunities for improvement.
Product discovery journey map:A smooth and consistent product discovery across touchpoints keeps a visiting customer engaged. Use this customer journey map for insights into the earliest interactions and experiences that shape a customer’s perception.
Customer journey map templates
In a digital-first customer environment, mapping integrated, complex customer journeys is time, resource, and effort-intensive. Effective customer journey management needs cross-functional collaboration as well as customer journey analytics and mapping tools.
Sounds complex? To ensure that you don’t have to start from scratch, you can use ourcustomer journey map templates— frameworks that help simplify the process and save you precious time.
What is a customer journey map template?
A customer journey map template is a pre-designed framework that outlines the key stages and touchpoints of a typical customer journey.
A handy tool with pre-built fields, it provides a starting point for you to create your own customer journey maps, allowing you to customise the template to your specific needs and target audience. Templates may vary in design and format but typically include sections for customer goals, pain points, emotions, and actions at each touchpoint.
A customer journey map template helps you:
Visualise end-to-end CX:In an omnichannel environment, designing an end-to-end customer journey map can be overwhelming. You might end up focusing too much on elements that offer little value while missing out on key factors. A template enables easier customer journey visualisation, ensuring you have all the parameters you need to picture the CX journey from start to finish.
Ensure a satisfying onboarding experience: The initial customer onboarding experience often defines if customers will stay with you in the long run. An effective customer journey map template ensures that you cover all the necessary steps in the onboarding journey, letting you optimise and enhance the customer experience at this crucial interaction.Unresolved customer pain points are the fastest way to lose business. Customer journey map templates provide structured frameworks that outline each step of the customer journey, making it easier for you to quickly identify areas of friction and implement solutions.
Understand different customer personas:Templates enable you to understand and analyse customers based on customer journey mapping goals. For example, a product discovery map template may quickly let you categorise customers into:
Review-led customers
Ad-driven customers
Brand content consumers
What does a sample customer journey map look like?
Here is an example of a customer journey map for a SaaS company, outlining the ideal customer journey for a new product:
Awareness:The customer becomes aware of the product through social media, online ads, or word-of-mouth recommendations.
Consideration:The customer explores the product’s features on your company’s website. They may look at product demos, customer reviews, and pricing information.
Purchase:The customer makes a purchase online, through a sales representative, or through a reseller.
Onboarding:The customer receives a welcome email or call and is guided through the setup process, including account creation, data import, and training.
Adoption:The customer starts using the product in their day-to-day business.
Optimisation:The customer discovers advanced features and integrations, receives ongoing training and support, and provides feedback to the company.
Renewal:The customer renews their subscription or upgrades to a higher tier, based on their evolving business needs and goals.
By mapping out this customer journey, the SaaS company can better understand the customer’s needs and pain points at each stage, and tailor their communication and support accordingly.
Customer journey mapping is becoming increasingly important for organisations looking to improve their overall business results. By identifying pain points and developing strategies for improvement, customer journey mapping is your golden ticket to winning and keeping customers, engaging more efficiently, and building lifelong trusted relationships.
Start mapping the customer journey today with our free templates.
Get the templates
World Tour Essentials Asia is Here!
Trailblazers from all over the region came together with local and global leaders to celebrate the latest in innovation, and to focus on the major drivers for business success this year — AI, data and CRM.
It was inspiring to gather so many industry leaders together, but if you weren’t able to attend, don’t worry. We have curated the highlights of the event for a virtual broadcast — join us onThursday 25 Mayat 10am (Singapore time) for a recap of the best sessions, including the keynote address, led by Sujith Abraham, LIKE.TG Senior Vice President and General Manager of ASEAN.
The future of business — AI + Data + CRM
Kicking off the event, the keynote address put laser focus on how artificial intelligence (AI), data and customer relationship management (CRM) will be the foundation of business in the years to come.
The power of AI to drive business growth is already being seen, and Generative AI is taking the world by storm. Frommarketingtosales, AI is becoming an important part of many businesses’ tech stack. It has the power to automate personalised service interactions, create hyper-targeted marketing messages, and accelerate your sales pipeline.
We recently announcedEinstein GPT— the world’s first generative AI for CRM. See it in action in an inspiring demo in the World Tour Essentials Asia keynote, andwatch the broadcastto see Clara Shih, EVP and GM, Service Cloud who outlined what Einstein GPT will bring to your business
We heard from Alison Olsson, Regional Vice President, who shared our new Customer Company Playbook, including how Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and more, can help any company become a customer company.
