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Top 6 Strategies To Grow Your Business With LIKE.TG
The rapid growth of technology has transformed customer behaviour in recent years. Customers are up to date with digital trends and demand a more connected and personalised experience. Modern businesses need to use the right tactics and tools to stay attuned to this change.
The most recent State of the Connected Customer report states that 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services.
As customers switch to digital first solutions, businesses will need to stay connected to their customers across every channel. For example, 78% of customers have used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction, according to the State of the Connected Customer.
So how do businesses stay connected with their customers? The answer lies in the efficient management of customer data across channels. LIKE.TG offers a suite of powerful and easy-to-use tools for businesses to manage their customer data more efficiently.
To explore how data drives your business and helps you connect with your customers, let’s look at six strategies to increase efficiency, streamline communications, and manage large volumes of data.
Stay connected with your customer on every channel
The first strategy for success is to stay connected with your customer.
State of the Connected Customer report states, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. More importantly, 83% of customers say they’re more loyal to companies that provide consistency across departments.
Great service begins with an integrated view of customer data. Customers expect a smooth experience across all touch points, and are willing to stick with the brands that remember them. With Customer 360, your team can have a comprehensive view of customers’ preferences. This single source of truth allows employees to work together to build lasting, trusted relationships and deliver tailored experiences to match the customers’ needs.
Unlock value for business with Slack as your Digital HQ
In business right now, you want up to the minute conversation with your teammates, stakeholders, and customers. The place where you can collaborate anytime and anywhere is Slack, your digital headquarters.
Slack is where all conversations come together. Integrate your team’s favourite apps into Slack for seamless collaboration. It encourages knowledge sharing across the organisation and among teams. Everyone has direct and instant involvement in discussion and exchanging of ideas.
With Slack, collaboration is the beginning. Not only does it offer smooth integration across your business, Slack also integrates with Customer 360 to give you full visibility of your customer.
Together Slack and Customer 360 unlock limitless potential for custom integrations, automated workflows, and solutions. In short, Slack and Customer 360 is how the future works.
Connect your systems together with MuleSoft
Customers want integrated experiences. They don’t want to get caught in the information gaps in your organisation. This is the domain of MuleSoft, which helps to bring complex systems and data together.
Businesses are balancing many competing demands to stay ahead. One of them is the accelerating speed of digital transformation. The 2021 Connectivity Benchmark report states IT project requests have increased by 30% to meet this demand. All while customers call for fast, digital, and on-demand experiences, or they will take their business elsewhere.
The central pillar to solve this huge challenge is to understand how integration drives digital transformation.
MuleSoft can connect any system, application, data, and device to unleash the power of Customer 360. The combined power of MuleSoft and LIKE.TG, enables customers to accelerate digital transformation.
LIKE.TG Administrators are vital to your business success
One of the key team members for success is a LIKE.TG Administrator. But what exactly do they do?
A LIKE.TG Administrator best understands how to make the platform work for their company’s goals. They build, configure, and automate technology solutions to deliver business value.
The colleagues of a LIKE.TG Administrator can rely on them to:
Maintain the platform
Make the platform as easy to use as possible for users of any technical level
Stay updated on the platform’s new tools, capabilities, and updates
LIKE.TG Administrators are vital to your business success, as they influence how business innovations and processes are implemented. They serve as analysts, trainers, and advisors within your business.
Think of LIKE.TG Administrators as your trusted advisors on all things LIKE.TG. They are a vital bridge between business and technology. With the help of a LIKE.TG Administrator, your team can set up personalised dashboards and reports to track every lead in greater detail. This level of organisation can lead to greater satisfaction in new and existing customers.
LIKE.TG Architects bring people and solutions together
How do you describe the role of a LIKE.TG Architect? Most people think that it is a highly technical role, on par with developers. While others see the LIKE.TG Architect role as a creative problem solver. The answer is in between.
LIKE.TG Architects find ways to solve real-world problems by bringing people and solutions together to design, deliver, govern, and plan. They are the critical link between your business and development teams as they map out the technological solution to meet the business requirements.
Seamless implementation bridges information gaps within your organisation and provides your customers with the best integrated experience.
Get started on your LIKE.TG journey with Trailhead
To learn the skills needed for the jobs of today and tomorrow, businesses need employees with digital skills. Skilling up is more important than ever.
That’s why LIKE.TG has created Trailhead, as a fun and easy way to learn the most in demand digital skills. You can learn everything from coding, to data management, while collecting badges and accreditation along the way. There is a vibrant community of other Trailblazers you can connect with to share learnings across the globe.
Trailhead helps to build credible digital skills with your employer. You can earn badges while learning data modelling and management, automation and artificial intelligence, or leadership and management skills.
The more tech skills you and your team can draw on, the better your business can stay connected in real-time with your customers. Stay ahead of the competition by skilling up on Trailhead and aiming to become a Trailhead Ranger.
With these six strategies, you can manage your business more efficiently and stay connected with your customers at every touch point.
How To Increase Your ROI With Marketing Analytics
Marketing analytics is the practice of using data to measure the success of marketing activities. It helps marketers gain insights into their audience from engagement data generated. This optimises marketing efforts and improves return on investment.
Businesses are increasingly taking advantage of analytics in their marketing. According to the third edition of the Marketing Intelligence Report, 88% of marketers surveyed utilised marketing analytics to grow digital customer engagement.
Here are some tips for growing your business with marketing analytics:
1. Identify your marketing objective
Define exactly what you want to achieve and set clear marketing objectives for each campaign. Metrics for success can be click rate, conversion rate, return on investment, customer satisfaction etc.
2. Report, analyse, predict
Use marketing analytics to:
Report on the past. By measuring past performance, you can identify what worked well and what mistakes to avoid. For example, what channel brought in the most revenue in the last campaign? How did the Facebook ad campaign fare against the Google Display Network campaign? How many leads did the whitepaper generate vs. the webinar?
Analyse the present. Measure your current marketing performance. Which content is driving more engagement? Which channels are converting better? How are people talking about your business and where?
Predict the future. Marketing analytics can help forecast answers to questions such as: How can newly acquired customers be turned into loyal customers? Which channels are worth investing more in? Which segments can be targeted next?
3. Invest in analytic capabilities
With data being generated from a growing number of sources, there is an increased risk of siloed data. Using a platform that gives you a single, cross-channel view of customer data is critical for data-drivenmarketing efforts.
AI and automation can accelerate cross-channel data analytics to free up resources for marketers to focus on strategic, creative work.
Despite the increased use of data analytics in marketing, many marketers fall behind in building up their analytic capabilities. Only 51% of marketing teams currently have employees dedicated to analytics. Still, marketers intend to catch up. Two in five marketers say they plan to invest in tools, processes, and people to improve their analytics.
4. Act with the power of data
Marketing analytics can transform all your available data into actionable insights.
With a single source of truth for data across channels, your marketing teams can have all the right information at their fingertips. They can spend less time analysing data and more time making smarter decisions. They can continue to build on what’s working or course-correct as needed to achieve their goals.
Connect, analyse, and take action on your data with Marketing Cloud Intelligence — your single source of truth for marketing performance.WATCH DEMO
Hiring Managers: Find LIKE.TG Talent With These Top 3 Trailblazing Characteristics
Finding the best LIKE.TG talent isn’t just about looking at a candidate’s experience. Assessing these three Trailblazing characteristics is key.
They are actively skilling up with Trailhead
They participate in the Trailblazer Community
They have work experience outside of LIKE.TG that translates well to valuable contribution.
I’ve hired numerous new LIKE.TG Administrators across multiple roles throughout my career, and I can tell you firsthand that you should throw out your “candidate needs 3-5 years of LIKE.TG experience” requirement. Instead, focus on these three Trailblazing characteristics.
1. They are actively skilling up with Trailhead
When I see a candidate who spends their free time learning and earning badges on Trailhead, LIKE.TG’s free online learning platform, I can tell immediately they have the drive and motivation to succeed (with that they’re already more technically skilled than I was when I started my LIKE.TG career!).
Trailhead helps you skill up for the future and learn the most in-demand skills that will help you land a top job in the LIKE.TG ecosystem. The learning is interactive, gamified, and, best of all, free!
If you’re considering a candidate who doesn’t have any experience working in a LIKE.TG role, check to see if they’ve earned any superbadges. Superbadges present learners with real-world business problems that must be solved without step-by-step instructions. They’re a good test of how the candidate will perform in a real-world business scenario.
Superbadges are not easy to earn!
A candidate who’s earned a superbadge is more likely to have the dedication, focus, and resilience you’re looking for. Asking them about how they earned a specific superbadge is a great way to go deeper in an interview and understand how they solve problems. If they are a Trailhead Ranger, ask them about their learning experience to earn that recognition.
Has the candidate built any apps on their own time? I’ve interviewed Trailblazers who have designed and built their own dedicated job-hunting apps in the Trailhead Playground to track applications, interviews, and job offers. If you find a candidate who can proactively identify a problem, design, and build the solution to that problem, then you know they can apply the concepts and lessons of Trailhead to real-world scenarios.
Ask your candidate:
What are your favourite Trailhead modules and projects?
Can you show me an app or object you’ve built in a hands-on challenge that you’re particularly proud of?
Tell me about a time you’ve struggled getting a challenge to succeed.
What strategies have you used to achieve success?
How a candidate responds to setbacks while learning is a great indicator of how they will perform when they face real-world challenges in a LIKE.TG role.
2. They participate in the Trailblazer Community
Candidates who take part in the Trailblazer Community are usually excited about and committed to LIKE.TG as a platform and as a career path. These candidates make time to learn more and network with others in the Trailblazer Community.
Since they’ve put in that networking time, they’ve also developed a built-in support system — people who can help them brainstorm and troubleshoot problems, while giving them advice along their career journey. With so many of us now meeting online, there’s no physical limit to the groups that candidates can join, from their own backyard to the other side of the globe!
While we’re talking about it, are you staying active in the Trailblazer Community?
If you are, you probably have a shortlist of passionate, talented, and motivated Trailblazers you’d love to have in your team.The potential candidates will probably be more interested in working with you if they know you’re as passionate as they are about the LIKE.TG ecosystem and their career potential.
Try getting involved with programs like Trailblazer Connect, the places that brand new Trailblazers go for business and LIKE.TG training — and where you can build even better community connections.
You’ll find participants who focus their time and energy on skilling up through learning case studies and solving problems. As they do this, they also develop strong networks and gain mentors who will help them find success in their careers.
3. They have work experience outside of LIKE.TG that translates well
If you look at the #TrailblazerStory hashtag on social, you’ll see the diverse experience that people bring to their jobs as LIKE.TG Administrators. Many people (including me) landed in admin roles by chance, without much (or any) previous technical experience.
Some of us even managed this before Trailhead existed!
Regardless of the details of a candidate’s work history, it’s likely they will have some past skills that will help them on their LIKE.TG career path. For example, those who’ve worked in customer-facing jobs, like bartenders, flight attendants, retail sales associates, and baristas:
Have learned the importance of being customer-centric.
Know how to anticipate client needs and proactively suggest improvements.
Are experienced in prioritizing requests and determining how they can deliver the most value.
Tend to be great analysts who learn from their experiences and work to always improve quality.
Are problem-solvers who genuinely want to enhance the customer experience.
These skills translate perfectly to what’s needed to thrive in LIKE.TG roles.
As you interview candidates, focus on behavioral questions that will help you determine if they are customer-focused, proactive problem-solvers. For those candidates without specific LIKE.TG experience, find out more about their soft skills, learn about their motivation and drive, and let them show you how their experiences can be applied to the role they’re interviewing for. If they’ve the right attitude and core customer service mindset, Trailhead can help them do the rest.
Bonus: Pass or fail, they’ve at least attempted a certification
Not everyone is a great test-taker. We know that LIKE.TG Certifications are a fantastic way to prove platform knowledge, and gaining one or more shows a candidate’s level of commitment and willingness to take risks. That said, I know a few full-time LIKE.TG Administrators who still struggle with passing certification examinations.
There’s no reason that Trailblazers should let the fear of failing stop them from trying for certification. Embracing the fear and taking the exams show that a candidate is willing to take risks. And that effort should be encouraged, even if it means several retakes.
In interviews, it’s always great to see someone with certifications on their resume, but I also get excited to talk to candidates who didn’t pass their Admin examination until attempt 2, 3 or 4 (or they’re still working on that goal). That proves they’re not only persistent but also resilient in the face of setbacks.
When we push through challenges and keep trying, incorporating the feedback we’ve received, we learn even more. A tenacious candidate with perseverance and a growth mindset is exactly the kind of person I want to work with.
The demand for top LIKE.TG talent continues to grow
By 2026, there will be an estimated 9.3 million new jobs created in the LIKE.TG ecosystem.
With this type of exponential growth, waiting around for the candidate who has the traditional “3-5 years of experience” means you’ll miss out on highly motivated and talented Trailblazers who are just entering the LIKE.TG ecosystem.
And if you’re a Trailblazer with multiple years of experience, it’s time to start thinking how you can give back – be a mentor, volunteer, and a Multiplier. Contribute to the Trailblazer Community, serve as a leader, and make a place for the excited newbies who will join us in the next few years.
New Trailblazers — and the entire ecosystem in general — can benefit from your support, experience, and guidance during this time of massive LIKE.TG growth. (Not to mention the boost your career will get from growing your own network and showing your leadership skills!)
Change your thinking, find the best talent
When seeking new talent, don’t get stuck in a “3-5 years of LIKE.TG experience” mindset. Focus instead on these three valuable Trailblazing characteristics, and you’ll be able to find and work with the best, most well-rounded, motivated, and determined candidates (you can thank me later!).
