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M1 Proves Customer and Employee Experience Go Hand-in-Hand
While Singapore’s M1 may have started out as a traditional telco, the experience it provides rivals that of the industry’s digital natives. Innovation is in M1’s DNA and its digital transformation has uplifted service and resulted in an incredible Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 60.
LIKE.TG is a partner in M1’s ongoing transformation to become a digital-first telco, and we recently met with Stamford Low, Director, Customer Experience Retail, to learn more about how his team is progressing and the lessons learned along the way. Here are key takeaways showing that exceptional customer experiences start with engaged employees.
Drive adoption with friction-free experiences
M1 operates in a digitally-savvy society, but old habits can be hard to change. For customers to self-serve or purchase a new phone and contract online, the process must be as convenient as dropping into a local store. That’s why M1 continues to streamline its digital journeys and remove any points of friction.
“If we provide frictionless digital journeys, customers won’t have a need to use legacy assisted channels,” said Stamford.
The same logic applies to new tools and processes for employees. M1’s employees have embraced robotic process automation (RPA) and new applications because they can see the value they provide. These technologies eliminate repetitive and mundane tasks, making it easier to serve customers.
“Our employees love the agent and sales consoles in LIKE.TG because of the user experience. Thanks to our agile way of building things, they’ve also been able to provide input into how we cluster and display information on screens,” said Stamford.
Customer experience and productivity are inextricably linked
Call deflection is a common measure of success for service-focused organisations. However, for M1, it is secondary. Its primary goal is to provide a better digital experience.
“The starting point for us is not call deflection or call avoidance because that’s inward-looking. We want to focus on making the customer journey so proactive that there’s no need for the customer to call,” said Stamford. “If we know that there is something wrong with your mobile service, for example, why should we wait for you to call us? We should be reaching out first, either through our app or an outbound call.”
When customers do reach out, M1 wants to ensure an efficient response — whether it is from an agent or the telco’s chatbot Mindy. Einstein Next Best Action and continued enhancements to the agent and sales consoles will help increase the speed of customer service and improve the telco’s already high NPS.
“Our NPS is at a level that makes it difficult to keep improving and we have already harvested all the low-hanging fruit. That’s why we are challenging ourselves and using Einstein Next Best Action to be more proactive,” said Stamford.
The telco also plans to reorganise the information in its agent and sales consoles so that it is more aligned with the customer journey. For example, if a customer calls about a billing dispute, M1 wants to provide agents with everything they need to manage that dispute on a single screen.
“Data shows that first contact resolution (FCR) is the number one driver for transactional NPS. So the best way to improve FCR is to equip employees with the best tools to resolve customer queries,” said Stamford. “I believe that also translates into empowered employees and thus a better employee NPS.”
Transformation is a journey, not a sprint
We asked Stamford for tips on how to manage internal change and shift employee mindsets. He said that digital transformation is a journey. It is important for leaders to be aligned and to provide clear direction on where the journey is headed.
“Digitalisation is sometimes viewed as a threat to certain departments and certain roles. For example, there were concerns within our business that we would go 100% digital and close all our stores. However, management alleviated these concerns by making it clear that’s not our focus right now.”
“Some people still struggle with digital, so to cater to Singapore’s whole population we will still need stores. The question is how do we upskill our store staff and provide them with the knowledge in their tablets to sell in a personalised way,” said Stamford.
Upskilling is an essential element of M1’s transformation and the business has made this as easy and efficient as possible for employees. When processes change, for example, employees only need to learn what’s new rather than sit through training on what they already know. They can also find information on new processes and features in a library of articles built on LIKE.TG Knowledge.
Training time is 50% faster for new sales and service employees. Stamford attributes that partly to how easy the service agent and sales consoles are to use.
Commenting on the broader efficiencies offered by new digital capabilities, Stamford indicated that the need for efficiency and productivity was a given. What’s most important to him, though, is the impact on the customer.
“People always look for efficiency and productivity gains in operations because it leads to cost optimisation. However, I think about efficiency more from the perspective of how it can help us to provide a better customer experience,” said Stamford.
Consumers Are Budget Conscious This Shopping Season — Use Data To Turn Browsing Into Buying
Would you be surprised to learn that companies with a strong retail data strategy grow revenue up to 2.9 times faster than companies without one? Or that 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations — a 7-point rise in just two years? Keep those numbers in mind this shopping season because they could affect your revenue and growth.
Creating personaliszed experiences based on collected customer data, also known as first-party data, is an increasingly critical part of retail data strategy. Despite this, only 32% of retail executives say they can turn profile information, purchase history, and service interactions into tailored experiences that make shoppers feel like VIPs. To stay profitable in this changing market, retailers need to meet the demands of must inspire budget-conscious customers. To do that, they need to prove they understand their customers’ needs and expectations.
Here’s how to acquire and engage customers this shopping season.
Use customer data to personalise every interaction
First-party data helps you tailor offers and messages to your customers’ specific interests. The payoff is huge: 78% of consumers say personalised email and other messages make them more likely to repurchase in the future. However, simply accumulating huge quantities of data isn’t enough. You also need to know what to collect, when to collect it, and how to use it. The challenge is to not drive customers away by asking for everything at once.
To level-up your retail data strategy:
Avoid intrusive demands
During the shopping season, customers’ patience tends to wear thin. Their interest in completing a long customer profile is probably low, so be strategic about what you ask. Focus on data collection that will enable you to follow up with them after the purchase to learn more. Use a multi-pronged approach that balances frequency with relevancy, and stay away from sending mass email and generic communication when possible. The more you know about your customers, the more opportunity you have to tailor your messaging to inspire participation. With a personalised approach, you can collect more valuable information, like product preferences, later as you build trust.
Keep your loyalty program ready for the shopping season
Not only are loyalty programs an effective way to gather zero- and first-party data, its members are often your most valuable customers. But with consumers likely to shop less and from fewer retailers this shopping season, your job is to make sure your members think of you first when they’re making shopping lists. How? By ensuring your loyalty program delivers the best value exchange possible.
While traditional rewards-for-transactions arrangements will remain important as consumers get more budget-conscious, don’t overlook the intrinsic value of the VIP experience. That’s especially important for millennial and Gen Z shoppers who value exclusive access to limited-edition products and experiences nearly two times more than Gen Xers and baby boomers. So, from priority sale access to complimentary gift wrap, ensure your members feel the data-for-rewards exchange is worth the effort.
Connect data across the full customer lifecycle
Busy shoppers don’t have time to waste. They don’t want to repeat themselves on the phone, explain an online promotion to a store associate, or make an extra trip to the post office because they can’t return a purchase in person. The bottom line? Your customers expect you to bridgephysical and digital interactions. By elevating data from sales, service, marketing, and commerce to a shared customer data platform, you’ll gain the 360-degree view you need to ensure every interaction stays personalised, consistent, and on-brand.
Segment audience data to automate relevant communications
Shoppers are inundated with emails, texts, app notifications, and social media advertising. Your retail data strategy needs to stand out from the crowd and capture their attention with intelligent messaging that’s tailored to their specific needs and interests. But how?
By organising your customer data based on shared attributes, you can target the audiences most likely to respond to customiszed messaging. For example, imagine you’ve created a segment of customers in a certain region who are on the waiting list for gaming equipment. You’ve recently restocked that region’s store shelves with popular consoles, headsets, and controllers. Segmentation and automated messaging enable you to alert interested customers that the items they want are back in stock. But even better, you can also send communications to lookalike audiences who have purchased gaming equipment from you in the past — and that’s the kind of personalised experience that drives revenue.
Make online experiences intuitive, wallet-friendly, and fast
To grow margin in a challenging economy, you need to do more than tailor communications to customer preferences. Your retail data strategy needs to capture the attention of your first-time shoppers at the right moments and then make it easy for them to buy.