AI skills for the future
Amidst the discussions around the potential of AI, we also explored how ready the workforce is to use these innovations. We unveiled the results of our AI Digital Skills Survey, revealing that 72% of knowledge workers in Singapore are excited about the use of generative AI for their job. Yet, many are not equipped with the right skills, highlighting the need to accelerate the workforce’s digital readiness and aptitude for AI. Currently only 15% of employees in Singapore are using AI in their day-to-day role.
Upskilling will be the way forward to address the AI skills gap. In fact, nearly all (98%) of respondents in Singapore believe that businesses should prioritise digital skills development for their employees.
Sujith spoke to Poh Cheng Pang, Group Director, Business Technology Group at SkillsFuture Singapore, about the importance of lifelong learning, and the company’s vision for enhanced customer experiences.
Pang Poh Cheng, SkillsFuture Singapore + Sujith Abraham
Incredible Trailblazers
We took a look at how Formula 1 creates incredible fan experiences using LIKE.TG Customer 360. Using Data Cloud, a global organisation like F1 can deliver personalised content to each of its 500 million fans worldwide. Watch the demo and the mesmerising Formula 1 film in theWorld Tour Essentials Asia broadcast.
And we heard from Chia I Mun, APAC Commercial Excellence Lead at Johnson Johnson Vision, who shared how the company is improving customer engagement, the skills needed for success, and the metrics that Johnson Johnson Vision uses to measure success. Tune in for those words of wisdom in the keynote where I Mun speaks to Polly Sumner, Chief Adoption Officer, LIKE.TG.
Chia I Mun, Johnson Johnson Vision + Polly Sumner
Inspirational sessions
The virtual broadcast will also showcase many of the sessions from the live event. Here’s a breakdown of what you can look forward to:
Your Sales Playbook for Cost Efficient Growth
Eighty-two percent of sales reps say they’ve had to adapt quickly tonew ways of selling. Empowering your teams to sell smarter not harder, is top of mind, and we explore how features currently available in Sales Cloud help your teams maximise this digital first, automated CRM, powered by AI, to work more productively and reduce costs.
Choon Soon Gan, Head of Business Process at ShopBack, shared how Sales Cloud helps their business scale fast across the region and work more effectively and productively across teams.
Choon Soon Gan, ShopBack
How To Generate Lifelong Loyalty with Service
A loyal customer is a lucrative customer — 88% of customers say the experience a company provides isas important as its product or services— up from 80% in 2020.
To nurture the kinds of relationships that lead to customer loyalty, you need to provide a consistent experience across your channels — especially as83% of customersexpect to resolve complex problems through one person.
Clara Shih, EVP GM, Service Cloud demonstrated the power of Service Cloud when it comes to delivering excellent customer experiences that keep your customers coming back for more.
We were also joined by Shilash Sharma, Senior Manager, Business Digital Transformation at Anantara Vacation Club, who shared how they can scale at pace with customer growth, and drive loyalty through excellent service and personalised customer engagement.
Shilash Sharma, Anantara Vacation Club
Marketing Moments That Count: Maximise First-Party Data to Drive Conversions, Growth and Customer Loyalty
The latestState of Marketing reportcontained at least one wake-up moment — 75% of marketers say they still rely at least in part on third-party data.
With the ongoing changes to the way that platforms are handling third-party cookie data, it is becoming increasingly important that marketers have a robust first-party data strategy — something that only54% of marketing professionalshave done so far.
In this session, see how Marketing Cloud can help you achieve business growth and deliver impactful customer experiences using a first-party data strategy.
LIKE.TG experts guide you through the demos, and an extra special guest —Golden Hoodie winner Shibu Abraham, APAC Head, LIKE.TG Practice at UST, shares how businesses can leverage Marketing Cloud to get closer engagement with their customers.
Shibu Abraham, UST
Unlock Your Productivity With Slack and Generative AI
Slack is the engagement layer for Customer 360, powered by automation, knowledge sharing, and connection. It enables you to bring together your teams to boost performance with improved decision making and increase efficiency with automated workflows.
In this session Shweta Verma, Regional Vice President for Slack Sales, demonstrates how a new generative-AI-powered Slack will transform the way you work.