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Use Email Marketing To Deliver The Right Message to the Right Audience
Email marketing allows marketers to communicate directly with their audience about their products and services. It helps build brand awareness and plays an important role in lead generation, converting prospects, and retaining customers. Email marketing increases return on investment and boosts engagement with different audience segments.
Businesses are increasingly incorporating email into their marketing strategies. In 2021, more than 90% of global marketers surveyed said email marketing was critical to company success. 79% of marketers listed email marketing in their top three most effective marketing channels.
Here are a few tips to get you started with email marketing for your business:
1. Set a clear marketing goal
Identify what you want to achieve with your email marketing and develop clear messaging to help meet that objective. Then set clear targets to measure success — it can be a 5% increase in subscribers over the next six months or a reduction in unsubscribes or a boost in clicks to conversions. Without clear targets, you could end up sending too many emails just to have immediate conversions.
Email marketing can be an effective channel to engage your audience within your digital marketing strategy.
2. Build your contact list
Your business needs people to sign up to receive your emails. With recent changes to email privacy protections, customers are increasingly concerned about the way their information is collected and used. Marketers should always build their own organic email list and avoid buying mailing lists. It is also important to seek consent from your audience to receive emails from you. This ensures compliance with data privacy regulations and helps you avoid fines and penalties.
To grow your audience, make it easy for users to sign up for your content. Add pop-up forms or visible sign-up boxes on your webpages, and use social media to drive website visits. Include clear and short CTAs such as ‘Sign up for our newsletter’ to allow users to enter their email address, along with an ‘opt in’ box. This helps build sender reputation and audience trust.
Create ‘gated content’ like e-books, whitepapers, and guides for users to access only after they have signed up. Host webinars to establish your thought leadership and invite your audience to register with their contact information. This helps build high-quality contacts.
3. Tailor content to your audience needs
Not all audiences are the same. Target the right group of people with the right type of content. To do this, segment your audience based on their stage in the customer journey. Are they existing customers or prospects? Are they looking for information or likely to make a purchase?
Build content around products and offers to address the specific needs of customers. An email automation platform can help deliver timely automated emails based on audience behaviour. By integrating a content management system (CMS) with your email automation, you can pull the right content for the right audience. Run A/B tests to fine tune your email messaging and audience targeting strategies.
This creates a content experience that is personalised and unique.
4. Unlock the power of analytics
Invest in a platform that helps you track and analyse your performance metrics like click-through rate, conversion rate, and unsubscribe rate. Measure your performance against the defined campaign KPIs. Gain insights into what’s working and what’s not, and optimise your emails to improve ROI.
Regardless of the size of your business, email marketing can help you connect with your audience, build your reputation, and grow your customer base — with a minimal amount of investment when compared to other marketing channels.
How Insurers Can Stay Agile and Keep Up With Changing Customer Demands
Insurance companies are increasingly leveraging insurance technology or ‘Insurtech’ to meet the evolving needs of customers. Insurtech refers to the innovative use of technology to improve efficiency, build trust, and deliver personalised insurance services.
According to the latest State of the Connected Customer report, customers today are more active on digital channels than in 2020. This trend is not expected to slow down anytime soon even as social restrictions continue to ease. In addition to this digital-first shift, 56% of customers expect offers to always be personalised. What’s more, 62% of customers want companies to anticipate their needs, while 73% expect companies to understand their individual needs and preferences.
As insurers strive to meet this growing customer expectations, building trust is proving to be more critical than ever. 80% of insurance executives stated that frustrating online experiences led to a loss of customer trust during the pandemic. So how is Insurtech making a difference? Let’s look at some ways it is disrupting the insurance industry.
Thriving in the new world of Insurtech
Our guest at InsureTech Connect Asia, Varun Mittal, Group Head, Digital and Ecosystems at Singlife with Aviva explained how the pandemic propelled the insurance and financial sector to make rapid changes. “It was more than a wakeup call — you can press snooze on a wakeup call! But there was no snooze button. Service and sales grew by five years in one year,” said Varun. “In a world of anxiety and information overload, we wanted to help at least remove financial worries from our customers.”
For Singlife, this means returning the power to make informed decisions to the customer. This includes providing transparency around the use of their data along with simplifying and digitising processes that were paper-heavy and tedious.
In Varun’s view, the launch of open banking in Singapore will go a long way in helping build trusted relationships. By giving customers a holistic view of all their policies and accounts, they are empowered to make the right and informed decisions. “This might ultimately mean they buy fewer products, but that’s okay. There is currently a trust deficit and this is a great opportunity to build trust.”
Insurtech solutions can help insurance providers build trust while meeting the increased demand for simple digital solutions. By using client insights tools, insurers can make highly personalised offers to customers.
Whether your customer has just bought a new car, refinanced their home loan, or planned an overseas trip, you can make the relevant offer at the right moment.
Insurtech also enables insurers to meet their customers where they are, on any preferred channel or device. If a customer initiates their query with a chatbot, they should be able to pick it up on their app or over the phone. Insurtech can help enable such an end-to-end seamless experience.
Cultivating agility to meet new challenges
In addition to adapting to the shifts in customer expectations, traditional insurers find themselves competing with the industry’s new entrants. Being more innovative in their digital strategy allows these newer competitors to easily adopt a customer-centric approach.
But innovation is not the only important factor when it comes to stepping up. Speed is critical too as fast-moving markets demand products to be created or modified in weeks or even days, not months.
Newer insurers are also more responsive to emerging trends in open finance and the flexibility demanded by customers — these are significant challenges for traditional insurers to contend with. Agility with automation, innovation, and digitisation is the key to meeting these challenges.
Automation can streamline processes to increase efficiency and accuracy across high volumes. Digital tools can be used to carry our repeatable tasks, such as creating a quote or recommending a policy. This frees up insurance specialists to spend more time on complex, specialised work.
By creating digital self-service options for obtaining quotes, making claims, and adjusting policies, insurers can offer multiple touchpoints in the customer journey. This can enhance the customer experience.
AI-powered digitisation and automationcan help insurers easily and efficiently capture and retain leads at the beginning of the insurance journey. This can help deliver fast, targeted service that is crucial in responding to customers in an increasingly competitive environment.
As the financial sector becomes more commoditised, customers want insurance options that are differentiated such as use-based (like motor insurance for fleet management) and on-demand (one-off use for travelling or using ride-hailing service).
Using legacy technology with slow transactions, fragmented data, and reliance on paperwork can impede the innovation required to develop these differentiated products. Integrated digital platforms like Financial Services Cloud can help insurers simplify their processes by having a 360 degree view of their customers on intuitive dashboards.
Working with brokers and underwriters
Digitisation and automation are also critical to the relationship insurers have with brokers. According to the Celent 2021 report on ‘Optimizing the Independent Agency Experience’, 76% of brokers say they would send more business to insurers if they improved their technology and made it easier to use.
AI-powered automation and cloud-based CRM technology can streamline the end-to-end insurance experience — from digital quoting to automated payments. The technology keeps brokers competitive and helps with customer acquisition and retention in a competitive market. Custom apps, for example, can give your brokers in-the-moment access to the data they need to secure a customer. At the same time, insurers have access to a wealth of information about broker performance, so opportunities are maximised with any issues being quickly resolved.
Meeting your customers where they live
As discussed above, it is important for insurers to connect with their customers on their preferred channel.
Varun pointed out, customers no longer want to be burdened with a huge policy booklet delivered to them by post. Instead they want to engage digitally with their quotes, claims, and policies. They want buying insurance to be as seamless an experience as shopping for any other product in the online marketplace.
Indeed, 68% of customers said the pandemic elevated their expectations of insurers’ digital capabilities. This highlights the importance of innovation, digitisation, and automation in improving customer experience. And that’s the winning combination that Insurtech is positioned to deliver. “Simplify and earn trust,” said Varun. “This is the transformation we want to drive.”
By transitioning from legacy systems to Insurtech solutions like a cloud-based CRM with AI-powered insights, insurers can better meet the expectations of today’s digital-first customers. The era of ringing a call centre to check the progress of a claim is fast coming to an end.
How To Take Your SaaS Business to the Next Level With AppExchange
AppExchange is the leading enterprise app marketplace to help LIKE.TG customers solve business challenges. As an independent software vendor (ISV) partner, you have the opportunity to sell your app to over 150,000 LIKE.TG customers by building on the LIKE.TG Platform.
By joining this network of LIKE.TG Partners, you’ll gain access to an international marketplace. Over 150,000+ customers have installed LIKE.TG’s AppExchange, and 91% of LIKE.TG customers have installed at least one app. Businesses of all sizes use AppExchange, so you will find customers for whatever solutions you provide.
Being a LIKE.TG partner also means being able to leverage LIKE.TG technology. Successful partners choose to build on the LIKE.TG Platform for this very reason — they build 4-10x faster, benefit from increased productivity, and reduce time to market.
Also, you will get access to a vast community of partners and a wealth of inspiring resources, news, and partner updates that will lead you through every step of your journey and beyond.
Let’s take a closer look at how being a LIKE.TG partner works.
What is the LIKE.TG Partner Program?
The LIKE.TG AppExchange Partner Program enables you to build business success and meet customer needs by participating in a virtual community of other partners and LIKE.TG experts. Each partner contributes to and benefits from the constantly evolving network.
Whether you’re an individual developer, a startup, a not-for-profit, or an established company of any size, you can become an AppExchange partner. The Partner Program gives you the knowledge, tools, and infrastructure you need to take your ideas to market. And you don’t have to be a seasoned LIKE.TG user to get started.
With access to the LIKE.TG Platform you can use low or no-code, drag-and-drop development, and automation tools to personalise the customer experience. With the highest levels of security, you can unify disparate data sources and collaborate across devices and systems to bring richer experiences to your customers.
Who can become a LIKE.TG ISV Partner?
ISV partners use the LIKE.TG Platform to create unique software or software-as-a-service (Saas) offerings for LIKE.TG customers on AppExchange. Current ISVs cover everything from organisational intelligence to development operations, security, and user experience.
While ISV partners are commonly B2B SaaS organisations, consulting partners also play an important role in the AppExchange partnership network. Skilled in specific industries, consultants can offer preconfigured solutions for common industry challenges.
What are the benefits of joining the LIKE.TG Partner Program?
Access innovative technology
The LIKE.TG Platform has all the building blocks you need. From a suite of innovative technologies and seasonal releases, to lightning-speed execution, it enables you to develop your app four to ten times faster as compared to third-party platforms.
Grow your business exponentially
You can expand the reach of your business with access to over 150,000 LIKE.TG customers, 91% of which use partner apps and solutions. The opportunities for connection and collaboration are huge.
Improve discoverability
Once you’ve built your solution, LIKE.TG provides everything you need to monetise it and boost your marketing efforts. You can leverage the power of the Partner Community and the Partner Marketing Center to leverage resources to build brand awareness and go to market faster.
Ensure powerful security
Security is another significant benefit of being a LIKE.TG Partner — all your app’s infrastructure is supported by LIKE.TG’s rigorous security standards.
By partnering with LIKE.TG, SaaS leaders position themselves and their business as competitive differentiators, future-proofing their business and setting it up for success.
These are just some benefits that AppExchange Partners can leverage. Discover more of the benefits of building with LIKE.TG Platform as a Partner on AppExchange here.
How do I get started?
To learn more about how you can become a LIKE.TG Partner please visit our LIKE.TG Partner Program.
Meet Joey Chan: How an Entrepreneur Found Success with LIKE.TG
At LIKE.TG, Nichola Palmer works with customers to bring their stories of innovation and transformation to life. In this blog series featuring Trailblazers, Nichola introduces Joey Chan, a LIKE.TG MVP and the founder of Cloud Jedi Solutions in the Philippines. Joey used self-guided learning to become a world-class LIKE.TG Architect, and now he’s helping others to replicate his remarkable journey.
Joey Chan is a natural entrepreneur. As a university student, he dreamed of starting his own business within five years of graduation.
But the budding young developer faced an important decision at the very beginning of his career. He questioned whether to specialise on LIKE.TG, or on another large platform.
“The problem with the other platform is that, given its complexity, nobody would trust that a 20+ year old knew what they were doing. But with LIKE.TG, there was so much I could do on my own without having a large team. That started my deep dive into the LIKE.TG ecosystem.”
Joey threw himself into his LIKE.TG self-education. He read all the LIKE.TG related blogs he could find, reviewed the LIKE.TG documentation, and built his knowledge answering questions from other LIKE.TG users around the world through the Answers Community.
“I dreamt of becoming world class, so I needed to make sure I really understood the platform,” he says. “I was hungry for knowledge, and one of the places to supplement my learning was the LIKE.TG community. People from around the world would ask questions about LIKE.TG, and if I didn’t know the answer, I would research it and find the answer for them.”
The force is with you
Just three months from graduation, Joey began moonlighting on the side with his goal of starting his own business firmly in his sights. Within nine months, he received an offer from a US-based company. They wanted him onboard as their full-time developer — at six-times his current salary. Joey seized the opportunity, left his job at the consulting firm, and then shortly after founded Cloud Jedi Solutions.
“I started getting more US clients based via referrals,” he explains. “It was a gradual progression. I never felt like I needed to market the business, because we had constant work. Part of our success was in making sure that our clients were getting a great return on their investment at each point of the project.”
Cloud Jedi Solutions has become an impressive success story. The company has been the number-one rated developer on LIKE.TG AppExchange since 2015, and Joey has been recognised as aLIKE.TG MVPfor his deep expertise and leadership of the Trailblazer Community in the Philippines.