Use data from existing customers to create:
Intelligent product displays. Offer relevant recommendations on the pages where customers are shopping, like athletic socks alongside sneakers. But don’t display just anything. Deliver a good customer experience by ensuring the products are in stock (or at least available for on-time shopping season delivery).
Money-saving promotional bundles. Budget-conscious shoppers don’t want to waste money or time. Reduce taps to discovery and increase average order volume by combining closely related products into wallet-friendly bundles. For example, offer a treadmill alongside a fitness tracker, workout wear, and hand weights.
Personalised (and fast) checkout. With 71% of traffic coming from mobile devices in the second quarter, it’s never been more important to optimisze commerce experiences for smaller screens. Invite new customers to create a profile with their payment preference and enable “buy it now” on mobile product pages to ensure they can breeze through checkout.
What’s next for your retail data strategy?
A difficult economy and shifting consumer sentiment are creating yet another year of unprecedented challenges in retail. You’ll need to use every tool you have to acquire new customers and keep loyal shoppers coming back for more.
With the right retail data strategy and streamlined digital experiences that address busy shoppers’ needs, you can keep your customers happy from double-digit shopping festivals to Black Friday and beyond.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Automation and Efficiency Are at the Heart of Customer Service Trends
How is the role of service changing? Findings from the latest State of Service, Fifth Edition report show that customer service has evolved. Instead of a department that handles customer complaints, it is now a cornerstone of any successful organisation.
The last few years have seen a major shift in the way that customers interact with the businesses they buy from. In turn, businesses are changing the way they approach customer service.
Telephone calls and email once dominated customer service interactions. But in recent years, they have dropped in popularity, with channels such as video support and chatbots becoming more widely available.
As more customers are choosing to communicate using more than one channel, service teams’ priorities are changing. New metrics, designed to allow managers to make meaningful change, are now being measured.
This has led to organisations everywhere choosing to automate their processes to improve productivity. Nearly three fifths of service organisations worldwide have some form of automation assisting their customer service teams.
Service managers are starting to measure different metrics
As the saying goes, you should measure what matters most. The State of Service report reveals that service managers around the world are changing what they measure to match business priorities.
Customer satisfaction is still the most popular metric among service teams, but its popularity is dropping. In 2020, 87% of organisations tracked customer satisfaction, but the number decreases to 74% in 2022.
Customer retention, revenue, and average response time have also dropped. In their place, service-level agreement (SLA) performance, first-contact resolution, and cost per contact have become part of service organisations’ reporting.
The biggest increase was in the number of organisations measuring case deflection — a process often achieved through self-service portals or automated processes. Since 2018, the proportion of organisations measuring this metric has grown from 36% to 67%. This goes hand in hand with what we’ve heard from customers. Eighty-three percent of customers expect to interact with someone immediately when they contact a company, according to the State of the Connected Customer report.
Automation and efficiency go hand in hand
Companies can find it difficult to balance speed and quality in service. Since 2020, the number of service decision makers who say that speed and quality are equally important has dropped by 9%. At the same time, The number of decision makers who say speed is more important has more than doubled.
To increase speed without compromising quality, many companies are turning to automation for answers.
58% of businesses around the world are using automation processes/workflows. The research shows that organisations across the region are ahead of the curve in implementing automation. In Indonesia and Taiwan, 70% of service organisations are using automation processes, and in the Philippines that number is 71% — much higher than the global average.
The use of artificial intelligence (AI) — a tool that often powers automation — is also popular across the region. Companies in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Taiwan use AI more than the global average. For instance, Fulbright University in Vietnam is using AI to make students’ lives easier. AI may even be able to flag potential problems for students before they occur.
Self-service digital options
Our research also shows that 57% of global customers prefer to engage with companies through digital channels, and 59% prefer self-service for simple questions. More than half of customers have used chatbots, and nearly two-thirds have used a self-service portal.
Insights from the State of Service reveal that the mix of channels that customers like to use is changing. In 2020, 96% of organisations around the world used the telephone for customer service interactions. Now, in 2022, that figure is down to 77%. For ASEAN organisations, that figure goes as low as 74% in Thailand.
The numbers for email have dropped in a similar way. Only 76% of global organisations use email for customer service, compared to 92% in 2020.
In their place, digital channels such as video support, and online communities have become more widely adopted.
The cost savings and efficiency benefits, as well as swift resolutions for customers, mean that automated service through bots is likely to become even more popular in the years to come.
Shared tools make customer service work easier
There is also a greater emphasis on agent experience. As the report states, 85% of decision makers around the world agree that there is a direct link between employee experience and customer experience.
There are several things an organisation can do to improve the experience of their workers. Service organisations around the world have offered flexible schedules, wellness benefits, and improved career progression opportunities, in an attempt to enhance employee experience.
Another way to improve the day-to-day experience of your service teams is to ensure that they have theright tools and resources they need to carry out their tasks efficiently. This becomes especially important when it comes to customer data, so that service teams can provide effective service without having to consult colleagues from other teams.
In the report, teams were asked whether they had access to the same customer relationship management (CRM) tool as other departments in their organisation. Sixty-two percent of organisations around the world reported that they did. Across the region the picture was slightly different. Some countries have fewer organisations sharing the same CRM technology than others:
Percentage of service professionals who say all departments use the same CRM software:
Indonesia: 68%
Malaysia: 58%
Philippines: 65%
Singapore: 49%
Taiwan: 70%
Thailand: 70%
Vietnam: 64%
Shared tools can lead to other benefits too — 95% of organisations that use more than oneCustomer 360 appreport that they see improvements in efficiency and productivity, and 96% say that they have met or exceeded their return on investment (ROI) targets.
Accelerating the Path To Net Zero — What You Can Do
The trail to net zero is a shared journey explains Boon Poh Mok, Director of Government Affairs Public Policy, Southeast Asia Greater China, LIKE.TG. When the public sector, private businesses, and people come together, they can accelerate sustainable outcomes for business and the planet.
Businesses in Asia Pacific are increasingly committing to net zero. By the end of 2021, 86% of companies across the region were already setting net zero targets or intended to do so over the next 12 months.
ASEAN countries in particular are forging ahead on the path to net zero. In March 2021, the Singapore government announced The Singapore Green Plan to advance the nation’s agenda on sustainable development. Committed action is also being taken by other countries in the region — Malaysia is implementing the Green Technology Master Plan 2017-2030 to create a low-carbon and resource efficient economy. Vietnam’s government has issued the country’s National Climate Change Strategy to 2050 to implement its COP26 commitments.
In 2022, LIKE.TG commissioned Access Partnership to prepare the Trail to Net Zero for Singapore report to investigate the sustainability efforts in the nation. The report also provides recommendations to accelerate the path to net zero. While it examines Singapore’s net zero journey, its recommendations are also useful to policymakers and business decision-makers across the ASEAN region. Here are some of the key findings and recommendations:
Sustainability requires a public-private-people approach
Climate change is a global challenge. Being a low-lying city-state, Singapore is particularly vulnerable to extreme weather events and rising temperatures. The Singapore Green Plan charts ambitious targets over the next 10 years to enable the nation to achieve its net zero aspirations with committed actions.
Singapore’s climate initiatives focus on lowering emissions through efficient power generation and energy demand, and boosting green spaces. A successful trail to net zero for Singapore will need the public sector, private sector, and people to work together. The public sector has taken the lead by setting the climate policy for achieving net zero. It is also partnering with the private sector in developing and implementing cutting-edge climate technologies. It provides incentives and grants to promote startups and ecopreneurs who build innovative solutions that merge business with positive social impact. It is equally important for the people to take advantage of opportunities to upskill themselves on sustainability initiatives. This can help them appreciate the importance of committed climate action and align their decision making with larger sustainability goals.
The business opportunity in net zero
YouGov surveys commissioned by LIKE.TG found that Singapore businesses strongly support action on climate change. The government’s net zero commitments resonated well in the business community — with 81% of managers supporting Singapore setting net zero emissions target by 2050. When asked whether enough is being done to address climate change, 54% of managers believed the government should be doing more, while 66% believed businesses should do more.