We spoke to Michael Brady, Group Director Operations atCebu Pacific Air, ASEAN winners of the Slack Award for Unlocking Productivity. Michael will reveal how Slack has empowered their business — saving time, improving customer experiences, and streamlining internal communications.
Michael Brady, Cebu Pacific Air
Stream it to believe it — World Tour Essentials Asia 2023.
Learn about
the apps the help you create a Customer 360 in your business
the platform that lets you innovate
how to leverage your data so you see and understand every customer
Tune in from anywhere and discover how the future of business is AI + Data + CRM with LIKE.TG Customer 360. Get inspired by Einstein GPT in our keynote, hear from industry experts, soak up demos, and tune in to Trailblazer stories as we invigorate you on your journey to become a Customer Company with the #1 CRM.
Experience the magic of Einstein GPT with live demos!
Register Nowfor the virtual broadcast of LIKE.TG World Tour Essentials Asia!
4 Account Management Skills for Sales Success
One of the most common questions I get asked as a coach is: What are the account management skills I need to keep my customers for as long as possible? The answer is simpler than most people expect: Learn how to hunt and farm.Traditionally, sales and account management has been divided into what psychotherapist Thom Hartmann calls the hunter mindset and the farmer mindset. The hunter mindset (sales) is characterised by an attention span that’s hyper focused for short bursts of time. This mindset helps sellers lock down deals quickly. The farmer mindset (account management) is marked by patience and consistency. Farmer types nurture relationships over the long term, bearing fruit in the form of upsells, cross-sells, and referrals.The most successful account managers bring together the best of both worlds. They keep clients happy while expanding the account to include new products. If you want to perfect this balance, I recommend honing four key skills: proactive service and support, collaborative problem-solving, stakeholder communication, and identifying account expansion opportunities.What is account management?Account management focuses on supporting customers after the close to make sure they’re satisfied with their new products or services. The best account management strategies emphasise building long-term relationships, which open the door to upsells and cross-sells, and generate additional revenue.Go beyond the close with the right account management skillsSuccessful account management is a balancing act, combining nimble decision-making, teamwork, and outside-the-box thinking. Here are the skills you need to make your account management top-notch:1. Be proactive, not reactiveToo often, account managers think of themselves as order processors or “maintainers” who come in after a sale, attending to customer concerns and putting out fires. This is important, of course, but it’s reactive. To build trust with your customer, be proactive about delivering solutions and solving problems. Keep an eye on their deal in your customer relationship management platform (CRM) as it moves toward a close. Look for signs of potential issues, like:Unanswered questions about product featuresConcerns about costLack of preparation for product training or onboarding supportIf you have a solid relationship with the seller who owns the deal, consider suggesting ways to address lingering concerns. If the seller doesn’t have time to address them, prepare materials you can give the customer as soon as the deal is done and handed off to the account management team.The gold mine here comes from farming. Don’t go chasing upsells or cross-sells right away. Earn the customer’s trust by putting their interests and success first. Once they see your commitment and a solid ROI, you can approach conversations around new or additional deals.2. Collaborate to improve account handoffsThe sales-to-account-management handoff is a critical moment in the customer experience. It’s a perfect opportunity to deliver on promises made during the sales process and set the tone for potential upsells and renewals.Instead of treating this as a priority, I see a lot of teams do the bare minimum. The account manager spins up a quick email introducing themself, offering to answer any questions about the deal. But this is so open-ended, it’s unhelpful. How does the customer know who to contact for product questions? Pricing questions? What about new deals?A better solution: The account manager schedules a meeting with all the point people the customer needs to know as they get up to speed on their new product or service. The list varies depending on the product and the customer’s needs, but generally includes someone from the product team, the sales rep, the account manager, and representatives from customer service and finance.The meeting should outline what happens as customer success takes over the account from sales, and who the primary contact is (you, the account manager). Introduce yourself as the customer’s point of contact, and then briefly introduce the stakeholders. Make it known that they’ll help with support, but all initial questions should flow through you. Then, review next steps, provide resources to help them get started, and leave time for questions.The goal: Make it clear the customer is supported by a team of experts that are ready and willing to help them succeed.3. Communicate like a trusted advisorAccording to LIKE.TG’s State of the Connected Customer Report, 74% of