Follow the leader
Joey used his skills on LIKE.TG to forge a path from an ambitious university student to a successful business leader. Now, he wants to help others follow in his footsteps.
He is an active leader of the Trailblazer Community in the Philippines, and is one of the organisers ofSEA Dreamin’— the largest community-led LIKE.TG event in South East Asia. He also currently hosts the LIKE.TG MVP Series that brings LIKE.TG experts to Philippines audiences.
“I believe where I am right now with the company is the result of all the investment in learning I made in the past,” he says. “But that knowledge is not meant to be kept to myself. I believe that it should be open to everyone.”
Joey says self-guided learning onTrailheadgives anyone with an internet connection access to the knowledge required to become successful in LIKE.TG. However, he advises young developers to find a mentor who can help them focus their learning journey.
“There are literally thousands of badges you can earn on Trailhead, so people new to the LIKE.TG ecosystem need guidance on the different paths you can follow. Mentors can really help with that,” he explains.
“The most important thing is to be able to build something on your own. It’s a lot easier to follow instructions, but you really bring value to a client when you can identify a problem and solve it with a solution you build in LIKE.TG.”
Family comes first
Joey is now a dedicated family man, and so is turning to the Trailblazer Community in the Philippines to help grow his team at Cloud Jedi Solutions.
“I can continue to work the same amount as I used to, but that’s going to be at a cost to family time,” he says. “That’s a shift I’m making now, and part of the reason I’m growing my team. I have been privileged to reach a point in my career where I can stop working if I want to.”
This is the kind of freedom Joey says a career as a LIKE.TG Architect can deliver — if you’re willing to do the hard work.
“You have to be willing to do the hard things. When I started Cloud Jedi, I wasn’t in a corporate setting anymore. I had to set my own standards. I didn’t want to be mediocre. I dreamt of becoming one of the best in the world. That was my mindset.
“I believe that what I’ve gone through is a pathway others can replicate. I think that in the Philippines, there can be a feeling of being stuck — that you have to leave the country in order to better provide for your family. But, with a career in the LIKE.TG ecosystem, you can do well here withoutleaving your family.”
How LIKE.TG Partners Can Guide Your Digital Transformation Journey
Digital transformation is a big undertaking, even for established businesses. Like any journey, having a guide to show you the way will make everything easier. It’s even easier if the people guiding you have helped dozens of businesses on their transformation journey.
This is where partnerships come in. By choosing a partner who understands your vision, and knows how to get you there, you will find the process of transforming your business much simpler.
Partners for all sizes of business
Over the last few years, we’ve seen every kind of business go online. In fact, LIKE.TG research shows that in Singapore and Thailand, 100% of the SMBs that we talked to had taken at least a portion of their operations online. Even the smallest family business requires a digital presence to grow their business, and large enterprises need assistance to manage large-scale digital projects.
Different organisations have different needs. For smaller businesses, it might be a lack of technology that’s holding them back from growing. But as soon as they have the right solution, the whole company will be ready to adopt new processes and take their business forward. For larger enterprises, the blocker might be operational, or slow adoption of existing technology. Partners to the rescue again! We have partners who specialise in change management, who can work with the leadership teams to walk them through the stages of digital transformation. They are proficient in creating programmes to encourage adoption across the workforce, while also ensuring minimum downtime, increased efficiency, and accurate reporting.
These are just some examples — for every problem you might face, there will be a partner that can help you.
How to choose the right partner
Our partners come in all shapes and sizes, just like our customers. There are partners who specialise in helping small businesses take their first step on the road to digital success. There are also experts who guide enterprises through complicated transformations.
Choosing the right partner is essential. Your goals, your resources, and your context should drive your choice. Small businesses often need to think more tactically — your ROI should be calculated in the short-term, and it might be the case that cost-effectiveness is one of the key considerations that you want to keep in mind. It’s likely that you will need to look close to home for your partnerships, so that they have an intimate understanding of your local conditions.
For larger organisations and enterprises, it’s about competitive advantage. You may have to tackle a total change in the way your organisation does business to stay ahead of competitors. If you need your teams to start thinking differently, that may influence the kind of partnership you want to establish. And of course, you’re driving innovation — partners can help bring in the latest thinking to give you the edge.
How partnerships can narrow the digital skills gap
We have agrowing digital skills gapacross the region, and skilling up the workforce is vital.
When it comes to digital transformation, multiple skills are required. You’ll need functional and analytical skills, as well as technical skills to connect various systems, assist with data management, and deliver on AI solutions, chatbots, etc. You may also need people with change management skills, implementation skills, programme management skills, and more. Digital transformation can sometimes require a significant change in the way your organisation works, and partners can help you communicate that to your teams.
Recruiting a workforce that has these skills and knowledge can be expensive and time consuming. This is yet another area where partners can save the day. Partnerships not only give you access to knowledge for a particular project, but also ensure that those skills are transferred to your teams after the partnership is over. This means you can get your projects up and running faster, while upskilling your own employees.
How partnerships make digital transformation easier for employees
All digital transformation projects meet some element of resistance. If you try to push through a change programme without understanding why some members of your team are pushing back, your transformation project is less likely to succeed.
At LIKE.TG, we believe that a diverse workforce brings value to every organisation. Partnerships offer the opportunity to diversify the voices in your digital transformation project. This means you will have access to new ideas and perspectives, which may open up new avenues of growth. At the same time, it may point out flaws and assumptions that you have noticed before.
Digital transformation, at least for larger organisations, is more about change management than technology. Because of that, diversity becomes even more important. Large organisations, who may already have a diverse workforce, will need a range of methods and programmes to ensure that everyone is engaged with the transformation process. A partner who has a wide range of perspectives can help you by making sure that everyone in your organisation feels heard and understands the process.
How to build ongoing relationships with partners
The best results happen when the partnership is established right at the beginning of the digital transformation journey. That way, the customer and the partner can establish their shared goals, and move forward together.
The most important thing with any partnership is trust. The foundation of trust is built on effective communication and transparency. This requires all parties to share information that the others will need to complete the project. Trust your partners and share important data with them. This transparency points the way to a successful digital transformation project.
It’s also important to communicate when things are not going well. Being open and honest is the key to a successful partnership. Rely on the trust that you have built with your partner, and remember that everyone is working toward the same goal. At LIKE.TG, we often say that your success is our success, and it’s the same for our partners.
Digital transformation opens up new ways to find customers and innovate. Partnerships allow you to embark on your transformation journey faster, and ultimately lead to long-term collaborations that grow your business.
Data Security is Every Employee’s Responsibility in the Hybrid Workplace
Perimeter-based security has often served as the first line of defence against cyberattacks. This ‘castle and moat’ approach treats the organisation’s network as a trusted space and places firewalls and other defences at the edges.
The challenge with this approach is that the network perimeter is eroding. In our new hybrid workplace, employees access and share data from anywhere, using multiple devices.
That’s why many businesses are moving to a zero trust approach. Zero trust includes the use of technologies like multi-factor authentication to secure individual data assets, as opposed to the perimeter they sit behind. Therefore, even if someone accesses one part of a network, they will not be able to move freely inside it.
Many businesses are also realising the need to strengthen all their defences and make security the responsibility of every employee.
The question is how can businesses elevate employees’ understanding of data security and equip them to play a more proactive role?
Here are top tips and practical examples on how to embed trust and security into company culture.
Educate and empower employees to keep data secure
The rise of remote working has made businesses more vulnerable to phishing, malware attacks,
rogue network access, and other cybersecurity threats. According to a 2021 report from IBM, phishing attempts alone rose 600%.
Advancements in security technology can help businesses protect against these threats and secure data at every touchpoint. However, many successful data breaches are the result of human error.
This issue was raised during a recent fireside chat with our customers on navigating the security frontier in 2022.
“Everyone in IT is aware there are seven layers of cybersecurity. One of these is the human layer and it is always the weakest point,” said Hasniza Binti Mohamed, Director, Digital Incubation at UEM Sunrise Berhad, one of Malaysia’s leading property developers.
With this in mind, UEM Sunrise Berhad launched a new cybersecurity training program last year. The program included a series of online modules as well as a phishing simulation to test key learnings. A number of employees fell victim to the simulated attack, which reinforced the need for continual training.
“Security depends not only on process and technology, but also on people. In the current environment, we need to strengthen all three,” said Hasniza.
To ensure the success of awareness and training activities, it’s important to tailor content to business context and incentivise participation. In the case of UEM Sunrise Berhad, a leaderboard and prizes gamified learning and kept employees engaged.
Engage employees to stay productive and secure
LIKE.TG research into the role of technology in employee engagement confirmed that the quality of anorganisation’s technology directly affects the quality of employees’ work. What’s more, 93% of office workers in Singapore say their experiences as consumers are increasing their expectations of workplace technology.
Employees want better workplace apps and the pressure is on IT leaders to deliver technology that improves employee engagement. The challenge is that 76% of IT leaders say their teams are not aligned with the rest of the business.
This misalignment can be heightened in the security space. For example, while every employee should have a vested interest in security, not everyone understands the language of cybersecurity. They might also not understand the impact threats can have on revenue, customer experience, and trust.
To engage with the business, IT and security leaders should start by translating security concerns into the language of risk. They then need to balance the risks with the business’ priorities.
Equip employees to build on a trusted platform
The relationship between security and business teams can be contentious. For example, the business may blame data security and privacy controls for slowing down innovation. However, data has become a critical asset and securing that asset should be at the foundation of any business goal.
The good news is that technology has evolved substantially. Today’s security solutions can actually help rather than hinder innovation. For starters, enabling teams to build on a trusted platform reduces risk, complexity, and the cost of compliance.
Teams can also embed security and privacy controls into the application development process using solutions like LIKE.TG Data Mask. This can help to accelerate innovation while protecting regulated data.
The bottom line is that businesses must prioritise security. Not only to protect their data, but also to earn the trust of their customers. A secure and trusted platform can help IT, security, and business teams to align on this goal and enable continuous innovation.
Download the IT Leader’s Guide to Data Security and Governance for more tips on how to simultaneously empower your teams and protect your data.
The Future of Commerce: How Brands Can Serve Customers Where They Are
The world of commerce has evolved significantly in recent years. As digital commerce continues to boom, customers are also increasingly returning to in-person experiences. This trend is expected to continue globally and in the ASEAN region for the next few years. So, how can businesses respond to the complex demands of today’s customers?
To better understand the commerce landscape in 2022, LIKE.TG analysed shopping behaviour from websites that use the Commerce Cloud platform. We also surveyed over 4,000 global commerce professionals in this research. Here are the key insights and learnings from the latest State of Commerce report to help you provide better service to your customers.
1. Deliver a seamless omnichannel experience
The pandemic has accelerated the shift toward digital-first commerce. Revenue from digital channels continues to grow across Southeast Asia. This is prompting businesses across industries to invest in new digital channels, with even business sellers now planning for an ecommerce-focused future. Many commerce organisations are already developing strategies for emerging channels like TikTok, digital storefronts, and the metaverse.
This expansion in channels comes with its own challenges. In Singapore, respondents ranked channel conflicts as their second biggest challenge. Buying journeys are becoming more complex, with B2C consumers engaging across an average of nine touchpoints when interacting with a company. This is making commerce increasingly complex and distributed.
Despite these challenges, businesses should focus on expanding their digital channels to meet customer expectations across every pre-sale and post-sale touch point. This is reflected in the fact that globally 69% of digital leaders say they’ve invested in new digital channels over the last two years. The adoption of new channels can help a business prepare for disruptions like supply chain shortages and inflation.
Even B2B organisations can benefit from expanding their digital channels, as buyers become more digital than ever. The biggest benefits of digital channels to business sellers are improved customer satisfaction, expansion into new regional markets, and growth to their customer bases.
As this trend in distributed commerce evolves, businesses are required to continuously invest in providing a seamless experience across channels.
2. Make informed decisions driven by data
Commerce organisations across the world are firmly focused on putting data into action. In Singapore and Thailand, a majority of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that their organisations were effective at using data — to acquire new customers, automate processes, and connect commerce to other areas of their business.
However, the increasing digitalisation of commerce faces a few challenges, from tightening global regulations on data protection, to reducing the use of third-party cookies. More than one-third (36%) of global respondents said they are investing in first-party data strategies to address some of these challenges.
As buying journeys become more complex, collecting data across all channels is no longer sufficient. Businesses need to combine their data to help their teams make well-informed decisions quickly. By using data to understand customer behaviour and develop marketing or business strategies, businesses can build customer trust and gain a significant competitive advantage.
3. Focus on flexible fulfilment and the post-purchase experience
With customers increasingly prioritising convenience when choosing brands, organisations are now focused on offering flexible fulfilment. Nearly all B2C sellers globally offer at least one convenient fulfilment option, such as buy online-pickup instore (BOIS), curbside pickup, or fast shipping. Even business sellers are now offering the same flexible fulfilment options to their customers. This is prompting organisations to focus more on the optimisation of the entire fulfilment journey, with 44% of global respondents saying this will be a key priority.
The demand for customer convenience is also leading to a growing range of offered payment options. More than half (52%) of respondents in Singapore and Thailand say they accept Apple Pay while 54% accept buy-now-pay-later instalment plans. Over one-third (37%) of other respondents plan to offer these options within the next two years. 30% are already accepting cryptocurrency, while half of the respondents say they plan to accept cryptocurrency in the future.
As customers seek flexibility across options, it is more important than ever for businesses to focus on delivering a seamless and simplified experience.