Businesses also had a sound understanding of the potential for growth opportunities in the transition to net zero. Singapore managers were three times more likely to think that achieving a net zero economy by 2050 will result in more jobs than less jobs (39% compared to 13%). The Singapore Green Plan 2030 projects a green economy will create 55,000 new jobs in Singapore over the next 10 years, with at least 4,000 created to date.
Businesses are also more conscious of emissions across their value chain. Almost two-thirds (61%) of Singaporean managers are more likely to purchase products or services from a supplier business with a net zero target.
Technology has an important role to play
On the trail to net zero, it is critical to adopt technologies that help reduce emissions and increase energy efficiency. Technology can open up opportunities for business innovation and growth, while helping to switch to more sustainable solutions. Artificial intelligence (AI) offers many use cases to achieve sustainability outcomes. It is already being used in Singapore to monitor pollution levels and mitigate extreme rainfall events. Other potential uses include smarter decision making for decarbonisation and efficient allocation of renewable energy.
Adoption of cloud computing can also enable businesses to lower their environmental impact, while offering greater flexibility, cost efficiency, speed, and business continuity. A study by SP Global Market Intelligence has shown significant energy savings of 79% from moving business applications and IT workloads to the cloud.
Trail to Net Zero for Singapore reveals that a reduction of one million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions can be achieved in 2022 by migrating to the cloud. Emissions reductions can be further boosted if cloud operators begin sourcing 100% renewable energy for their operations.
Walking the talk on net zero
While many businesses today talk about sustainability, it is critical to take actions and track progress to build credibility with customers and stakeholders. One of the ways to do this is to have a third party audit of your sustainability initiatives and provide recommended actions to achieve net zero.
Public and private organisations can also adopt a shared digital platform to forecast and track emissions. This can provide a single source of truth to ensure better decision making across an organisation’s operations, including its supply chain.
Sustainability is one of LIKE.TG’s core values, and we continually put it into action. For over a decade now, LIKE.TG has been on a sustainability transformation journey. We are a net zero company, and have achieved net zero emissions across our value chain, and are sourcing 100% renewable energy for our operations. We have funded more than 40 million trees as part of our 100 million trees goal. Our commitment to sustainability transformation has helped inform our Climate Action Plan and forms the basis of the Net Zero Cloud platform to help businesses go carbon neutral faster.
Sustainability is a shared journey. We walk the talk and walk together with businesses on their trail to net zero.
Learn more about Singapore’s sustainability mission in Trail to Net Zero for Singapore
Go carbon-neutral faster with Net Zero Cloud.
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Infographic: 7 Ways to Drive Digitalisation With Low-Code Development
The growing need for rapid digital transformation and the shortage of skilled developers to deploy projects at pace is creating a new phenomenon — an industry-wide demand for cost-efficient low-code development platforms. Low-code platforms can help businesses meet their digital transformation goals and increase speed to market.
Companies not only need to address the urgency of digitising workflows but also increase the efficiency of their sales and operation teams. How? By equipping the average business user with the ability to create the apps needed to work better, without waiting on the IT department. Low-code platforms help you create customer-facing apps as well as internal ones for employees; these highly customisable apps with popular features deliver the ideal user experience.
As companies look to turn more of their employees into citizen developers, more IT leaders and businesses are leveraging the potential of low-code tools. According to Gartner, the use of low-code software development platforms is increasing at a rate of over 20% annually. By 2023, more than 50% of medium-sized to large businesses are expected to implement low-code development platforms.
So why is low-code touted as the future of software development?
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Time is money when it comes to developing apps. A dynamic low-code platform like LIKE.TG can speed up the app-development process, letting you save on cost, time, and effort. With the help of the LIKE.TG suite of low-code tools, users can create apps, monitor and manage changes easily and reimagine business processes with visual workflows and point-and-click tools.
This post originally appeared on the I.N.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Meet Chloe Chua: A Purpose Driven Change-Maker
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 Chloe Catherine Chua, CRM Data Insights, Outreach Partnerships at NVPC. Chloe has spearheaded the use of LIKE.TG with no prior IT experience, and is proving people with mental health challenges can contribute immense value to supportive organisations.
Chloe Catherine Chua is an inspirational change-maker. Professionally, she has spearheaded the use of LIKE.TG at Singapore’s National Volunteer Philanthropy Centre (NVPC) with no prior IT experience. Personally, she is using her journey with anxiety and depression to inspire change in how mental health is viewed in Singapore’s fast-paced professional world.
Chloe’s mission is to make peoples’ lives easier — both at work and in the mental health space. She joined NVPC from the logistics industry and began work with the nonprofit organisation in an administrative role. Despite having no prior IT experience, it wasn’t long before Chloe started thinking about how to use technology to make positive change.
“When I started at NVPC, we had LIKE.TG but it wasn’t being used well,” she says. “LIKE.TG is such a powerful tool, but if you don’t know how to use it, you’re not going to get the value it can deliver. When we started testing LIKE.TG after I came in, we saw how it could make our lives so much easier.”
Building a LIKE.TG ecosystem
Chloe took the development lead. She self-learned LIKE.TG via YouTube videos and articles on the LIKE.TG website. Then she began to build an organisation-wide LIKE.TG ecosystem, with teams that automated workflows and achieved significant efficiency improvements and productivity gains across departments.
From consolidating volunteer and donor data into a centralised single source of truth, to creating an interactive events calendar in Tableau, Chloe proved herself to be a one-person digital transformation change-maker.
The results she has achieved are impressive. NVPC now has a 360-degree view of stakeholder interactions and data-based insights into program performance. This has led to greater efficiency across teams and improved external communications. It has also relieved a lot of the burden from administration on NVPC employees. And migrating the events calendar to Tableau has improved event scheduling and resource allocation.
Making lives easier
These would be impressive achievements for any experienced IT head. But the fact Chloe has added this much value to the organisation without prior IT experience makes her contribution even more remarkable.
“I’m thankful that LIKE.TG doesn’t require heavy coding,” she says. “It helps me think a lot more in terms of process and what the different possibilities are, rather than having to focus on how to code it. Whatever ideas I have, LIKE.TG can definitely do it. It’s just a matter of knowing the LIKE.TG functions.
“I’m also grateful that NVPC trusted me enough to take over LIKE.TG and revamp the whole system with zero IT knowledge,” she says. “Once I understood what NVPC was trying to achieve, I could apply what I had learned about LIKE.TG and build up the automation step-by-step from there.
“I would like to make things easier for everyone, so when people tell me I’m making their lives so much easier, that’s a huge achievement for me.
Chloe’s experience with LIKE.TG has opened up her love of data analytics and systems design. Systems design has helped her think outside the box and approach problems from multiple angles. Data analytics empowers her to provide leadership teams with accurate and concise reporting on organisational performance.
“It excites me to see how I can challenge myself and come up with creative solutions to solve different issues. These skills have given me the focus and direction to further my career development,” she says.
Support is a two-way street
Chloe is clearly a rising star in the LIKE.TG community. She has the talent — and now experience — to continue to create positive organisational change. However, her immense potential has not always been recognised.
“I suffer from anxiety and depression, and my last employer actually let me go,” she says. “But NVPC understands that support is a two-way street. They offer counselling, and if I’m having a difficult period, I can say I need some time to myself and they are very supportive of that. It’s a wonderful thing when employers don’t question you, they trust you.”
NVPC’s trust in Chloe has certainly paid off for the organisation. But it’s a concept she says many employers still struggle with.
“There’s definitely a long way to go in Singapore,” she says. “There is a stigma that people with mental health challenges can’t work efficiently and can’t help the organisation — that they are just a burden. But we are definitely not.”
“It’s difficult to find the right company and the right people to support you, but it’s good to believe that you will find them. So don’t give up. It took me a long time to find an employer that supports me personally, but now, with the right support, I have finally found myself again. And I’m curious and optimistic about what the future holds.”