customers say communicating honestly and transparently is more important now than before the pandemic. Little wonder. In times of change, communication is the number-one way to build and maintain trust. That trust is what allows you to build loyalty and, when the time is right, secure upsells.There are two parts to honest and transparent communication. The first is proactive check-ins. A few days after the customer signs the deal, reach out to make sure there aren’t any outstanding questions from late in the sales process. Then, schedule a follow-up a few weeks out to ensure onboarding went well and the product is working as expected. What happens after that depends on customer needs and any updates you need to share. I suggest regular check-ins, but nothing more frequent than once a month — just to confirm that all is well with the product or service, and needs are being met. The exception: If a problem arises or you can’t follow through on a commitment, don’t wait for a check-in to let the client know. Be honest and upfront — then, offer a way forward.The second part involves responding to customer communication. To make sure you’re handling this in an effective and timely manner, create a system where you can rate the importance and urgency of different client needs, and triage accordingly. Set up a list of criteria to help you categorise incoming messages in four buckets: urgent and important, urgent, important, and standard/normal. Then, set response times for each one. At the very least, I recommend responding to urgent and important messages within 24 hours.For most account managers, it’s easiest to set up folders in your email client or CRM to keep client communication organised. If your CRM includes AI tools, I highly recommend using them to flag these automatically based on keywords that appear in incoming messages.Finally, be sure all your responses are underscored by empathy and understanding. Remember, you’re a trusted advisor, so live up to your reputation by being as helpful and supportive as possible.Get articles selected just for you, in your inboxSign up now4. Become an opportunity scoutThe three account management skills above are all about farming — building trust, rapport, and connection with the customer. When you have a strong, positive relationship (based on feedback noting satisfaction with the product/service and support), it’s time to tap into the hunter mindset.Think about upsells and product expansions as inevitable endpoints in the relationship. In other words, while you’re farming, be proactive about finding opportunities for upselling or expanding the account to other products or services.During periodic check-ins with the customer, ask questions to help you surface upsell opportunities. Gently frame these questions to show you’re keeping their needs and pain points in mind so they can stay successful.Here are a few examples:I’m so glad things are going well with our product. Do you have enough licences to last you through the end of the year? I know there’s a big end-of-year push for you, so I’m happy to fold in some more licences at a discount now so you don’t have to worry about it later.I saw on LinkedIn that you’re adding a new marketing division. Congrats! We just launched an email marketing tool that integrates with the platform you onboarded a few months ago. Any interest in a test run?I know you were looking at the next subscription tier for our product, but also noted some budget cuts. How about I give you an extended trial run for that upgraded tier to see if it helps boost productivity?When you get a bite, bring in stakeholders from the product and finance teams to share details. Offer to set up a demo call. Keep your solution top of mind with regular check-ins and free resources like ebooks, white papers, and trials. However you proceed, make sure your conversations are centred on the customer’s success. At the end of the day, all they care about is hitting their own goals.Ready the harvest, begin the huntAcquiring new customers is a costly endeavour. Keeping loyal customers often delivers higher ROI, but this depends on account managers who can harness both hunting and farming mindsets. Get ahead of potential problems, take time to plan an effective handoff, be hyper communicative, and jump on upsells and cross-sells when the moment is right. At every stage, make sure you’re squarely focused on the customer and their success. If you can manage that, you’re a lot more likely to retain those high-value customers, secure upsells, and boost your revenue.Adrian Davis, author of “Human-to-Human Selling: How to Sell Real and Lasting Value in an Increasingly Digital and Fast-Paced World,” contributed to this article.
Consumer Goods Data Will Help You Build Relationships Directly With Your Customers
For consumer goods (CG) companies, selling through retail partners will likely always play a major role in business strategy. But more and more CG companies are realising they need to build their own relationships with consumers. That’s because retailers are in a powerful position: they own your consumer data sets and can mine them to develop private-label offerings. And when that happens, thetrue differentiatorthat stops a shopper from choosing a competitor or store brand over yours? Personalisation — powered by consumer goods first-party data.
What, exactly, is first-party data? It’s the information a business collects directly from its customers — and owns. Here’s how consumer goods companies can collect it and gain value.