How is your business adapting to the changing commerce landscape?
Today, commerce organisations have to navigate a complex world of shifting customer expectations, expanding sales channels, and evolving data challenges. By leveraging the power of data across channels, businesses can build a sound strategy to deliver exceptional customer experiences and increase their profitability. This is how they can meet customers where they are.
Build Trust And Grow Your Business With Unparalleled Customer Service
Customer service is the support you provide your customers before and after they purchase your product or service. Offering timely service that consistently meets customer expectations leads to a positive experience of your brand. It helps you build trust and foster long-term relationships with customers to help grow your business.
The pandemic has significantly shifted customer engagement to digital channels. But even as lockdowns and social restrictions continue to ease, this digital shift will continue to evolve. According to McKinsey, 75% of first time digital channel users will keep using these channels. This has also significantly shifted the service standards expected by customers. 76% of customers now expect consistent interactions across different departments and touchpoints.
While customer service agents play a crucial role in delivering quality customer service, the systems and processes that support them are as important. Here are a few tips to help your business bring people and systems together to provide excellent customer service:
1. Invest in customer service training
Businesses with high-performing customer service teams invest in their agents. By providing training to improve product knowledge, troubleshooting, empathy, and customer management skills, businesses can empower agents to build trust with customers.
As newer contact centre systems and processes are implemented, agents need to be continually trained. This helps them take advantage of the improved tools at their disposal to deliver unparalleled customer experience.
2. Deliver personalised customer experience
To deliver great customer service, agents need to understand the changing needs of customers. When they have a 360 degree view of customer data across channels, they can gain insights into customer behaviour. This helps them meet expectations at every stage of the customer journey.
A cloud-based CRM can help your customer service teams stay connected to every customer interaction. They can deliver connected experiences with unique and personalised service, thereby increasing affinity for your brand.
3. Embrace analytics and automation
Identify and automate the most repetitive customer service tasks to free up agents’ time to focus on more complex, rewarding work. Some businesses build AI chatbots to help answer basic customer questions. Others use tools to automate the collection of basic information and logging of service requests.
A CRM analytics platform can empower service agents with just the right data and insights they need to make quick, informed decisions. By enabling them to solve challenging customer problems, it can help improve agent satisfaction levels.
4. Never lose customer focus
Create a customer journey map to help you see things from your customer’s perspective. Focus on what matters to customers by analysing the journey data continuously. This helps you craft a seamless, connected experience across customer channels and keep up with customer demands to stay ahead of competitors. When channels are connected, senior executives also get an overview of service standards to make the right operational decisions.
Staying customer-focused helps your teams come together, serve customers better, and grow your business.
Boost customer loyalty and deliver connected, personalised customer services across every touch point with LIKE.TG Service Cloud.
WATCH DEMO
6 New Marketing Cloud Features To Help You Power Personalisation
The last few years have shown us just how important personalisation is to a brand’s digital strategy. According to the latest State of the Connected Customer Report, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
That demand is apparent, but marketers face three main challenges in addressing it:
Personalising at scale across channels
Effectively using owned data to power personalisation
Aligning organisations for consistent personalisation
The stakes are much higher and the competition more intense. But there is good news — marketers can now access more data and better technology to create better customer experiences.
On that note, here’s a look at six new features in the latest Marketing Cloud release that can help you personalise your marketing strategies.
1. Engagement: Data Extensions Query Support for Intelligence Reports Advanced
As a marketer, you need to ensure you’re delivering the right message to the right audience. With Data Extension Query Support, you can analyse the performance of your messaging by unique audience attributes stored in Marketing Cloud’s Data Extensions. This helps drive higher engagement and brand loyalty. With this new feature, you can:
Enrich your query analyses by connecting up to 30 data extensions to your subscriber-level and aggregate Marketing Cloud engagement data
Perform codeless queries with audience attributes from Data Extensions to uncover new optimisation opportunities
Understand the structure and rows of your Data Extensions with standalone querying
Enrich your customer engagement analysis and uncover deeper insights with Data Extensions.
Watch the demo to learn more.
2. Customer Data Platform
Use richer customer information and reach people on their preferred channels with Marketing Cloud’s Customer Data Platform (CDP) updates. New features in the CDP can help you achieve better personalisation by:
Augmenting the volume and variety of data types that can be shared with Marketing Cloud engagement systems
Connecting data across the enterprise from both marketing and non-marketing systems
Activating data from Customer Data Platform to Mobile Push contact points in Marketing Cloud engagement to drive personalised mobile messages
Expand activation capabilities to drive 1:1 personalisation at every digital touch point.
Watch the demo to learn more.
3. Personalisation: Triggered Campaign Messages
Triggered Campaign Messages combines the best of Marketing Cloud Personalisation with the powerful outbound communication engine of Journey Builder. This can help you reengage customers on their preferred channel.Deliver personalised, relevant messages based on deep, contextual customer behaviour, all in real time to:
Trigger an email, mobile app message, push notification, next best action/offer, or an in-store experience based on an individual’s behaviour
Measure the amount of time an individual spends on your site, and understand the business context
Use powerful real-time segmentation and sophisticated artificial intelligence to determine and deliver contextually relevant experiences that inspire customers to take action
Build relevant customer intent that matters and inspire customers to take action.
Watch the demo to learn more.
4. Account Engagement: Conditional Completion Actions
When it came to prospects interacting with marketing assets, marketers previously needed to run multiple automations to segment effectively and at scale. The new Conditional Completion Actions allow marketers to run these automations in one place. Get even more granular with personalisation on your emails, forms, and other assets by only triggering follow-up actions if a prospect meets a certain set of criteria. You can now:
Suppress certain groups from getting added to lists, engagement campaigns, or receiving auto-responder emails
Easily assign prospects to the correct user
Route leads to more personalised journeys by further segmenting prospects at the point they interact with content
Create personalised experiences with conditional logic in completion actions to increase customer engagement.
Watch the demo to learn more.
5. Intelligence: Database Exports
Customers are investing increasingly in enterprise database software. These databases act as repositories of information from all teams across the entire organisation. Previously, getting data from the marketing team was a hassle. Marketing data is often complicated and relatively siloed, so teams are tasked with making marketing data more accessible enterprise-wide. We are meeting this trend of database investment with the new Database Exports feature. With Database Exports you can:
Automate the export of cleansed and harmonised marketing data into your organisation’s database
Make marketing data available to other parts of your organisation for deeper analysis and insights
Back up the data you have in Intelligence in your preferred database, creating an audit-proof system of all enterprise data
Unlock value in your enterprise strategy with Database Exports.
Watch the demo to learn more.
6. Einstein: Einstein Engagement Frequency “What-If” analyser
Are you worried that your customers will feel email fatigue from too many messages? The new “What-If” analyser tile on the Einstein Engagement Frequency dashboard predicts how your next email send will affect engagement. This will help you:
Avoid email fatigue that comes from oversaturating your subscribers
Visually test multiple message frequency scenarios to understand how additional messages will affect engagement over time
Determine how many emails to send for your upcoming campaigns
Predict how your next email send will affect engagement.
Watch the demo to learn more.
Want To Prepare Your Employees To Lead From Anywhere? LIKE.TG Reveals Its Playbook
After moving to a remote-first work culture this year, LIKE.TG needed to rethink how our leaders were trained. As our employees and teams became more distributed than ever, we needed a new approach to leadership for an increasingly volatile, disconnected, and complex business landscape.
And so, we went through a 9-month-long process to overhaul the structure, design, and delivery of our leadership development programs. Our goal was to build more and better leaders at every level. Today, I’m going to share an overview of where we were, where we are now, and what we learned along the way. I hope it helps your company up its leadership game.
At LIKE.TG, managers are the No. 1 driver for engagement, job satisfaction, wellbeing, innovation, and inclusion. That makes great leadership business-essential. This isn’t just a technology trend; it applies to every organisation, regardless of industry, size, and location. And I’m not alone in thinking this. According to the results of PwC’s global Future of Work survey, a lack of leadership development is one of the three most significant disruptions to organisational success.
How we developed leaders before
Historically, the LIKE.TG approach to leadership development is believing that overinvesting in top talent was the most efficient and effective way to develop exceptional leaders. We held a formal nomination process within LIKE.TG to identify the highest-performing, highest-potential leaders.
From there, leaders engaged in a mix of case study review, peer dialogue, volunteer experiences, and coaching to scale their impact. Led by senior internal executives and external thought leaders, the programs were widely recognised as an essential rite of passage for rising leaders.
Want to keep your best people? Teach them new skills
The upside of this traditional approach was significant. For the business, the nomination process forced the company to review key talent and plan for their growth by investing in them through a formal program nomination. For leaders, the quality of their executive development experience measurably improved their leadership capability and increased their commitment to LIKE.TG.
Despite good track record, the purpose of the model has become misaligned with our changing work landscape for three reasons:
LIKE.TG’s growth required more and better leadership from every level (not just the top).
Because of our commitment to equitable access for employees, we needed to move away from the formal nominations process.
We needed virtual programs for much of the pandemic and potentially beyond.
First, decide what matters
As we set our course for change, we needed to decide what we cared about most. Through leader interviews, stakeholder focus groups, and design sessions, setting new priorities became essential for the broader transformation road map:
Anyone can lead. Great leadership can come from anywhere. Focusing exclusively on the highest-performing leaders can reinforce unintended bias and limit the participation of traditionally underrepresented employees.
Every great leader should do three things really well: Build a great team, be a great person to work for, and deliver great results together.
People learn best with others, over time. Relevant content delivered in the context of everyday work allows leaders to sustain engagement, motivation, and community among their peers.
Leadership growth occurs in stages, and — to stay relevant — leaders need differentiated training and development that matches their responsibilities.
Leaders must be accountable. Leader behaviours should be measured and reported on transparently to validate improvement and performance.
Great learning requires both virtual and in-person experiences. Most learning and development can occur virtually to drive down cost and increase scalability. But truly immersive, relational, and experiential learning is best done face-to-face.
These parameters created a blueprint to guide the larger transformation process. We shared them around the organisation so that we could refine them and start getting everyone involved early.
Designing the new structure
This evolution wasn’t easy and we went through several iterations. We found that asking these questions were most helpful in shaping the final scope of LIKE.TG’s design. They may help your organisation, too:
Who gets access to development?
Everyone should have access. This requires putting an end to the formal nomination process for democratised access to development — regardless of title and tenure — for any aspiring or current people leader.
How will leaders be segmented?
Using a customised leadership pipeline model, all ~80,000 employees were assigned to one of the six stages based on their current role and responsibilities as defined by the HR system of record.
What is different across the stages?
After researching the different challenges and requirements for success at each stage of leadership, a detailed profile was created for each stage to document distinct skills and capabilities required for success.
Is the development focused on leading people, leading the business, or both?
Both: Rather than waiting until leaders are more senior in the business, start at the first stage — aspiring leaders and leaders of individual contributors — and provide a blend of business and people leadership capabilities from day zero.
Do leaders at each stage go to a single program, or is it an experience over time?
Learning and development outcomes are greater when delivered in the course of daily work, so “Pathways” (i.e. learning journeys over time) were designed to move away from single-point-of-learning events.
What happened to the legacy programs that many leaders recognised and respected?
Iconic milestone programs were preserved, however, they were sequenced within their respective Pathway, then re-imagined for scale.
Is participation in leadership development optional or mandatory?
Optional: While LIKE.TG needs every leader to be accountable for being a great manager, the research is clear that outcomes from compulsory learning are not as good as voluntary learning.
How do adjacent development interventions, such as career development, leadership coaching, and teaming fit in?
Adjacent development interventions are fully integrated into ongoing leadership experiences to create diversity in learning styles, accountability support, and application of learning within teams.
Introducing the Great Leader Pathways
We call our new approach to leadership development the Great Leader Pathways. Each stage has its own targeted curriculum that ties the relevant mindsets, skills, and behaviours with leader success at that level. The new open-enrollment model democratises access to further deliver on our commitment to equality.
Great Leader Pathways deliver personalised experiences with bite-sized content and activities. This helps leaders at all levels get the tools they need to lead in a success-from-anywhere world. Here are the six stages:
Growing experts: Individual contributors seeking to grow as experts in their chosen profession, rather than becoming a formal people leader.
Aspiring people leaders: Individual contributors seeking to develop themselves and their careers through people leadership.
Leader of individual contributors: First-line managers responsible for the success and growth of a team.
Leader of leaders: Those responsible for the success and growth of multiple teams led by other leaders.
Function leaders: Executives responsible for the direction, success, and growth of a specific function or area.
Enterprise leaders: Our most senior executives, directly responsible for the strategic direction and success of our company as a whole.
No two careers are identical at LIKE.TG. Not everyone spends equal time at each stage, so Pathways focus on the relevant capabilities required by that specific stage. They are taught through memorable experiences, both self-paced and live, with a mix of curated content, community/peer learning, instructor-led workshops, virtual facilitated sessions, and face-to-face, immersive experiences.
Initial Results
Early results are promising, with around 22,000 employees enrolled in the first open window. We expect another 3,000 or so to enrol in the second window, making the growth in participation more than 200% from the year prior. What is more, under-represented minorities and women are participating at higher rates than our employee population averages. As programs within each of the Pathways are delivered during the months of July through November, we will continue to collect, analyse, and report evaluation and assessment data.
If you question the investment of time and resources required for this type of large-scale learning and development initiative, remember this: In today’s volatile labour market, the job of every senior leader is to attract, develop, and retain exceptional employees to remain competitive in the marketplace. Knowing the pivotal role that leaders at every level play in this process, how can you afford not to invest in well-designed, high-impact leadership development initiatives?