How Coffee Reignited the LIKE.TG Singapore Office Experience
When is a cup of coffee more than a cup of coffee? The Singapore Workplace Services team has been pleasantly surprised by the positive response they have received to the office coffee perk. Many Singapore employees have been greatly enjoying the reimagined coffee break experience as they come together to connect with their peers. Travis Lim, Senior Manager of Workplace Services, and his team decided to focus on transforming a very common — and historically mundane — office moment: a cup of coffee. We sat down with Travis to learn more.
What was the motivation for your team to create a moment of connection from the typical coffee experience?
We knew that a lot of employees start their day with a cup of coffee, so we started thinking about what that experience was like.Every time I go somewhere to get coffee, I don’t get a welcoming feeling. It’s transactional. I wanted to make this experience transformative: an experience that could completely change how the employee was feeling. I wanted them to love the experience so much that the coffee moment alone was good enough to make them come back the next day. Part of making that experience great is focusing on how it can help the employee connect to their peers.
The Singapore office’s coffee cart features latte art with familiar faces!
You didn’t just bring in a coffee cart, you took your team to a barista training course to learn about the brewing process and create a truly custom experience. Why was that important to you?
Everything we did to prepare for the coffee cart’s opening was to understand what would make it a memorable experience. The barista training course gave us the knowledge to collaborate closely with our coffee vendor: we adjusted the roast on the coffee beans for a better flavour and let our employees taste it and give us their feedback. We learned that our employees preferred plant-based milk, so we brought in three different options. When there is a holiday or an executive visitor, we add custom designs to the latte art.Not only is it a positive moment in someone’s day, it creates a natural moment of socialisation that people have been missing. We knew the employee could take time to chat with their colleagues while their drinks were brewing. The cart became a moment of community.
Jasmine Xu (L) and Bonnie Chin (R) creating specialty coffee drinks during the Lunar New Year event
What has been the employee response to the reimagined coffee experience?
We are always trying to get ahead of the experience that employees want so they are excited about what’s next. And it’s working! Employees have told us that the coffee cart is one of the best parts of their day. It’s even working on me; I never used to drink coffee, but now I can’t go the day without stopping by the cart. The baristas know I like cinnamon, so they always add some to my drink. It’s that customised experience — the feeling that we know who you are and we care about the kind of day you have — that we want to give to everyone.
Your team’s curated experiences have been very well-received. What’s the secret to getting them right?
Our strategy is to listen to what our employees want, collaborate closely with our partners, and experiment. Most of all, at every event, we want to turn something transactional into a transformative experience.This is also not something we achieve alone. We couldn’t do it without the support of our leadership, who fully trusts us to create an environment that is best for employees. The Singapore Culture Guides- employees who volunteer their time to support culture events- and Employee Engagement partners also work hard to deliver many exciting events with us. We are very fortunate to have such supportive partnerships working together to bring the LIKE.TG culture to life.
L-R: Jasmine Xu, Bonnie Chin, Travis Lim, Tammy Ang, and Brenda Rodrigues of the Singapore Workplace Services Team
LIKE.TG was named Singapore’s #1 Best Workplace in Technology 2022 (large category) as well as one of Singapore’s Best Workplaces. Both awards are credited to a high rating of employee trust and engagement. The Singapore Workplace Services team’s dedication to building trust and engagement is a testament to the LIKE.TG culture. We asked Travis’ colleagues about their experience:
What did it feel like when you realised your team had created such a well-received employee experience?
“Ecstatic — it was pure joy to see our employees so happy to see their colleagues in person! You could really see it in their smiles and body language. The catch-up moments everyone was having were really special in those first few weeks. Also, I felt relieved. [It was] a relief to see everyone happy back at their workstations and enjoying the space.” – Brenda Rodrigues, Supervisor, Workplace Services “Welcoming our colleagues back to work after lockdown was a huge transition…With more and more employees returning to office to connect and socialise, seeing their smiles and faces give us the reason to keep curating and improving employee experiences in office.” –Tammy Ang, Lead Coordinator, Workplace Services
Your team goes above and beyond to focus on the employee’s experiences at the office. Why is that?
“It is the culture that makes it different here. Employees are writing their own inspiring chapters and we [live] by our values daily. There is a sense of purpose in doing meaningful work and it is a safe environment where we can bring our authentic selves to work daily. [Because of this,] our team is never afraid to try and change things along the way. And of course, not forgetting about social connection, to listen and understand what the employees really want. Seeing employees’ smiles across their faces is worth going above and beyond!” – Jasmine Xu, Workplace Services Associate“Do it from love, not for love!’ – This is how we started together as one team and built our foundation from there. It goes beyond ticking a to-do list. It’s not just about fulfilling just a task, it’s the love of connecting our people together. Passion is the word and it keeps us burning. ” – Bonnie Chin, Office Service/Administration Manager
Volunteer Time Off Is the Perk Your Company Needs Now
Employees have made it loud and clear they want more than a paycheck from their jobs. Among the biggest contributors to a great employee experience, according to new LIKE.TG research, is a sense of purpose. Many businesses have responded by focusing more on purpose and impact on society. But there’s an often overlooked element of that new focus: paid volunteering, or volunteer time off programs.
From the Corporate Giving Study 2021 conducted by NVPC, 42.3% of the companies surveyed in Singapore include corporate giving in their business policies. Within this percentage, only 11% allocate paid volunteer time off (VTO) benefit, despite the fact that companies with a culture of volunteerism have better morale, retention, employee engagement, and brand perception.
Many companies offer employees some kind of volunteer opportunity, but it’s often a single day of volunteering or raising money for charities.
Make volunteer time off a core part of employee engagement
LIKE.TG was founded on the principle that businesses can have great social impact. The company offers employees an above-average VTO benefit of 56 hours, or 7 business days, each year. They can use that time to volunteer for one of the nonprofits LIKE.TG formally supports — the company has pledged millions of dollars to support education, workforce development, and climate justice initiatives — or one of their own choosing.
We’ve learned a lot over the years about how VTO impacts our workforce and the community. We’re happy to share our expertise and best practices here.
According to Jamie Olsen, senior director of Citizen Philanthropy at LIKE.TG, about 75% of the company’s 73,000-person global workforce participates in the VTO program, with about 25% using the whole 56-hour allotment.
“These are the types of programs that people want and that are attracting them to companies right now,” she said. “They better the community. They improve people’s happiness. They make them feel more engaged when they are sitting at their desk.”
The recent global research by Deloitte found that the younger generation workers are seeking balance and sustained change. Many are concerned about the state of the world and how companies can make work more purpose-driven.
Companies that create aspirational workplaces foster a culture of inclusion, purpose, listening, caring, and empathy.
How to establish your own VTO program
LIKE.TG has donated more than $530 million and 7.3 million hours since our founding. The company might be an outlier in the resources it devotes to VTO programs — Olsen’s team, for example, has 25 people dedicated to it — but there are steps that you can take to establish your own VTO initiatives. Here are some tips:
Self-service digital options
Build volunteer engagement programs that align with your strategic focus areas or what your business focuses on. While employees should be free to volunteer however they choose, try to steer them toward opportunities where you’re already making a financial commitment. Try to pair employees with organisations that support them.
Focus on important goals
Think about your specific goals rather than spending time or money on any problems. What change do you want to affect, and where can you have the biggest impact? Formalise your goals in writing, and make sure all employees are aware of them and how they can participate. Doing so will give everyone something to rally around.
Plan with scale in mind, but within the budget you have
Think several steps ahead, considering all the different factors that might come into play. For example, LIKE.TG used to award employees who hit certain VTO milestones with donations to their cause, with no cap. When that became unsustainable, we reworked the programs while still recognising the employee’s efforts.
Track activity
Use tools that help employees find opportunities that align with organisational initiatives. LIKE.TG built its own digital tool, Volunteerforce, that lets employees log their VTO hours, organise team volunteer activities, and search for opportunities by skill, project type, duration, and location.