Start with a D2C strategy
D2C channels offer an opportunity to collect first-party data and use it to improve customer satisfaction and experience. There’s no doubt CG executives know how important this is. In fact,99% reportprioritising direct-to-consumer (D2C) initiatives. A D2C strategy is not merely about creating a new channel to sell products. It’s creating the infrastructure that will power intelligent decision-making for the business. Why? Because companies that have a direct relationship with consumers understand what shoppers want. Access to consumer goods first-party data can inform everything from product decisions to retailer relationships, and even unlock new consumer segments.
D2C channels provide opportunities for brands to offer more personalised experiences to consumers. However, only 43% of CG leaders are completely satisfied with their ability to leverage customer insights from retailers. That’s disappointing in an industry where access to end-consumer data helps accelerate innovation and time to market. What’s more, the data can fuel artificial intelligence efforts that help brands build personalisation, convenience and automation capabilities.
Still, D2C is just one way CG brands can build relationships with consumers. Their service centres and loyalty programs also help them collect data at both scale and a more granular level.
Let’s walk through setting the foundation to gain value from consumer goodsfirst-party data.
Get to know your end consumer
Health food companyKINDSnacks built meaningful relationships with loyal customers while uncovering new segments through a D2C ecommerce site. Their recipe for success? Use the new channel to learn what consumers want, then adapt to meet those needs. With their test-and-learn mindset, they launched a subscription box service that allowed them to introduce new products and gain valuable consumer feedback.
Before you begin, ask consumers what they want, what they need, and how they feel. To do so, use a mix of direct queries — for example, consumer surveys — and indirect queries, such as online browsing and search behaviour or customer service data. Combine this with data from retail partners for a deeper understanding of your consumers.
You can also analyse your media data to uncover insights. What types of products are consumers looking for? How are they searching for them? Keep an eye out for patterns you may not have seen before. For example, maybe consumers are talking about how they wish you had spicy flavours. Or that they love your brand, but need a gluten- or dairy-free option to meet their changing lifestyle.
Based on your learning, you can build a communication plan for further consumer goods first-party data collection. Digital advertising and social media targeting can help here. Test your plan first on internal employees, which is a low-stakes option to gather feedback. Then, fine-tune your approach and launch it to different consumer segments.
Personalise your relationships with consumer goods first-party data
Consumers expect a give-and-get from the brands that they interact with. In fact,73% of customersexpect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Immediately relevant experiences that resonate and drive sales all start with data.Yetidid this with a single point of consumer information and order history. The brand was then able to personalise interactions that drove conversion 27%.
To turn individual preferences into opportunities, a single source of truth for data is key. To help you gather data and uncover insights from across your business, consider acustomer data platform. This makes it easy to link marketing, commerce, and service data so you can connect, automate, and personalise every single interaction.Artificial intelligence(AI) also comes into play. AI can help you measure each action, use intelligent analytics to understand program efficacy, and uncover avenues for continued improvement. Based on these insights, you can adapt your channel, your message, and your content to personalise the experience and build trusted relationships for consumers at scale.
Engage consumers on their terms
There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to consumer engagement — your team’s creativity and business needs will lead the way. But there are some basic principles to keep in mind.
Aggregating consumer goods first-party data across all your touchpoints, including service centres, D2C interactions, and loyalty programs, you’ll find your most valuable consumers are repeat loyalists — they score high on average order value, purchase frequency, and ROI in marketing. It’s essential to turn your one-time buyers into repeat customers by creating a long-term, personalised experience over time. Pull people into loyalty programs with the insights you’ve gathered across the consumer journey, then re-market to them according to their preferences and behaviours.
Each micro-moment — from the start of a consumer’s search all the way through purchase — should lead to a different call to action. Regularly review your personas. Look for engagement statistics that indicate if your personas are relevant. Does your communication plan account for each step in the consumer journey? Test, repeat, test, repeat, then go back to the drawing board if need be. Identify if there are any points in the journey that can make or break the experience.
A/B test content and offers regularly, and usetools to personalisethe consumer journey at scale.
The more you know about your consumers, the more you’re able to offer an experience that meets them where they are. That’s the true benefit of a D2C channel — and how you gain that competitive advantage. When you invest in the consumer relationship, you build brand equity and value, all with your owned data.
Customers Expect Service That Wows — Can Banks Deliver?
Fromlabour and skillsshortages to increased competition from digital-only institutions, traditional banks today are facing unprecedented challenges.