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Trying To Identify a Corporate Purpose? You Don’t Have To Save the World
It’s easy to declare yourself a purpose-driven organisation. It’s much harder, however, to identify just the right purpose to elevate your business strategy and operations.
Many companies are driven by stakeholders’ demands to stand for more than just profits. The belief that building a compassionate corporate culture helps to attract people, from partners and customers to employees, often drives organisations to align their business strategy closely to their company’s values. It is the primary way that companies build trust with their employees and customers.
So how do you identify and activate a purpose? Or decide on just one? Sustainability, diversity, equity, poverty, and upward mobility are all noble causes, but no company can effectively address them all.
Defining your purpose
To identify a purpose, leaders need to consider what their stakeholders (both internal and external) are passionate about, what is needed in the community and the world, and what the company is uniquely positioned to deliver.
Leaders need to look at what they’re already doing (a new product, service, partnership) and ask themselves how to use it as an opportunity to elevate and align it with a societal issue their stakeholders care about. They can then begin to articulate and fulfill their purpose in a more fruitful way.
Consider these examples, which are clear, precise, target real societal issues, and apply what each organisation does well to address them: Genius Group’s purpose is to build a successful community of purpose driven entrepreneurs, while The Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations (SFCCA) aims to preserve cultural traditions and connect new generations with their ancestral heritage. When trying to identify a corporate purpose, ask yourself these questions: How do we make a difference to our customers and our market? How do we do it differently? What do our employees love about their job?
Answering these questions helps organisations take a broader view while ensuring their purpose is not reduced to a marketing slogan or so exaggerated that it does not address precise needs.
Activating and elevating your purpose
Once you have articulated the unique “what” and “why” you do what you do, the next step (and indeed the bigger challenge) is activating it throughout the organisation. Mobilising every employee to march to the same beat and incorporating the purpose into their daily jobs are essential for a successful activation.
Business leaders need to be knowledgeable of business practices that undermine the credibility and integrity of their purpose. When stakeholders see a gap between what you say and what you do, you lose trust. But if you make a bold strategy move to align with your purpose, even if it requires a short-term cost, it’s an enormous boost to building trust and confidence in your organisation.
The company’s stated purpose can feel disconnected from its operations and strategy when values are not properly aligned with business strategy. Thus, the purpose becomes nothing more than empty words, and trust is either never gained, or worse — lost.
The goal is to drive employee behaviour, not parrot the company tagline, by communicating how each person’s job helps the company achieve its purpose.
Stay true to your purpose for trust with employees
The pandemic has accelerated many organisation’s purpose-driven initiatives. In recent months, the Great Resignation has driven business leaders to motivate their workforce with clarity of purpose. When you consider the importance consumers and employees place on trust and living your purpose, it’s easy to see why.
According to a global “Strength of Purpose” study by Zeno Group, consumers are four times more likely to trust and purchase from a brand with a strongly-articulated purpose. Moreover, they are 4.5 times more likely to champion the brand, and six times more likely to defend the brand in a challenging moment. In the State of the Connected Customer report, customers expect businesses to act responsibly. Eighty-five percent of customers say their purchase decisions are swayed by how companies treat employees and sixty-eight percent of customers around the world trust companies to act with society’s best interest in mind.
At the same time, employees, emboldened and empowered by the tight labour market, prefer to work for purpose-driven organisations.
Business leaders should ask themselves if their structure, systems, and resourcing equips employees to bring the organisational purpose to life. Specifically:
Are you a magnet for the right talent, hiring, and retaining people that allow you to excel at the capabilities needed to deliver on your purpose?
Do you connect with intention across boundaries, breaking down silos so people across the organisation can work together to achieve its purpose?
Do you invest in your purpose, putting your money where your purpose is?
A company that’s meeting all three criteria could position itself more authentically to job candidates, bring teams together for better collaboration, provide customers with a more connected experience, at the same time, allocate a percentage of its profits to underinvested communities.
Stay true to your purpose for trust with customers
Stakeholders, in particular customers, need to know and understand your purpose to develop trust. Have you defined your purpose as a solemn promise to your customer? Remember, the world may not need more software, sofas, or soap, but it does need companies to use their unique strength and passion to address real problems.
Not too long ago, a company’s trustworthiness centred primarily around protecting customer data, and its purpose was to sell products customers wanted. Not anymore. Customers have unparalleled choices, access to information, and a massive platform to share their opinions. Company values weigh more than how it used to be with 66% of customers stopped buying from a company whose values didn’t align with theirs — up from 62% in 2020.
If organisations can establish and constantly demonstrate their commitment to living their brand purpose to customers, trust will follow.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
How Financial Services Can Improve Customer Experience With a Data-Driven Approach
The pandemic has significantly changed customer behaviour across industries. To meet the evolving needs of customers, many businesses are accelerating the digitalisation of their services. Financial services institutions, in particular, are witnessing a rapid shift to the digital-first customer experience — where customers prefer to access a service virtually while expecting a seamless experience across channels. From opening a bank account online, to making investments or an insurance claim digitally in minutes, today’s customers expect quick, convenient service with minimal in-person interaction.
To meet these growing expectations of customers, many banks are transitioning from traditional banking to ‘open finance’. This new model allows customers to access an online marketplace and choose from a range of financial services, including banking, insurance, and wealth management, tailored to their specific needs. It gives customers better control of their finances and increases access to fairer and more equal financial services. This shift to digital-first customer experience is here to stay and will continue to evolve.
According to McKinsey, 75% of first time digital channel users will keep using these channels, even as lockdowns and social restrictions continue to ease. This has also significantly shifted the service standards expected by customers. 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across marketing channels and departments. And if the customer service offered by a business is good, 91% of customers want to maintain that relationship.
To deliver these hyper-personalised experiences, financial services institutions need to have a comprehensive view of the customer journey. So how are they developing their digital capabilities to meet the service standards expected today?
Turning challenges into opportunities
Gaining insights into customer needs is critical in delivering fast and seamless service. While financial services institutions have digitally transformed their systems, many have been slow to embrace service transformation. Siloed customer data on legacy systems makes it a challenge for service agents to seamlessly engage customers.
63% of customer service agents say they struggle to balance speed and quality of service. And 79% of service professionals say it is impossible to provide great service without a complete view of customer interactions. These challenges faced by service agents are impacting customer experience. Only 27% of banking customers say they received great customer service and support. And 80% of customers will switch to another company after just one poor experience.
To meet the high expectations of today’s customers, financial service institutions are investing in improving quality of service. C-suite executives are increasingly making customer experience and engagement a top business priority. One of their key focus areas is the transformation of the contact centre — an important customer experience touchpoint.
Critical to the contact centre’s quality of service is the ability to understand changing customer needs. Service agents need to have a single view of customer data across channels and departments. They also need to access financial transaction data (e.g. credit card, investments, loans etc.) from systems outside the organisation. Being able to bring all this data together to gain customer insights provides an important opportunity to improve customer service. This allows service agents to stay informed of customer behaviour and provide them the best experience.
Good data culture delivers a great customer experience
A cloud-based CRM is a powerful tool that can help your customer service teams stay connected to customers. It enables service agents to access customer data and interactions from anywhere in a secured online environment. When combined with a visual analytics platform like Tableau and CRM Analytics, your CRM can unlock the power of data and gain actionable insights to deliver faster, more efficient service.
Tableau empowers service agents with these data-driven insights to accelerate their decision-making. By prioritising data-driven decision making, you can build a good data culture in your teams. And by giving each team member insight into exactly what they need to make excellent decisions, you can help them consistently meet their customer service KPIs.
When a leading insurance provider in the Asia-Pacific region used LIKE.TG with Tableau, they were able to better understand the customer journey. This empowered their contact centre with insights to provide faster, more impactful service. Tableau analytics dashboards helped their teams track application status and issue policies in a timely manner. By combining data from across teams, Tableau helped their teams gain visibility into customer engagements and the end-to-end insurance journey. This significantly improved their speed and quality of service. Their senior executives were also able to continuously monitor business performance on dashboards and quickly respond to market changes. A data-driven approach helped both their C-suite and contact centre achieve operational excellence.
Adopt a winning approach, driven by data
Together, Tableau and LIKE.TG Customer 360 can empower your financial services institution to meet the expectations of today’s digital-first customers. Your service agents have access to unified customer data in a “single pane of glass” with key insights across the customer journey. Your business can see the world through your customers’ eyes.
With a comprehensive overview of the connected customer journey, financial services providers have all the information they need to elevate customer experience, improve operational efficiency, and drive loyalty. By adopting a data-driven approach, you can develop a distinct competitive advantage and transform your business from a cost centre into a revenue driver.
Learn how to delight your customers by crafting an unrivalled and personalised customer experience through connected data, digital intelligence, and automation.
How To Deliver a Successful Product Launch
Your brand has a new product on the way. Your marketing team has spent months partnering with product management to understand the roadmap and build messaging and positioning. Now it’s time for the fun part: telling the world about this new innovation with a product launch.
LIKE.TG defines a product launch as announcing a new offering to the public. Launches are opportunities to tell compelling stories about your product, not just about its functionality but also the impact it will have on people.
A passionate and relevant story builds trust with your core audience. That trust extends to increased awareness and excitement about the new product’s features. And that ultimately leads to more sales.
So how do you deliver a great launch? It’s a big, coordinated effort with product, sales, marketing, public relations, analyst relations, and events teams. Let’s take a look at the three types of launches that we have at LIKE.TG and what we’ve learned over the past few years.
How to create a marketing launch
A marketing launch is often called a “soft launch” and is used when introducing a new product — typically three to six months before general availability (GA) to the public. We do this to build the excitement that leads to the GA of the product and allow early adopters to test it.
Soft launches give our product team a chance to see how customers will use the product and what can be improved. Marketers can later use these customer stories when the product launches.
A key to success in this early launch is communicating the value of your new product to the media. Earned media is one of the best awareness you can get. Marketers and PR teams must deliver a clear, concise, and consistent story that’s interesting, easy to understand, and is a conversation starter. What makes your new product so interesting and why should people care? Demo videos, blogs, emails, and small events can all work together to explain the answer.
Planning a successful GA launch
Once your product has finished its pilot program, the product team will be ready to make it generally available to the masses. Preparing for a general availability launch is no small feat.
As a marketer, the sales team is your main audience for a GA launch. Your job is to help them clearly explain the product’s value to customers.
Sales can be a tough audience! They’ll want content that is clear and direct, which means no marketing fluff. At a large company like LIKE.TG, we believe in keeping it simple and relevant. We focus on use cases: how are customers adopting the product? We also focus on industry-specific cases and always factor how the product ties to the rest of the sales portfolio.
Sales is a priority, but your external audience is also crucial during a GA launch. We’ve found that events are a great way to generate excitement and show the product in action. LIKE.TG is an events-driven company, and programs like Dreamforce, LIKE.TG Live: Asia and our travelling World Tours help us scale the launches of the newest versions of the products when they become GA.
There’s another benefit. Having a large audience of customers in one place allows us to answer their questions and have meaningful conversations — not to mention celebrating everyone’s success.
Support customers with a solution launch
So you launched a new product, and it’s finally available to the public. Your job’s done, right? Not quite yet.
Solution launches showcase a relevant application of the product for a line of business or an industry.
Products often evolve with customers’ wants and needs. This may happen fast or over a longer period. After a GA launch, you may discover new applications for your product. Or maybe there was a major world event or a shift in the economy that turned everything on its head.
A solution launch is a way to tell customers, ‘here’s why this product is relevant to you,’ by showing them additional innovations and integrations that are coming.
Solution changes also help you extend your marketing reach. You can use them to craft your product message targeting a specific industry or business area. These are great ways to expand into new markets and test which solutions increase your product’s overall sales.
Now that you’re familiar with the different kinds of launches, here are three quick tips to help you plan for your next product launch.
Tip #1: Understand your product launch goal
Are you entering a new market? Are you building and keeping momentum for an existing product? Are you showcasing a new feature or capability? It takes a lot of people across many different teams to make a launch successful, so make sure everyone is clear on what the shared purpose is.
Tip #2: Know the product
Become best buddies with your product teams. No one knows the product better than the people building it, so collaborate with them early and often. Roll up your sleeves and get hands-on with product functionality, study the product roadmap, and ask questions when something is unclear. The more you understand about your product, the easier it will be to lead different teams through a launch.
Tip #3: Be nimble
Things can change fast during a launch, so you have to be flexible while staying focused on your goal. I always say that nothing is precious during a launch. In order to move the project forward, you need to accept feedback and make the right decisions, even if it means making a turnaround.
Product launches are an exciting way to bring people together across product, sales, and marketing. If done right, you’ll not only delight your customers but also bring your team together around a common goal. That will set you up for success both in the short term and over the long haul. Happy launching!
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Level up Your Data Skills With the New CRM Analytics Release
The CRM Analytics Summer ’22 Release brings a variety of exciting updates and new features. The new release from CRM Analytics (formerly known as Tableau CRM) will allow you to seamlessly access, collaborate, and share insights from anywhere.
Here are some exciting features in the Summer ’22 release:
Leverage machine learning to extract keywords from large text fields with Einstein Discovery Text Clustering.
Discover data insights using natural language search and automated recommendations with the Ask Data for LIKE.TG.
Bring data to every conversation and share insights and predictions from anywhere with the CRM Analytics app for Slack and Predictions in Slack.
With new enhancements in Data Manager, get the additional features built around recipe sharing (folders), recipe chaining, and recipe visualisation.