“I think a lot of companies start managing this with Excel spreadsheets, or with someone in HR managing this off to the side, but that quickly becomes unscalable and unsustainable,” said Olsen. There are several companies that provide volunteer tracking apps.
Incentivise employees by creating impact milestones
At LIKE.TG, employees who hit at least 7 milestones — repeat volunteer engagements, donating skills, joining a board, organising a team event, etc. — are entered into a lottery for a grant to an eligible organisation of their choice. That’s in addition to standard company matches to eligible organisations.
Volunteer time off is the evolution of employee engagement
It’s easier to measure the impact of corporate giving for the recipients than it is to measure the impact of VTO on employee engagement and morale. How does LIKE.TG measure employee impact? Olsen’s team collects survey data to better understand how employees are inspired to connect with the community in meaningful and sustainable ways.
“We also look at participation in our programs, and how many people are hitting each of the impact milestones,” Olsen said.
She said 13,500 employees have hit at least seven impact milestones.
Over the last few years, much has been made about the importance of purpose-driven employment. Lately, quiet quitting, where workers collect a paycheck by doing the minimum and no more, has made headlines. But here’s the thing — is quiet quitting really about slacking off at work, or about employers giving employees the freedom to lead a more purposeful, fuller life outside their jobs?
In an age when businesses are expected to engage in social issues in bigger and more visible ways, the next step is giving employees the tools, support, and time they need to do just that.
Prioritise employee engagement to boost morale, productivity, and retention.
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This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
4 Steps To Building a Successful Partnership Strategy
You want to get your product or service into the hands of more customers. Other companies might want to get your product out there, too — if it helps generate revenue for themselves. And that can form the foundation of a successful channel partnership strategy.
As a channel partner or Cloud Reseller, you can increase your value to new and existing customers — and, in turn, grow your profits. We’ve seen this happen time and again over the last six years at LIKE.TG. And along the way, we’ve learned a number of important tips from successful partners, including how you can get your solutions to market faster.
A key word we hear when we talk to our current partners is “scale.” They want to go big. And their main question is: What is the key to scale our sales efforts and maximise revenue?
Let’s start thinking through the four steps to help you define your partnership strategy:
1. Understand where you win
Identify your best, high-growth products, market, and segments.
Start by gathering your facts, sales data, recent information about closed deals, and success stories. Where are you trending in regards to market segments and verticals? Which product combinations are selling the best in each region?
Action: From your wins, define what can complement your solution to your end customer. Talk to your customers and get feedback by asking the following questions:
What makes their decision making easier?
What helps the sales process go smoother?
What do they believe creates better alignment?
What makes your solution more attractive compared to your competition in the market?
2. Establish the business goals for your partnership strategy
Understanding where you win — what regions and verticals — will help you target areas that you want to invest in. Sharing this information will also make it easier for partners to recognise an opportunity where they can partner with you to get to market faster.
Questions to ask yourself:
Are you looking to co-market/co-sponsor events?
Are you looking at expanding into new markets and regions? New market segments and verticals?
Are you looking to work with other LIKE.TG partners who complement your technology?
Are you looking for other LIKE.TG partners who can support your implementations and provide professional services?
Are you looking to leverage existing networks and expand your coverage through your partner channel?
Look at your competitors’ partner programs, including the type of partners they target, the events they sponsor, and how they are incentivising and creating value.
Action: Answer the above questions, and identify the top two reasons you are looking to partner. Write down your business goals for the partnership strategy. Now, define the three benefits you can accomplish by developing partnerships in the ecosystem.
3. Develop measurable objectives
Here are some questions to answer in order to set revenue targets for your partner program:
What is your predicted partner-led revenue as a percentage of your total revenue?
If you have worked with partners to drive revenue in the past, what was the dollar amount your partners generated over the last two years?
Consider joint marketing efforts with your partners, and the amount your partners will contribute to that program. Below are some potential scenarios:
Is it more cost-effective to embed a partner solution instead of building it in house? If yes, have you evaluated potential partners? If no, perform a cost analysis to develop, maintain, and upgrade the solution.
If you are looking to get more leads and referrals through an extended network, is there a software company that has many of the same customers? Reach out to develop joint marketing plans. What about a partner who is already in your target vertical or market?
To build a better brand and create awareness, consider the partners that have done a great job in this area. Can you brainstorm together?
Partnerships are there to help you with all of the above, but prioritise your business goals, and have clear objectives so that you can pick the right partners. Then, put a partnership strategy together and drive toward success.
What you can do now
Getting started is half the challenge. Begin with these four activities on your journey.
Measure and know your business metrics and your customer profile
Define your goals and business needs
Determine the amount you are going to spend on your defined objectives
Determine the amount you are expecting your potential partner to drive
4. Set yourself up for success with LIKE.TG Partner Program
The LIKE.TG Partner Program enables our partners to build and grow successful businesses while delivering ongoing and meaningful customer success. The Program has been designed with a fair and transparent partnership model to create a thriving and connected ecosystem where it is easier for partners to collaborate and do business with LIKE.TG.
Under the program, partners are given access to premium tools and resources they can leverage to supercharge their sales and marketing strategy, and take their solutions to the next level.
Some resources you can look forward to:
Pardot Plus
Premier Success Plan
Accelerate Program
Platform Experts AppExchange
Performance Incentive Referral fees
Access to Marketing Development Fund and many other Partner Marketing assets/resources
Find out more about LIKE.TG Partner Program Overview here.
Learn how marketers can drive growth with innovation.
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This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Dreamforce 2022: Inspiration and Action To Get To Net Zero
With sustainability unveiled as a core value for LIKE.TG earlier this year, sustainable transformation was a key theme at Dreamforce 2022.
Packed with sessions featuring environmental experts and thought leaders, Dreamforce 2022 inspired the LIKE.TG community to take action for a more sustainable future. Attendees were empowered with practical tools and strategies to help them go net zero.
This was also the most sustainable Dreamforce ever, with many steps taken to reduce our carbon footprint:
Dreamforce was 100% beefless and porkless for the attendee lunch. This helped conserve millions of gallons of water.
The lunch program offered 100% compostable packaging with containers, napkins, and utensils that could be tossed in the green bin.
Once Dreamforce was over, attendees could drop their conference badges and lanyards in designated bins for recycling.
Instead of receiving backpacks and other giveaways, LIKE.TG is giving all attendees the opportunity to offset their travel-related emissions to Dreamforce – by supporting carbon offset projects and reducing greenhouse gases.Carbon projects at Dreamforce Net Zero Vista contributed to LIKE.TG’s commitment in growing 100,000,000 trees by 2030. 3,000 LIKE.TG employees also planted 5,000 native seedlings in partnership with not-for-profit organisations Literacy for Environmental Justice and Golden Gate Audubon Society.
Rather than providing packaged water, water stations were available throughout the campus for attendees to refill their own bottles.
Net Zero Treehouse located in the Net Zero Vista at Dreamforce.
Change-makers inspire sustainable transformation
Net Zero keynote with Dr Jane Goodall
World-renowned environmental advocate Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE spoke with Marc Benioff to kick off the Net Zero Summit at Dreamforce. Jane declared that it is ‘a new day for our environment’ and that it is critical for us to use innovative thinking to go net zero. She shared her own journey and experiences as a primatologist and anthropologist leading to her efforts in environmental leadership today.
“We are part of the natural world, and not separate from it,” Jane said. “But today, we feel separated from it.”
This feeling of separation has led many people to think they can have unlimited economic development on a planet with finite natural resources. According to Jane, business has an important role to play in climate action by being a platform for change and an essential source of innovation.
“Business must drive and support the ‘ecopreneurial’ thinking our planet so desperately needs,” shared Jane. “Through innovation, education, and mobilisation, we will continue to thrive together, as a planet, as a species, as people.”