At the same time, customers continue to demand excellent, timely, and highly personalised service. Yet, according toThe Future of Financial Servicesreport, only 11% of customers stated their banks anticipated their financial needs.
So what can banks do to win and retain customer trust while being more efficient and keeping costs low? How do they wow their customers?
Evaluate how and which technology can deliver business value
Banks need the right data and infrastructure in place to understand and anticipate consumer needs. In other words, they need to undergo significant digital transformation. Yet, one report found thatless than one third of APAC banks’ digital transformation strategies are ‘advanced’.
More than half the banks surveyed were at risk of missing their transformation targets altogether. This is despite the fact that the surveyed leaders were aware of the need to embrace digital transformation, or risk losing market share (67%), or even ceasing to exist within a decade (58%).
To embrace the opportunities ahead, banks need to first have firm digital transformation objectives. Next, they must identify gaps in their current technological portfolio so they can amend or add tools to help them get to their goal. But such changes are often costly, so any technology investment must deliver value in the long term to make it worthwhile.
Move from custom solutions to out-of-the-box technology
It may be tempting to build highly customised solutions that cater to every stringent protocol a bank needs to adhere to. However, this can be costly, and may limit future return on investment (ROI). Any changes to a custom build would likely require significant coding, which leads to loss of time and money. It also puts undue pressure on IT teams to troubleshoot problems and provide always-on support.
Instead, banking institutions should considerout-of-the box cloud solutions. By nature, they are designed with usability and accessibility in mind. Such services take the “clicks not code” approach, which means they do not require any coding knowledge and can be leveraged by employees across the organisation.
However, asThe Reset reportpoints out, it is also important to understand that while many tech features can be deployed out the box, organisations shouldn’t simply take a blanket approach. Instead, they should remain selective and focus on using out-of-the-box features in areas with low strategic value, where the outcome is highly commoditised.
For instance, when used for customer service, the teams involved can adopt ready-made technology quickly, without having to rely heavily on IT teams. And without a steep learning curve, their productivity improves rapidly, leading to higher efficiencies, cost savings, and happier customers. AForrester studyfound that the implementation of LIKE.TGService Cloudimproved call centre average handling time by 25%, and improved agent time to competency by 66%.
Break down silos to deliver personalisation
Another way to elevate customer engagement is by delivering personalised experiences. With71% of APAC consumers responding positively to tailored products, bespoke service can be a great business differentiator for banks.
However, businesses often use technology that is siloed for particular functions or teams. This means information doesn’t flow through between teams and nobody gets a clear picture of what the customer is after.
To break down these siloes, banks can consolidate their technology solutions for a 360-degree view of customer data across various channels.
A leading bank in the Philippines uses Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Marketing Cloud to better understand and wow its customers:
When a customer calls, the contact centre agent can see all the customer information inService Cloud. Not only does this allow them to provide a more personalised service, employees also see a ‘next best offer’ on their interface to cross-sell products to meet customer needs better.
The same offer can also be seen by reps inSales Cloud, along with any known customer concerns. This empowers them to own the customer relationship and offer the right solutions for individual customer problems.
And marketing teams can create highly personalised messages inMarketing Cloud. The result: 34% increase in engaged leads for the bank.
Take advantage of service automation
Like many other organisations, banks can simultaneously scale service and improve the customer experience by providing access to self-service portals. By intercepting simple customer enquiries and diverting them away from high-touch channels like the contact centre, automated or self-service portals free up agents to handle more complex customer requests.
There are various channels you can start building today — chatbots, self-service knowledge banks, or automated telephone systems.
In just one month in early 2020, the same leading bank in the Philippines handled more than 80,000 customer messages via chat, saving their contact centre agents hundreds of hours.
Empower your teams to deliver innovation
Automated processes allow companies to free up valuable employee time by cutting out mundane administrative tasks. This allows employees to dedicate more time to strategic thinking.
In fact, with “drag and drop” technology solutions, staff members are encouraged to experiment with the tool and can often come up with new use cases for the technology. This can help the bank achieve true digital transformation — delivering greater business value through cost savings and opportunities for long-term growth.
To thrive in the digital age, traditional banks must transform ways of working. It’s time to look for new and innovative strategies to scale operations without increasing costs, and seek out technology that can help them do all this while keeping customers satisfied. And to make sure that innovation can continue, it’s important to consider solutions that not only address your immediate challenges, but that also scale with you as you evolve.