Let’s take a deeper look at some new features in this CRM analytics summer release.
Discover insights from your unstructured data
Today’s businesses are resting on vast amounts of data, the majority of which is unstructured. The most common type of unstructured data is text. Unstructured text data is generated in various forms, including survey responses, emails, messages, social media sites, and blog posts. To access the unused insights from the unstructured data, we are introducing Einstein Discovery Text Clustering in Summer ’22.
Unstructured data in raw form often cannot be used to input into discovery. With Text Clustering, you can discover key words from large text fields to make data-related decisions. The words that have less information are clustered together and added to a separate bucket. This way, you can focus on the important keywords to uncover hidden insights and improve decision-making by reducing unstructured data. Using Text Clustering, you can pull keywords from a raw field and input them into the discovery model and story. Not only that, you can also check the types of words driving it from the story.
Clusters of rows show the top three keywords for each cluster (2). You can uncheck clusters to filter them into an “Other” category.
Ask data a question and search insights with Ask Data for LIKE.TG
With Ask Data for LIKE.TG, you can ask questions from the data without building a dashboard. It augments natural language querying and autocomplete suggestions to help you find insights quickly and easily. You can select any data, fields, and values to map with your question.
The search insight page recommends top insights consisting of a configured visualisation or metric. It also includes recommended next best insights and related dashboards matching your search. Additionally, it gives you the chance to revise your questions on the spot. You can dive into the associated items directly, share and explore the next best insights right from the page.
Note: Ask Data for LIKE.TG is enabled by default in production orgs with 1,000 or more reports. The service becomes available 24 hours after it’s enabled. If you have fewer than 1,000 reports in production, but want to try Ask Data for LIKE.TG, contact LIKE.TG Support.
The Search Insights is an instantly configured visualisation or metric that recommends top insight (1). The Insights page includes recommended next best insights (2), asset recommendations related to the search (3), and opportunities to revise your questions on the spot.
Collaborate and share insights from anywhere with CRM Analytics for Slack
You can now leverage Slack’s collaborative competence to provide insights to a broader audience. By integrating CRM Analytics (Formerly called Tableau CRM) dashboards and Einstein predictions into Slack, you can increase collaboration and decision-making.
CRM Analytics for Slack empowers everyone with real-time insights and most important metrics right within their Slack workflows. It gives access to AI-powered recommendations and insights within Slack and allows everyone to take action to drive results.
For example, you can browse for recent and favourite dashboards, reports, and lenses, or if you want to share specific insights with your manager, browse and share the dashboard directly from Slack. Share a snapshot of the dashboards and your findings with your entire team or channels and loop in external partners, vendors, or customers with Slack connect.
Stay on top of all your data with notifications and subscriptions. Whenever your metrics meet certain thresholds, you get notified automatically, and you can also select to alert a specific team or channel. You can also get regular snapshots of reports from the CRM Analytics dashboards.
Customers can access AI-powered predictions from Einstein Discovery right within Slack and share them with their team. Predictive models can be applied to a report’s base object to obtain aggregated predictions.
Integrated CRM Analytics dashboards and Einstein predictions in Slack.
Unlock new Data Manager enhancements in the CRM analytics summer release
With our new, revamped Data Manager, you can instantly access all your data. You can view all the connections in the column list in the connection view and get clearer visibility of your data usage and limits from the new Usage view.
You will get advanced functionality with a brand new look when you open the Data Manager from the Analytic Studio home page. There is always a risk that the data volume or the processing might exceed any of the limits we specify for our product, so having a centralised view of these limits is essential. Check if a product is nearing its limit from the usage section. Switch between CRM Analytics and LIKE.TG Data Pipelines if you have the correct license to access more data.
The new Data Manager shows how you can improve execution, usability, and scalability.
The new Data Manager focuses more on Data recipes than Dataflows. With this new enhancement, we encourage all customers to use data recipes. But, Dataflows are not going away completely. You can manage your Dataflows or create live Datasets by opening the old data manager link provided at the bottom.
Level up your data skills with the new CRM Analytics release and learn how it can provide intelligent insights to your business.
WATCH DEMO
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Einstein Delivers Personalisation Throughout the Customer Lifecycle
With inputs from Vikrant Deshmukh, Senior Solution Engineer
Even if the first impression is not the last one, there is no denying that it creates an impact. Personalisation, from the very beginning, can be a differentiator between winning a loyal customer and losing a lead.
However, a lot goes behind delivering personalised experiences, such as connecting different touchpoints and functions or building a comprehensive and complete customer view. From marketing to service, businesses are constantly innovating and strategising to improve multi-channel engagement, customer profiling, and personalised service.
The most frequently asked question is — what can be done to personalise interactions that can take customers further on their brand journey?
Streamlining and personalising customer experience using AI-powered recommendations
When it comes to nurturing customers, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered tools can help any business function or team know what the next best actions are to deliver personalised experiences.
AI can help you capture large amounts of data such as customer interaction history, location, preferences, and case history, and derive accurate and actionable insights from it. You can use this information to determine what your customer wants to do next or the next logical step for them.
Withthe help of a virtual task force, you can simplify processes, improve access to information, and suggest the next ideal steps for your business. This helps marketers, sales reps, service agents, and management teams to make informed decisions that ‘wow’ customers.
LIKE.TG Einstein is our integrated AI engine that can increase team productivity, and improve customer experience at every stage of the customer journey. Einstein’s Next Best Action helps with:
Discovering hidden insights
Predicting future outcomes
Recommending the next logical step
This feature assists users by delivering the right information at the right time based on a predictive model. Imagine seeing a pop-up on your dashboard that suggests products a customer may like. With the click of a button, you can compile them into a personalised message and send it on their preferred channel. Tailored recommendations can be sent to the customer at impactful moments without delay or errors.
If you’re resolving a case related to on-premises services, you will know exactly what actions you can ask your customer to take while waiting for the field agent to arrive.
Here’s how Einstein and Einstein Next Best Action can simplify your decision-making process and help you take the right actions:
Einstein for Marketing
Ask marketers what the most important aspect of a successful campaign is, and you’ll get various answers. What goes behind a successful campaign is knowing the right time and channels to reach your customers with the right messaging. When designing a marketing campaign or customer journey, Einstein can suggest the ideal channels and instances to interact with customers at different stages of their journey.
With Einstein Marketing Cloud, recommendations based on customer preferences or intent can help you create personalised messages and content. This helps you understand your customers better to implement contextual marketing campaigns.
Einstein Next Best Action for Sales
Once the customer is convinced they want to engage with your brand, closing the deal presents a new set of challenges. A salesperson should know the offers or products that have attracted the customer. For instance, customers are unlikely to be interested in a previously purchased product. Instead, a recommendation based on supporting products can help with upselling.
LIKE.TG Einstein allows users to fetch information regarding purchase history from the customer profile with just a click. This makes upselling and cross-selling much easier.
Imagine this scenario — a customer has seen a certain product and added it to their cart. However, they don’t checkout and the cart is abandoned. An AI-enabled recommendation pops up on the salesperson’s dashboard. These recommendations could look like:
Send a custom offer that bundles the product in a cart with another ideal product for their customer segment.
Send them a reminder that their cart is waiting.
Send them more information regarding the product and the support you can promise if they complete the purchase.
Einstein Next Best Action for Service
Once a customer has purchased from a business, the best way to ensure loyalty is by providing services that stand out. This can be done by letting your customer know you care and providing them with a seamless service.Instilling a feeling of familiarity by using their name, not making them repeat grievances they have already shared, and following up on feedback they’ve given show you value their association with the brand. All of this can be greatly improved with a 360-degree view of the customer.
AI recommendations with a holistic view of the customer can enable service agents to:
Send informational content that solves customer issues with ease
Send quick replies that keep the customer engaged while a solution is being fetched
Conduct relevant surveys to ensure satisfaction
Remind customers to renew subscriptions or contracts to build long-standing relationships with your brand
Send loyalty rewards or offers to customers close to attrition
Upsell and cross-sell relevant products
LIKE.TG Einstein for customer-centric businesses
Now, if we revisit the question posed earlier — What action will be most effective in moving a customer ahead in their journey with the brand?
Einstein can tell you exactly that. It can tell users if:
Campaigns are effective
Sales goals are achieved
Customers are enjoying their interactions with the brand
Then, it makes recommendations that can help any team take the next best steps to deliver more relevant and consistent customer experiences across channels.
This post originally appeared on the LIKE.TG India blog.
How To Build A Productive Lead Generation Strategy That Works
Our goal as marketers is to attract people to our brand. But not just any people: we want to draw prospects with a high likelihood of becoming customers. Good lead-generation tactics can help.
We define lead generation as the process of creating consumer interest for a service or product, with the end goal of turning that interest into revenue.
Leads can be generated when a consumer downloads a piece of content, signs up for a free trial, or creates an account for a free product. They come from organic channels, such as Google search, and paid channels, such as advertising campaigns.
Generating mass appeal is good for brand awareness, but here’s the thing: not all leads are created equal. Running a strong lead-generation program is not about the quantity of leads we generate. It’s about ensuring quality leads by targeting the right people, at the right time, and delivering the right content on the right channel to them in their customer journey.
Want to learn more about building a productive lead generation strategy? Here are three tips to grow more leads, using examples from how we do things here at LIKE.TG.
1. How to measure lead generation tactics
An important metric is a key indicator of business growth and can be tied to the increase in product engagement and revenue. It’s something the entire organisation can rally behind.
Our marketing team key metric is when an opportunity reaches the second stage of thesales funnel. At that point, our sales development team has vetted a prospect, and the prospect is verified and accepted by an account executive.
Our sales team will estimate the potential revenue from the opportunity, allowing the marketing team to also begin tracking a return on investment. From here, we start to build our measurement framework. We use this metric to measure the success of our lead generation tactics and improve programs.
When measuring, it’s important to gauge which sources are bringing in high-quality leads. Are they social platforms like LinkedIn, email newsletters, or ad partners like Google? Also, make sure the money spent on ads is generating high-quality users.
An example of a high-quality lead is a ‘hand raiser’ — someone who engages with the brand or asks for information (like requesting a demo or free trial). A passive lead is someone who provides contact info to download an ebook but hasn’t expressed other interest. We pay close attention to hand-raiser leads because they have a higher chance of becoming customers.
We focus on content performance from the highest-quality sources of leads. If traffic is dropping from a top-quality lead source, we react quickly because of the expected downstream effect. Possible tweaks include changing our ad design or ad copy, adjusting our paid investment or updating a call to action (CTA).
2. Develop strategies to get the right leads
There is a saying that goes ‘a lead is a lead,’ but that’s a big misconception.
Customer insight and interest is valuable, and social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn generate revenue by offering targeted advertising that uses the customer data they’ve collected. So, a more targeted campaign on LinkedIn will cost significantly more than a general banner ad.
Some leads can be less costly and have huge scale, but are low quality because they aren’t reaching people who are looking for specific products or services (and therefore less likely to convert).
Other leads are more expensive but target people who are ready to buy. And then there is everyone in between.
The various channels, targeting options, and content that we pair together to acquire leads can produce hundreds or even thousands of iterations. We have to recognise the lead generation tactics that produce quality leads and at what cost.
For example, on LinkedIn, our target is sales managers within the financial services industry who have interacted with our business once in the past. We serve them a customer story from a banking customer. These leads might be more expensive, but they’re highly likely to convert, so the cost is worth it.
3. How to test lead generation tactics
Improving the efficiency of lead generation tactics is crucial — no matter if it is a one-person team at a startup or a larger team at an enterprise.
At LIKE.TG, we improve lead quality and ROI by using Marketing Cloud Intelligence to run tests on our paid ads. We run a test by delivering two or more versions of ad copy or form pages to different segments of our audience at the same time and seeing which ones perform best.
These tests are done on our highest-trafficked content. We’ve found that even the most basic changes have driven significant returns — and then we can apply those changes to other programs to make them more efficient as well.
For example, we ran a simple test changing the layout of the several fields in a form that readers filled out to access a piece of content. It was simple — just shortening the vertical length of the form. This change increased form submission on desktop computers by 10%. We now do this on all our forms.
Again, not all tests require massive change of content. What matters the most is when we do find wins, they are used across many of our programs.
Building the right lead-generation tactics takes some work. But when it is done efficiently, these tactics will save cost and time, and bring in new revenue.
Building relationships with your customers is vital for your business growth. Learn how to get the most out of your leads and take your business from good to great from this guide.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Keep Your Data Secure and Accessible From Anywhere With Hyperforce
With inputs from Deepu Chacko, Senior Director, Solution Engineering
Businesses today must make decisions quickly to gain a competitive edge over others. Whether it is figuring out product pricing or planning customer engagement strategy, quick decision making boosts business performance. Using public cloud providers makes it easy to access data on the go for informed decision-making. But when companies run critical business functions and operations on a public cloud, they also need to consider certain key aspects such as:
Availability
Collecting relevant data, particularly first party, and providing it to authorised users when they need it. Your cloud infrastructure should support the right channels, integrations, and compute capacity to ensure a seamless exchange of information amongst business stakeholders.
Confidentiality
The encryption of both data in transit and at rest, and the availability of access control options to restrict unauthorised data usage.
Integrity
Maintaining data accuracy and real-time updates, with no tampering or modification.
Amping up cloud benefits with LIKE.TG Hyperforce
Your customer data resides on LIKE.TG Customer 360 for a holistic view of the customer. How do you ensure that it can only be accessed by people who need this access? How do you adhere to local data regulations while making data globally accessible?