During the conversation, Marc revealed that Jane influenced him to focus on forests, and was the inspiration for the 1t.org platform to grow, restore and conserve one trillion trees. Jane also shared that her dream of empowering young people to take climate action inspired her to establish the community action programme Roots Shoots.Today, the program’s participants include young people from kindergarten to university age in countries across the world. The participants in Roots Shoots are empowered to help people, animals and the environment. These projects enable them to make impactful change and inspire others to do so too.
Watch ‘A New Day for the Environment’ — Net Zero keynote here.
ASEAN Business Spotlight: PETRONAS
Energy and utilities companies have a unique role to play in the transition to a clean and equitable energy future.
With sustainability embedded in their business over the last two decades, PETRONAS has committed to achieving net zero by 2050. The company has embraced technology-driven innovation to help it become more agile and meet its sustainability goals. In partnership with LIKE.TG, it deployed PETRONAS360 to enable all partners, customers, and executives to access a single source of truth. This helped their teams to pivot, be agile, fail and recover quickly on their digital transformation journey.
Aadrin Azly, Chief Digital Officer, PETRONAS spoke about the company’s sustainability vision and its evolving partnership with LIKE.TG. According to Aadrin, PETRONAS began with a focus on nation-building and then international growth, but today it is increasingly focused on the transition to clean energy.
“The energy transition has to happen in a fair, equitable and measured manner — so we focus not only on delivering clean energy, but also to those who need it the most and in an affordable way,” said Aadrin.
“Sustainability solutions, like carbon tracking and methane tracking are of interest to us. We’re also working with LIKE.TG to meet our target of deploying 90% of our applications on the cloud.”
In ‘The Energy Utilities Future: Agile Energy Transition’ session, Azureen Azita Abdullah, Head of Downstream Digital Innovation, at PETRONAS, shared how the Malaysian energy provider is making the transition to net zero.
“Now we have a clear roadmap for energy transition, and we are escalating this whole ecosystem to our nation and hopefully catalysing it for the whole region,” said Azureen.
Sustainable Transformation is Everyone’s Job
While businesses have an important role to play in conserving the environment, they can also do this in a financially sustainable manner. In the very insightful discussion, ‘Sustainable to the Core‘,a global panel of thought leaders examined how organisations can embed sustainability into their business model.
According to Kathy Varol, Purpose Strategy Expert and Consultant for CSR ESG, businesses should realise they can’t have unlimited growth on a finite planet. Her advice to companies embarking on their sustainability journey was — “Identify a purpose for your company and use environmental, social, and governance as a framework to bring that purpose to life — holistically across the organisation with accountability, control and metrics.”
David Reynolds, CEO, Department for Trade and Investment, South Australia, shared how his state has pursued sustainability goals and facilitated the transition to renewable energy. This enabled the Department, a public sector organisation, to show private corporations that sustainability can be used for economic development and turned into a business advantage. Orlando Ferreira, CFO, IDB Invest shared his views on sustainability from a development banking perspective.
“Nine out of ten projects that fail do so not because of credit issues, but because ESG criteria were not put into place,” said Orlando. “Sustainability is not just the right thing to do, but the right thing for business itself.”
Paul Polman, Business Leader, former CEO of Unilever, and co-author of “Net Positive” concluded that sustainability is a story of hope.
“There are the right demand signals from the market today, especially from Gen Z and the millennials on sustainability. But we need to move faster, and everyone has a place and role to play.”
Watch ‘Sustainable to the Core’ here.
Climate action, here and now
To empower businesses to take climate action, LIKE.TG introduced the first-of-its-kind Net Zero Marketplace at Dreamforce. The platform makes carbon credit purchases simple and transparent, allowing any organisation to accelerate climate positive impact at scale. Attendees were able to offset their travel-related emissions to Dreamforce and learn more about the Net Zero Marketplace.
Net Zero Marketplace, built onCommerce Cloud, connects buyers andecopreneurs— environmentally-focused entrepreneurs who lead and drive climate action worldwide.
It is this type of environmental focus and commitment that is drivingBrowzwear, a 3D apparel design company, to reduce waste in the fashion industry. Supported byCustomer 360, Browzwear has scaled its operations to help more than 1000 fashion companies on their sustainability journey.
Dreamforce was a great opportunity for the LIKE.TG community to come together and be inspired by Trailblazers, thought leaders, environmental experts, and activists. It showed how each of us has a role to play in going net zero, and showcased tools and strategies to help us get there — together.
Watch all the Dreamforce episodes on Sustainabilityon-demand here.
Catch all the magic fromDreamforce 2022 on-demandon LIKE.TG+
3 Ways to Elevate Your Financial Services Customer Experience
The latest Future of Financial Services Report – a window into global customer preferences and behaviour – sheds light on what ASEAN customers today expect from financial service providers. Customer experiences of banking, insurance, and wealth management services are falling short of expectations. This is prompting customers to switch service providers. But for financial services institutions (FSIs) willing to make changes, these trends present an opportunity to inspire new loyalty, trust, and business growth.
LIKE.TG ASEAN’s Prakash Thomas believes that customer behaviour has significantly shifted in the region. In an era of economic uncertainty with the lingering effects of the pandemic, customers today prefer digital-first experiences in almost every aspect of daily life. As Regional Vice President of Financial Services Health, Thomas notes FSIs are having to rethink customer journeys, and make them digital-first to meet customer expectations.
“Financial services are making the shift to digital-first experiences,” said Thomas. “Yet customers aren’t satisfied and aren’t afraid to switch providers. Over one-third of customers across banking, insurance, and wealth management switched providers in the last 12 months — for an easier, better experience. Today, FSIs have an opportunity through digital transformation to anticipate customers’ needs just like Spotify and Tiktok anticipate what their users want next.”
As interest rates and costs of living rise, the report shows consumers are more willing than before to look for better alternatives that meet their needs. Global customer churn rates are substantial at 22% for banking, 33% for insurance, and 33% for wealth.
In Singapore, the churn is high especially in wealth management services with 46% of surveyed customers switching providers – 13% higher than the global churn rate.
This can be partially explained from the reasons for switching providers.
A common trend is the lack of trust ASEAN customers have in their providers. The biggest driver for switching providers was ‘hidden fees and fine print’ (40% in Singapore).
With customers expecting digital-first experiences even after pandemic-related social restrictions have eased, FSIs need to invest in technology to lift their digital capabilities. The report highlights three key trends in the future of financial services. To retain and delight customers in a post-pandemic economy, successful FSIs of the next decade will need to excel in the following areas.
1. Offer seamless digital services and customer journeys
As businesses shut and call centres were overwhelmed with customer calls during the pandemic, digital channels emerged as the preferred option to engage customers. This trend continues now for ASEAN customers, who are ready to change providers for a better digital experience. Customers highlighted ‘Easy to use digital interface and user experience (website, app, chat function)’ as another key reason for switching providers (39% in Singapore).
Andrew Taggart, Partner (Clients Markets Leader), PwC South East Asia Consulting, says FSIs are trying to make the customer experience seamless and easy.
“We have seen FSIs trying to move beyond creating good customer service through easy and efficient customer transactions,” said Taggart. “They are now trying to create more customer value by providing more contextualised and personalised insights, and advice at interactions across all channels, human and digital. This requires a shift away from the mindset that digital channels are only good for efficient transactions and that human interactions are better suited for handling enquiries, to an omnichannel customer journey that bridges the two.”
The report also reflects a consumer trend of switching to fintech platforms for their simplicity. When asked why they didn’t use a traditional provider, Singapore customers highlighted ‘easy and fast setup, verification, onboarding, and first time use of the app’ and ‘easy and intuitive user interface/user experience and navigation of the app’. Percentages for both were well above global averages.
Gary Teh, Managing Director (Group IT) at Great Eastern, a Singapore-based insurance provider, believes FSIs can implement service automation to deliver better customer experiences. But they should have a strategic approach to automation.
“We are guided by the value to the customer,” said Teh. “Ultimately, automation needs to enable customers to get service faster and more comprehensively in one click. If it doesn’t help the customer get quick service, then I’d say don’t do it.”
Great Eastern has successfully implemented many ‘one-click’ services – enabled by integrations with multiple platforms like digital IDs and instant payment transfer services. Its customers can fill in their application form with SingPass and pay via PayNow almost instantly. Products such as travel insurance, home content cover, and dengue cover can also be purchased at the point of need in one click, without having to go through an agent.
2. Make every interaction personal
From online searches to advertisements to Netflix choices, consumers are being delivered personalised experiences across industries like never before. Non-curated experiences are impacting customer satisfaction in a significant way. ‘Attentive and personalised customer service’ was the next highest driver for switching providers (31% in Singapore).
This is an area where traditional banks are still trying to improve their capabilities. Many are still using legacy systems with data silos across the business and no centralised source of truth. This makes it difficult to have a 360-degree customer view. When asked ‘does your provider anticipate your financial needs?’ only 13% of Singapore customers said they agree.
Delivering the relevant and personalised experiences that customers expect requires customer data to be readily accessible and easily managed. A cloud-based CRM like Customer 360 can provide a single, shared view of the customer journey across a service provider’s teams. It can enable teams to work together to deliver connected customer experiences and build strong relationships.
While data and digital capabilities are important, it is also equally important to deliver service with a human touch. Teh explains how Great Eastern relies on its network of agents to deliver personalised customer experiences.
“Nothing can beat personalised service with a human touch. If you had a butler, would you not call? So, our focus has been to empower our agents with the tools to deliver personalised service to customers. When we design our customer journey, we always have our agents in mind. Today, our agents can help our customers perform financial and non-financial transactions digitally. Customers don’t need to step out of the comfort of their home or office.”
3. Build credibility and trust with customers
A key theme of the global report is a continued lack of customer trust in financial providers. For the Singapore market this is particularly clear, with less than 18% agreeing with the statement ‘I trust that my provider is invested in my financial wellbeing.’
According to Taggart, customers are questioning service providers’ ability to use their data to provide proactive service and increase trust
“The customer experience of privacy today is clicking on long, never read, legalistic terms and conditions and then clicking through cookie acceptances,” said Taggart. “They are really left hoping service providers will do the right thing on data sharing, that the laws they don’t understand are sufficient to protect them, and providers have sufficient cyber defences to protect their data.
“I think more is required to educate customers and ultimately allow them to participate in the data sharing market, i.e. if FSIs share customer data with an organisation, they will get benefits and in turn pass on benefits to the customer, like discounts, points, gifts, or upgrades.”
Customers want providers to care more about their financial wellbeing and the insights from the report outline some key areas for improvement. To start, financial providers can regularly highlight how they protect and use customer data, remain compliant to industry regulations and make terms and conditions easily understandable.
This post originally appeared on the A.U.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Building Resilience in Financial Services – How LIKE.TG Can Help
The uncertainty businesses felt at the start of the pandemic has re-emerged with many anticipating a global slowdown. The Straits Times reports that almost three-quarters of the World Economic Forum’s Community of Chief Economists believe that a global recession is at least somewhat likely.
There are a number of factors driving this uncertainty and market volatility, including supply and demand shocks, intense measures to tame inflation, and a lack of funding for new initiatives. These impact the flow of capital and influence investment behaviours, particularly when it comes to technology.
As a result, financial services firms are adopting different methods to adapt to the changing landscape. These include platformification and digitalisation of the front office to manage operational costs while providing new digital services. Firms are also creating value and competitive advantage with new offerings such as sustainable finance.
In short, firms have both an opportunity and challenge to reimagine their business models and customer experience.
Forging new pathways to success in financial services
LIKE.TG Customer 360 can help firms navigate the challenges ahead and unlock new opportunities. LIKE.TG’s Financial Services Cloud provides the platform for financial services institutions to build trust. It unifies the customer experience across channels, geographies, and lines of business for both consumer and commercial businesses.
With purpose-built industry functionality and all the capabilities of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, financial services firms can increase employee productivity, accelerate time to value, and deepen customer trust with every interaction. More importantly, they can be there in the moment for their customers who rely on them and trust them with their financial wellbeing.
At the same time, MuleSoft, helps firms easily automate any process to drive efficiency and productivity. MuleSoft also connects multiple systems to streamline the customer experience.
Slack supports faster resolution of issues for higher levels of customer satisfaction. The powerful collaboration tool also enables seamless communication with partners and customers, leading to less friction, more innovation, and faster decision-making.
New business models are underpinned by embedded experiences and ecosystems seamlessly integrated into the journey of customers, employees, and partners. With LIKE.TG’s innovative solutions, financial services can drive cost savings and build better business resilience.
Building resilience and customer engagement with data
During the pandemic, data-driven organisations proved to be more confident and resilient. To navigate this next phase of uncertainty, it makes sense for firms to turn to their data.
Tableau empowers teams with real-time insights and analytics to make informed decisions. They can make more accurate predictions about where business is heading. They can also identify opportunities to fine-tune operations and increase productivity.
With LIKE.TG Genie, firms can integrate data from every step in the customer experience to create a real-time customer profile. This profile enables all teams — across sales, service, marketing, and more — to tailor the experiences they provide in real time.
According to our Future of Financial Services report, three out of customers’ top five pain points in their digital experiences tie back to poor personalisation. So for those wanting to grow and engage their customer base, it is more important than ever to provide experiences tailored to each individual’s needs.
Balancing corporate responsibility and profitability
The need to build more resilient business models and drive sustainable growth will be highlighted at the Singapore FinTech Festival this week. The festival will also examine how organisations balance corporate responsibility and profitability in order to achieve greater stakeholder engagement and satisfaction.
LIKE.TG is a passionate proponent of stakeholder capitalism and committed to doing well by all our stakeholders — our customers, employees, partners, communities, the planet, and society as a whole. And we believe that data and technology can support more resilient and inclusive business models that serve the needs of all stakeholders in the financial services industry.
Just look at Bank Mandiri, one of the leading financial institutions in Indonesia. At the height of the pandemic, when many of its customers faced cash flow problems, Bank Mandiri leveraged its data to increase flexibility in its operations and assess customers’ suitability for a new loan restructuring program. Customers could still carry out their financial transactions and receive support with their financial and loan repayment needs.
Investing in sustainable growth
In the current climate, many firms may be feeling pressure to reduce their technology spend. However, investments in technologies like automation software can help drive efficiency and sustainable growth.
Additionally, Software-as-a-Service-based solutions that LIKE.TG provides reduce the upfront costs of new technology investments. Firms can pay only for what they need or, in other words, pay as they grow.
Visit us in person at the Singapore FinTech Festival to learn more about how LIKE.TG can help you build business resilience and customer engagement. Find us at booth #2H29 in Hall 2 at Singapore Expo from 2 – 4 November 2022.
How Customer Centricity Unlocks Profitable Growth and Success for SMEs
What is customer centricity? How can growing startups and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) prioritise customer centricity to fuel growth and drive success? Customer centricity is about providing personalised, connected customer experiences across all channels — before, during, and after every transaction. Customer-centric businesses deliver more empathetic experiences to win over customers and build more highly valued customer relationships that return real business value.
Having a customer-centric mindset is more important than ever in a digital-first world. Whether you are a digital-native organisation or a traditional structured company, putting the customer at the centre of everything you do is critical to a successful digital transformation.
The problem is that many SMEs try to solve one problem at a time and lose focus on the big picture. That tends to create a disconnected ecosystem of siloed platforms, which can result in disjointed customer journeys and cause a customer success gap.
Prioritising customer centricity is one of the key factors to SMEs’ success and growth. Focusing on putting your customers at the centre of everything you do as your big-picture goal will help to close the customer success gap, support your customer journeys, attract investor interest, and scale your business. Here’s how.