Consider this:On any given day, LIKE.TG customers deliver an average of 2.6 billion marketing messages, create 4 million leads, and log 19.7 million customer service conversations. In addition,LIKE.TG Einsteindelivers more than 80 billion AI predictions.
That is a lot of data.
Realising the fluidity of today’s business environment and the massive changes sweeping across every industry, LIKE.TG has reimagined its platform architecture —Hyperforce. With Hyperforce, LIKE.TG customers get enhanced data security and privacy when they build custom applications using the LIKE.TG Platform, or use any product from the vast LIKE.TG suite.
Anshul Bhatnagar, Head of Software Engineering Architecture at M1, said Hyperforce helps with regulatory compliance. “To be compliant with Singapore regulatory requirements, Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data must be kept within Singapore. When our org was in Japan, we were having a lot of data flowing over the internet and experienced a lot of chattiness. With Hyperforce Singapore, latency has dropped and we are now planning to march the PII data back into LIKE.TG.”
What does this mean to you, as a LIKE.TG user?
Instead of having an abstract, self-service cloud infrastructure (aka public cloud providers) you now have an architecture especially designed to help you scale business faster, and more securely. Here’s how:
Centralise data control through restricted user access
Using the Zero Trust principle, all the best security practices have been standardised. This means that whenever there is a new security protocol, it’s applied automatically and consistently across the infrastructure. You don’t need to worry about defining new access rules because ‘if they aren’t verified, they don’t get access.’ After all, that’s what the Zero Trust approach to security is all about.
For instance, the senior managers of a company may have the right to access specific data and share it with external partners, while a junior associate may not have the same rights.
Comply with global regulations while enjoying local storage zones
Some highly regulated industries such as finance and healthcare have a different set of compliances that need to be followed. For instance, data needs to be locally stored.
With Hyperforce in action, customers can innovate freely and tap into new opportunities the world over, but get to choose the location for their data storage with zero worries around data security and compliance.
Scale fluidly without the hassle of reconfiguration
With the new infrastructure architecture, you can deploy LIKE.TG apps and services using the agility and scale of public clouds. Enjoy true cloud elasticity — your needs are recalibrated depending on your requirements. You don’t have to worry about making patches or changes to resources since LIKE.TG Hyperforce will replace it in a group with each updated version.
Equip your engineering teams while making your business future proof
Your engineering teams can stay focused on building features your customers want, while LIKE.TG has your back with the cloud-native architecture of Hyperforce. Your teams can provide a world class experience to customers, and simultaneously scale up LIKE.TG apps.
Accelerate business with Hyperforce
Deploy solutions at scale in more locations around the world using the public cloud. Enjoy faster in-country performance and reduced latency, while ensuring built-in compliance with global security protocols.
Signed Up for a Trailhead Account? Here Are Your Next 4 Steps
Signing up for a Trailhead account is just the beginning! Discover the steps you can take today to accelerate your LIKE.TG learning and career journey.
Step 1: Discover your ideal role Step 2: Make time for learning and plan your path Step 3: Build in-demand skills Step 4: Get support and build connections
Trailhead — LIKE.TG’s free online learning platform — helps Trailblazers worldwide skill up and prepare for success in the LIKE.TG ecosystem. It all begins with a simple first step: creating your Trailhead account. But that’s just the start of your learning adventure.
With Trailhead, you can learn more about your ideal LIKE.TG role, build in-demand skills and connections, earn badges and credentials, and accelerate your learning with expert-led classes — everything to help you prepare for a successful career in the LIKE.TG ecosystem.
Here are four next steps to help you boost your LIKE.TG learning journey.
Step 1: Discover your ideal role
A 2021 study from IDC found that the LIKE.TG ecosystem will create 9.3 million new jobs and USD$1.6 trillion in new business revenues worldwide by 2026. IDC forecasts that cloud-related technologies will account for over a third (37%) of digital transformation IT spending by 2026.
In addition to this explosive growth, careers in the ecosystem offer competitive salaries. On average, jobs with LIKE.TG skills pay around USD$80,000 per year. With this tremendous opportunity on the horizon, there’s no better time to explore LIKE.TG careers. With LIKE.TG Career Paths, you can learn more about which career is right for you.
With LIKE.TG Career Paths, you can explore:
Role descriptions: Browse roles, including LIKE.TG Administrator, Developer, Architect, Marketing, Sales, and Designer roles, and view up-to-date career information like salary averages, job growth rates, and even open positions.
Trailhead learning paths: Kick-start your career with curated learning paths — Trailhead trailmixes — including the Build Your Admin Career on LIKE.TG, Marketing Analytics Director, and the Build Your Developer Career on LIKE.TG trailmixes, to name a few.
Stories from real Trailblazers: Get inspired by actual Trailblazers in the field. Learn about their career paths and how you can follow in their footsteps to develop the skills and experience to secure a job in the LIKE.TG ecosystem.
Step 2: Make time for learning and plan your path
While you’re exploring LIKE.TG roles, Trailhead learning paths, and stories from real Trailblazers in your career of interest, you’re also blazing your unique journey to success. Of course, this journey and definition look different for every Trailblazer, so take the time to figure out what it means to you.
A great way to start exploring what success means for you is by motivating yourself to go further with Trailblazer Ranks. Unlock new ranks by challenging yourself to earn more points and badges while building in-demand skills along the way.
You can kick off your rank journey with Road to Ranger. This is a curated learning path designed to create the perfect combination of badges and points to eliminate guesswork from achieving your final rank status — Trailhead Ranger. Road to Ranger consists of three trailmixes (think of these as learning playlists):
Trailmix 1: Get started with the basics about Trailhead, LIKE.TG, and some important guiding principles.
Trailmix 2: Take a look at our technology, including learning more about how the LIKE.TG Platform supercharges customer relationship management (CRM), Marketing Cloud, and Einstein Basics.
Trailmix 3: Get hands-on and earn some points! Explore trails on everything from protecting LIKE.TG data to Admin Essentials.
Step 3: Build in-demand skills
Learning is a reward in itself. But there’s always room for some extra motivation. With Trailhead Quests, you challenge yourself by learning new skills with the added incentive of winning prizes.
Whether you’re new to LIKE.TG, thinking about getting certified, or you just want to keep earning those Trailhead badges, there’s a quest for you.
Kick-off questing in three easy steps:
Choose your quest: Pick which one works best for you from the Trailhead Quests page — from beginner to expert, there’s a quest for everyone.
Complete the challenge: Follow the instructions listed on the specific quest, and make sure to complete your quest within the specific timeframe.
Be in with a chance to win: Complete your quest to receive shiny community badges that will be shown on your profile.
If you’re new to Trailhead, kick off your quest journey with the Beginner’s Quest trailmix. Quests change regularly, so join the Trailhead Quests Group to stay up-to-date on all things quests.
Step 4: Get support and build connections
The Trailblazer Community is a worldwide network — millions of Trailblazers from all walks of life inspire and support one another along the journey of learning and succeeding with LIKE.TG. The Trailblazer Community is where you can connect with fellow Trailblazers based on your location, role, and interests.
With the Trailblazer Community, you can:
Develop in-demand skills: Follow featured and trending topics and find fast answers to your questions on key topics in the Trailblazer Community Topics forum.
Connect with fellow Trailblazers: Find and join one or more of the 1,300+ Community Groups and meetings across 90 countries.
Give back: Share your knowledge and build your network by answering questions on the Trailblazer Community Feed and volunteering to help new Trailblazers skill up and find jobs through Trailblazer Mentorship and Trailblazer Workforce Partners.
Choose your adventure!
There’s something for everyone on Trailhead, no matter your learning and career goals. If you haven’t already, sign up for your free account and start blazing new trails today!
Popular Trailhead badges to get you started
LIKE.TG CRM: Learn how to use CRM software to grow your business.
LIKE.TG Platform Basics: Get introduced to the platform, navigate use cases, and build custom functionality.
Accounts Contacts for Lightning Experience: Discover how accounts and contacts work together in LIKE.TG.
Data Management: Learn how to import and export data in LIKE.TG.
Data Modeling: Give your data structure with objects, fields, and relationships.
Trailhead Playground Management: Create hands-on orgs, practice your LIKE.TG skills, and complete Trailhead challenges.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
What Is MuleSoft?
This post was updated in August 2022.
MuleSoft has been part of the LIKE.TG family for more than two years. During that time, we’ve been helping companies achieve digital transformation by easily connecting all their business systems. So, what does MuleSoft do? Let’s explore the powerful world of integration.
IT innovation takes on a new urgency
Over the last few years, organisations relied on IT to support a rapid shift to remote working. Day-to-day operational demands have always taken up too much of IT’s time, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic period. As businesses gradually move toward hybrid working, the number of systems and amount of data that companies need to manage has increased. This creates an integration barrier to automation progress which 96% of companies find it difficult to overcome.
According to the 2022 Connectivity Benchmark report, organisations asked IT, on average, to deliver on 40% more projects over the last 12 months. Organisations are increasing IT budgets (5.8% in 2021), but not in line with the growing demands from the business. This is contributing to a widening IT delivery gap for many companies.
At the same time, many organisations are accelerating digital transformation. Digital transformation is no longer seen as an option, but a necessity. Customers expect fast, digital, and on-demand experiences, or they will take their business elsewhere.
The more digital transformation initiatives that need to be implemented, the wider the delivery gap gets. It’s a balance most organisations still struggle to find. The central pillar to solve this huge challenge is to understand how integration drives digital transformation.
MuleSoft automation addresses those concerns with capabilities that allow customers to automate any process for any team. Enter MuleSoft.
So, what does MuleSoft do?
Customers expect connected experiences. They don’t want to see the seams where your systems and departments meet.
MuleSoft brings a new unified solution for automation, integration, and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that easily automates any workflow and system for your team. It helps your team to quickly adapt to constant change and business complexity. This makes it easy to consolidate data to deliver a single view of the customer to build connected experiences.
The solution now includes no-code capabilities to automate repetitive manual tasks using bots with MuleSoft RPA (robotic process automation). It can quickly connect data from any system, such as Slack with MuleSoft Composer. The new capabilities are fully integrated into LIKE.TG Flow, a comprehensive suite of automation technologies across the Customer 360 to increase efficiency and productivity and deliver unparalleled experiences.
This expanded MuleSoft capabilities facilitate co-creation and accelerate innovation across IT and business teams. Business teams such as sales can close deals more efficiently and service reps can quickly sync customer records to improve customer service interactions.
The results speak for themselves. LIKE.TG customers are creating 4.8 billion MuleSoft transactions daily and this saves over 100 billion hours of work every month with LIKE.TG Flow. Forrester found that MuleSoft customers realise an ROI of 445% within just three years and were able to free up 90% of developer time from maintaining APIs and integrations.
MuleSoft case study
Let’s use an example. One of the world’s largest consumer goods providers wanted to find more efficient solutions to deploy new products and services. Their goal was to roll out a new ecommerce initiative quickly, to engage directly with customers through both digital and in-store channels, and deliver a better customer experience. However, delivering end-to-end automation is broader than what their IT team can handle on its own.
To make this happen, IT and business teams need to work together to facilitate the change as multiple tools to its ecommerce platform, such as LIKE.TG Commerce Cloud, SAP, and NetSuite need to be integrated. Using a custom code path, the IT teams would need to:
Spend IT time, effort, and resources to build three separate integrations while also including security considerations.
Hire an employee who understood the thousands of fields in their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, the various systems required for their new ecommerce platform, and was able to build each integration.
Create additional integrations if they ever change any of the systems they use.
Spend time and effort on training the other teams to use the various systems.
Instead, the company decided to adopt MuleSoft to enable the connectivity between tools and collaboration between teams. Using MuleSoft RPA, the company started by building an automation platform that connects with Anypoint Platform and Composer to eliminate manual tasks and processes. MuleSoft RPA takes only the information needed from the relevant systems, combines it, and exposes it in a simple and accessible format. That means:
Repetitive and manual tasks can be replaced with bots that can intelligently process data from any system, document, photo, or legacy user interface. These bots can also be securely shared and reused across teams.
Applications with pre-build enterprise connectors and bots can be seamlessly integrated with both MuleSoft Composer and MuleSoft RPA.
Automations can benefit from hundreds of connectors to important systems and even directly call APIs created by technical teams.
Teams can use MuleSoft RPA to automate workflows across multiple systems and apps by integrating RPA bots seamlessly with LIKE.TG Customer 360, Anypoint Platform, and MuleSoft Composer.
IT teams can govern, monitor, and secure any automation and integration built with APIs or bots with Anypoint Platform.
In other words, business teams can gain productivity instantly with no-code automation, and leadership teams can immediately start to create and reuse composable assets to transform business. Thanks to MuleSoft, the IT and business teams are now working together on one platform to deliver unparalleled customer experiences. Today, deployment for new initiatives is 3-4 times faster — dropping from months to days.
How LIKE.TG and MuleSoft can be leveraged together
MuleSoft can connect any system, application, data, and device to unleash the power of Customer 360. The combined power of MuleSoft, the #1 integration platform, and LIKE.TG, the #1 CRM, enables customers to accelerate digital transformation.
Together, MuleSoft and LIKE.TG give companies the ability to unlock data across systems, develop scalable integration frameworks, and ultimately create differentiated, connected experiences at a rapid pace. Across various integration patterns, LIKE.TG products, and third-party systems — the integration possibilities are endless. These include developing integrated applications with Lightning Platform, Heroku, Slack, and Tableau to achieve a single customer view in Sales Cloud and Service Cloud. By incorporating siloed third-party systems, and connecting LIKE.TG Customer 360 with legacy sources to synchronise order, invoice, and product information. With MuleSoft, repetitive work can be eliminated and that helps to increase employees’ productivity and reduce costs for customers.
Learn more about how MuleSoft RPA automate repetitive processes and tasks for your business.
Gain insights into the enterprise technological trends from IT leaders worldwide.
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Learn How To Innovate at the Speed of Singapore Airlines
The mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ doesn’t work in a trust-based economy where data security and data privacy are critical. Instead, businesses need to find ways to innovate fast without compromising security or building up technical debt.
Fortunately, achieving the right balance is a little easier today. DevOps and Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) provide the guardrails development teams need to move quickly and safely. This includes strong governance and practices like automated testing. Businesses like Singapore Airlines have also established their own best practices to innovate without disruption.
We spoke to Srinivasan Santhanam, Senior Principal Technologist at Singapore Airlines to learn about these and hear how the business keeps up with the demand for new features and digital experiences.
Here’s what we learned.
The right mindset and technical muscle are both keys to agility
Like many businesses during the pandemic, Singapore Airlines had to move fast to reimagine its customer touchpoints. It introduced online meal selection and other mobile services to provide a contactless journey.
Technology teams relied on two key levers to deliver these solutions within a tight timeframe. The first was a change in mindset.
“We didn’t have the luxury to ideate for a long time. So what we did during that time is cultivate a mindset of build-measure-learn. That allowed us to ideate and conceptualise solutions very quickly,” said Santhanam.
The second key lever was the technical muscle to translate these concepts into real-world solutions. Singapore Airlines already had a strong set of development tools and processes. The business had also shifted to cloud and serverless computing for greater agility.
“We had already set the ball rolling on our digital transformation and were leveraging platforms like LIKE.TG to deliver faster. What we needed to do was accelerate everything to meet customers’ expectations,” said Santhanam.
Barriers to agility highlight the need for good governance
We asked Santhanam about the barriers to delivering change faster. Using the iceberg analogy, he pointed out the visible or common barriers first. The largest barrier is not having the right tools and that’s followed by unsuitable processes.
“Incorrectly modelled processes create a lot of bottlenecks. Also, people are often too eager to automate and automation just makes a bad process worse,” said Santhanam. “People should first take a look at their processes — how they ideate, conceptualise, and deliver. They can then identify what they need to tighten before they automate.”
Other visible barriers include a lack of collaboration and transparency. For teams to move fast, they need to communicate and have visibility into the work created by their colleagues.
The invisible barrier Santhanam pointed out is technical debt. Application development projects often start with a minimum viable product. Then, when developers should be refactoring or restructuring code, they get tasked with new requirements and keep building.
“What happens over time is that a small system change requires significant effort because there are so many undocumented dependencies and much more that you need to test,” said Santhanam.
That’s why applying goodgovernancefrom the start of application development is so important. On top of that, businesses need a robust DevOps process with high levels of test automation to reduce production defects and downtime. The DevOps process should include an effective branching strategy that allows multiple teams to build and test in parallel using isolatedSandboxenvironments. In addition, data in these Sandboxes should be anonymised and protected using a solution like LIKE.TGData Mask. This will prevent any data leaks and ensure regulatory requirements are met.
New platforms and processes needed for seamless collaboration
While remote and hybrid working is now the norm, Singapore Airlines had to reimagine its ways of working early on in the pandemic. For example, it had to find a way for developers to collaborate and develop solutions in parallel without stepping on one another’s toes.
Sharing their learnings, Santhanam said teams needed secured platforms where they can collaborate and share visibility of their work. They also need training on how best to use these platforms.
“IT teams also need to organise their development processes in a way that makes it easier to collaborate. For example, they need to think about how they manage their source code and how they conduct code reviews,” said Santhanam.
Solving these human challenges is just as important as overcoming the technical barriers to innovating fast.
For more tips on how you can navigate both, watch the webinar ‘Success Anywhere: Innovate Fast. Scale with Confidence. Empower Everyone’.
4 Ways Financial Services Drive Growth With Personalised Experiences
Our research reveals firms must wrangle data better and track the entire customer journey to meet rising expectations. Prakash Thomas, Regional Vice President; Financial Services Health, LIKE.TG Industries; ASEAN, shares four ways financial services institutions (FSIs) can drive growth through great digital experiences.
Financial services customers have a message for their providers: they like doing business online — and they aren’t going back to pre-pandemic habits.
That’s the good news from LIKE.TG research on financial services trends and the state of banking, insurance, and wealth management. The not-so-good news is that globally, customers are often dissatisfied with the digital experiences being offered by financial services institutions.
In the past year, digital adoption has increased in varying degrees across banking, insurance, and wealth management. It has shown steady growth during a challenging time — continuing pandemic, growing inflation, and increasing economic and geopolitical uncertainty.
Against this backdrop, digital adoption is proving to be not just resilient but unstoppable. In Asia, high rates of smartphone usage are driving growth in e-commerce and creating more opportunities for businesses to offer embedded financial services. According to a McKinsey study “Future of Asia” (Oct 2021), many financial consumers across Asia are taking this “mobile-first” approach. This leads to a rise of digital ecosystems, including highly integrated super apps that offer a one-stop-shop for a range of services.
Banks are also introducing innovations like embedded finance and banking as-a-service platforms to participate in digital ecosystems. DBS Bank in Singapore, for example, is pursuing such digital ecosystem-based opportunities. It runs marketplaces in travel, mobility, and property, and an application programming interface (API) developer platform.
So how can FSIs improve the digital experiences of their customers? To help answer that question, LIKE.TG conducted a survey of 2,250 customers in nine countries in April. We also interviewed six senior financial services executives in strategy, business development, and innovation to help understand how to improve service where it matters.
Based on the responses we collected in The Future of Financial Services: Better Customer Experiences Start with Automation, here are our top insights:
1. Provide experiences that are easy and transparent
The pandemic has forced financial services to focus on constantly evolving their digital experience. Both B2C and B2B financial service players needed to quickly enhance their technical capabilities to deliver more value to customers on their digital channels. The first expectation from today’s customers is, ‘I want to be able to access things digitally. I want to have a really clean website or a login page where I can access all the right features. I want a really great app.’
If you don’t have these capabilities yet, that’s a risk. Financial service institutions are losing customers to competitors because the online experience isn’t easy or intuitive. The appeal of “easy” is driving customers to digital-first financial services. In our survey, nearly half of respondents said easy and fast setup, verification, onboarding, and first-time use of the app were pushing them to try out the newer financial apps. 41% cited an easy and intuitive user interface and navigation as reasons to test out these newcomers.
Transparency is another one of the financial services trends driving customers to newcomers. More than one in three survey respondents said they switched providers — whether banking, insurance, or wealth management — because of hidden fees and fine print. Then there’s the general category of unsatisfactory experiences that prompt customers to switch providers. More than one-third of insurance policyholders left their current provider for that reason.
2. Anticipate customer needs and show you care about their financial health
Customers don’t just want products. They want to work with financial services that care about their financial health and personalise recommendations. Based on the insights from our survey participants, the industry is still falling short of customer expectations. Only 16% of banking customers, 15% of insurance customers, and 25% of wealth management consumers strongly agree that their vendors are invested in their financial wellbeing. To win customer trust and loyalty, financial services institutions should offer differentiated and value added services.
Customers want you to anticipate their needs, similar to the way product companies know what customers want next or media companies anticipate which movies customers want to watch next. Only 11% of banking, 11% of insurance, and 18% of wealth management consumers agree that companies anticipate their financial needs. LIKE.TG research suggests FSIs can improve their ability to do this by using predictive personalisation based on each customer’s unique journey.
According to a McKinsey 2021 personal financial survey, Asia’s share of active digital banking users increased to 88% compared to 65% four years ago. This is driving financial services to innovate to drive additional online sales. The study notes that consumer adoption of digital channels was initially strongest for transactional services. However in 2020, even high-touch products like mortgages have started to move to online channels. Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation (OCBC) in Singapore launched a 60-minutes mortgage approval service for Singaporeans in May 2020 leveraging automation and straight-through processing of mortgages online. OCBC executed 30% of loans through this platform.
Another example is RCBC, a retail bank in the Philippines which has made significant progress in transforming customer engagement via intelligent automation. With Marketing Cloud, the bank was able to leverage customer transaction history and demographics data to establish behavioural patterns. This helped build more personalised, automated campaigns and journeys. The collective efforts of automation enabled ₱4.5 billion incremental deposits from the term deposit campaign. Delivering this successfully requires a strong tech foundation that enables end-to-end visibility of individual custom journeys.
3. Use automation behind the scenes to create great customer experiences
Creating simple automated workflows with customer data can enable delivering quick and efficient customer service. FSIs don’t need to change the entire systems or replace the whole infrastructure, according to the experts interviewed for the research. End-to-end automation can be complicated, expensive, and uncertain. Instead, they should strategically choose their specific problem spots and selectively apply automation for immediate ROI.
Wealth managers are using automation to improve onboarding and lay the groundwork for more profitable relationships. Insurers are also using automation and other technology to help significantly reduce underwriting time. Automation can have a major positive impact on B2B services, where paperwork is more complex and time-consuming than in B2C services.
4. Get creative with metrics to get a complete picture of customers
It can be especially hard for financial services institutions to create a holistic view of their customers. They don’t often have the same access to first-party data that retail businesses do. Plus, many large financial services companies are a combination of multiple smaller companies, which means customer data is scattered across different parts of the organisation.
The experts interviewed for The Future of Financial Services also recommend several ways to approach this challenge:
Forge partnerships with external data providers who can supplement customer insights.
Think more creatively about the types of data needed and track every step of the customer journey to identify pain points. This means going beyond tallying accounts and diving into types of accounts (whether or not they’re primary) and the ratio of low-margin and high-margin engagements.
Invite design partners to assess the customer journey and raise the quality of interactions.
Leverage digital distribution channels to create a platform for driving product innovations enriched by broader data sets from across the value chain.
Financial services trends point to a digital future
This post was localised based on the original atthe A.U. LIKE.TG blog.
How ACFC’s Vision for Customer Engagement Leads To Sustainable Growth
ACFC has been delighting Vietnamese fashionistas since 2009. The luxury fashion retailer is a member of the Imex Pan Pacific Group (IPPG), and markets more than 22 international fashion brands through a nationwide network of around 250 stores.
Despite building an impressive base of more than 2 million VIP customers, ACFC is striving to deliver even better customer experiences — both in-store and across digital channels.
Louis Nguyen, CEO of ACFC, says the company is facing the same challenges most retailers are contending with in the digital era, particularly when it comes to connecting with digital-native Millenials and Gen Zers.
“Young customers interact with brands not only through traditional channels like media and stores, but via multiple channels across physical and virtual spaces — from traditional e-commerce to live streaming and social commerce,” he says.
“Customer needs and preferences change rapidly, and brands have to catch up with these changes as quickly as possible,” he explains. “We must use customer insights to understand customer needs, so we can offer them personalised products and services that are relevant to their needs in real time.”
Delivering a total customer experience
Smart brands are using digital transformation to put their customers at the heart of everything they do. Louis says ACFC’s digital transformation vision aims to empower sustainable growth as an omni-channel retailer with a customer-centric mindset.
“Technology solutions help bring more value to our customers, and bind them to the company,” he explains. “Technology also transforms our business from a traditional retailer into a new digital retailer with more revenue streams than ever thought possible.”
Louis believes successful customer engagement is the source of sustainable growth, but effective engagement must extend beyond product or service offerings and marketing communications.
“We must deliver a total customer experience,” he says. “That means considering the feelings our customers have when visiting our bricks-and-mortar stores, ecommerce website and mobile app. They need to feel comfortable, at home with our brand, and that their specific needs and interests are understood.”
Chinh Dinh, CIO at ACFC who is directly responsible for the digital transformation of the business also shares the same vision as his CEO. Chinh works closely with executive directors and mid-level managers at ACFC to understand business needs and provide the technology initiatives that support business growth. He believes that for retailers to grow, they must be able to deliver personalised customer experiences.
Creating a 360-degree customer view
To achieve that, Chinh and his team have turned to LIKE.TG. They plan to use Customer 360 to build customer personas and deliver personalised customer experiences in real time.
“ACFC aims to use Customer 360 to collect customer-related information, gaining insights that we can then use to serve our customers better through real-time personalised offerings,” he says.
ACFC will draw on Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Interaction Studio and Datorama to build and deploy an integrated solution, with help from implementation partner Gimasys.
However, digital transformation doesn’t come without growing pains. Careful change management is often required to unify processes and people.
“Digital transformation is our motivating force for change,” says Chinh. “However, with new technology adoption, business processes change. People also need to change to align with the new way of doing business.”
Managing change for success
Chinh says training the ACFC team on LIKE.TG via Trailhead is helping to ease that transition, and initial employee feedback has been positive.
The critical element of a successful digital transformation, however, is a clear understanding of the reason for change.
“Be clear when you communicate why you are doing the transformation. Have a clear strategy and roadmap, but be ready to employ the change management process,” Chinh explains. “Then you will need partners to support and help you through the long, difficult but interesting journey of digital transformation.”
Customer engagement is the new currency of success in the digital era, and customer-centric technologies are putting more personalisation power in the hands of brands. ACFC is using LIKE.TG to develop a customer-centric mindset and deliver complete customer experiences across all online and offline channels.
To learn more about creating connected customer experiences, download The Secret to Seamless Service: Connected Channels ebook.
Find out how Customer 360 can help your brand deliver personalised customer experiences.