1. Close the customer success gap with a single source of truth
Customers’ expectations and behaviours have shifted as we continue our transition to a digital-first world. According to LIKE.TG’s latest State of the Connected Customer report, 73% of customers now expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
That means customers no longer want to be categorised. Customers want personalised communication on any — and all — channels they choose. A few years ago, we started with the concept of 1:many. It then moved to a 1:1 model, thanks to the evolution of the Marketing solutions. Now, it has evolved into what we call the 1:U, where customers want the brands they love to know them on a personal level.
To close the customer success gap, you must put the customer at the centre of everything you do. That requires the right structure and technology to unify your data and create a single source of truth.
2. Choose technology that supports your customer journeys
To prioritise customer centricity, the technologies you choose should support your customer journeys. The right technology can help achieve this in three key ways.
First, it drives automations to add efficiency and consistency across your customer journey ecosystem. Second, it creates a single source of truth with customer data accessible to everyone, from anywhere. Third, it enables you to make data-backed decisions, and provides the agility you need to react to situations quickly.
Take Zenyum, for example. The Singapore-based smile cosmetics company deployed Sales Cloud to allow their team to analyse data by country within the markets efficiently. At the same time, Service Cloudand Experience Cloud help them create a sophisticated personalisation pipeline that delivers deep data insights, including a 360-view of each customer interaction. It is also used to connect different teams on a single platform, increasing efficiency, and reducing turnaround times by 40-50%. As a result, Zenyum has achieved 8x improvement in lead activation rate.
3. Attract investors and get funding for your business
How do you secure funding for your growing business? Securing business funding can be a difficult challenge to overcome. Investors, venture capitalists, incubators, and accelerators take customer success seriously when assigning value to your business. In a recent discussion with James Watson, Director of Investments at Catcha Group, we talked about what SMEs need to do to attract investor interest.
“We always look for companies that have relatively low cost to acquire customers, and have a platform that can retain them successfully with minimal churn,” he said. “You need to continue to show growth in obtaining new customers and make sure they are retained successfully without spending too much to retain them. Being able to innovate quickly, pivot your business, and directly serve your consumers is the key differentiator we look for in companies.”
Customer-centric companies are able to achieve this by leveraging data to understand customer behaviour and make insightful decisions to best serve their customers.
4. Scale your business with a digital-first mindset
At LIKE.TG, we define scalability as increasing revenue without substantially increasing resources. Achieving that is about using a digital-first mindset to create better efficiency and ensure that any additional resources are reflected in your return on investment (ROI).
This digital-first mindset has to be fused into your company culture. You need to identify the prime areas for automation, hire the right people ahead of the curve, and don’t become over-dependent on one person or isolated knowledge. Building your business with scalability in mind and taking a customer-centric mindset are the keys to growth and success.
Vietnam-based test automation platform provider, Katalon, is putting this concept into practice. The company has doubled in size in less than 12 months, and credits LIKE.TG as a catalyst for their growth.
To scale into the enterprise segment, the company uses automation through Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Platform and Inbox to enable the customer success team to touch every customer account while maximising efficiency and cost effectiveness. These solutions have reduced manual processes by 70%, improved conversion rate, and increased accurate forecasts by 50%.
The company is also using LIKE.TG to streamline the entire sales funnel and divide tasks between sales and customer success teams, while maintaining a seamless experience across the entire customer journey.
LIKE.TG enables Katalon to hire in any country and optimise serving their customers globally, while keeping a culture of accountability through their remote sales, service and finance teams. This capability has contributed to a four-fold increase in revenue team growth.
5. Innovate and grow your business with a customer-centric vision
This is more evidence why the SME’s roadmap for sustainable growth should be centred around a 360 customer-centric vision that puts the customer at the core of the experience.
Building your business with scalability and customer centricity in mind is critical to growth and success. Learn how to create a winning strategy that can help you stay competitive and innovative in this fast-changing environment. Take your business to the next level and be the game changer for your business.
Watch our customer centricity video now to learn how to unlock profitable growth and success for your business.
No One Understands Your Charts — Here’s How To Change That
Charts are the language of business, used every day at all levels to convey information. But too often, they consist of incomprehensible pies, bars, gauges, dots, and lines, leaving the reader no more informed about the topic at hand. The good news is it’s almost certainly not your fault — it’s the charts themselves.
I’ve been helping people build better charts for 15 years, through my book, The Big Book of Dashboards, on Chart Chat (a video series about the good and bad of data visualisation), and at conferences around the world. I’m a senior data evangelist at LIKE.TG’s analytics platform Tableau, and here’s what I know: data visualisation is a language as expressive as the written word, a language that needs to be understood by all but often is not.
I’m endlessly fascinated by the power of data to persuade or inform. Seemingly trivial choices such as colour or orientation can completely transform a chart’s message. Check out this two-minute video for a perfect example of how a simple bar chart can be manipulated to tell two completely different stories.
In this post, I’ll share my top tips that will help you improve any chart. Each one represents a core aspect of data literacy skills. This list could also form a checklist you can use when creating charts to ensure you’ve made something that will work for your audience and help you communicate your message more efficiently. I’ll show the tips by making incremental changes to a typical chart you might find on any dashboard. Below is our starting point, an everyday pie chart:
Tip #1 – Avoid the pies!
Pie charts are everywhere. Humans love circles, but pie charts are rarely useful. Consider our example above. Who has the biggest sales? It’s hard to answer the question. Let’s apply our first incremental improvement and switch to a bar chart:
It’s not only easier when the data is shown in bars, your brain efficiently processes the bar chart on the right before you even consciously think about the data.
How can that be? Data visualisation takes advantage of “preattentive attributes.” These are environmental signals that we process subconsciously, and they’re super-useful. Length, colour, size, and angle are all examples of preattentive attributes. However, we process some more efficiently than others. Our brain is terrible at efficiently comparing sizes of slices in pies, but wonderfully efficient at perceiving even the smallest differences in lengths.
A chart should deliver its message in the most accurate way possible. Choosing the right preattentive attribute is a critical skill. Don’t just click the button that makes the most “attractive” chart. You should always think about whether the chart actually conveys the message you want it to.
Tip #2 – Avoid distractions (aka, “don’t make me tilt my head!”)
Your goal when making charts is to reduce the cognitive load on the audience as much as possible. How many times have you seen a chart with the labels rotated vertically? I see it all the time, most often on bar charts. Why not simply rotate the chart so the bar is horizontal?
Making these incremental changes helps people get to the insight more quickly because they can focus on data, not formatting. Other distractions that often clutter charts are excessive gridlines, intrusive axes or borders, or the use of three dimensional charts.
Tip #3 – Use colour with intent
Avoid the temptation to use too many colours in your visualisations. In all analytics software, colours are just a click away, and it’s easy to feel productive by sprinkling some into your charts.
Take a step back. Is the purpose of your analytics to make pretty rainbows, or to share insights?
Some of the most powerful and effective charts use only one colour. In the below example, the multi colours used on the left serve no purpose. Readers might be confused as to what the different colours even signify. The example on the right is more effective in highlighting the intent, which is identifying the top two sellers.
Tip #4 – Choose a good title
After choosing an appropriate chart, orienting it correctly, and using colour to highlight, you need to stop and think: what is this chart actually showing? What conclusion do I want people to draw from this chart?
The first thing people look at on your chart, and the most likely thing they’ll remember, is the title. It’s the one chance you get to tell them what they’re going to see and suggest the insight you want them to take away. A good title should describe the insight the chart shows — this could be in the form of a short phrase or question. Getting in the habit of making good titles also forces you to be sure you know why you are making the chart in the first place.
In this example, I’ve created an effective 2-level title on the right. This allows a clear intro (“Who are our top 2 sellers?”) with a sub-heading for added context.
Tip #5 – Show the right number
My final tip is possibly the one you should consider first. Are you even showing the correct number to your audience? So far, we’ve been looking at sales by Account Executive. It looks like Christine and Andrea are our leaders. However, sales success is measured against a quota, not the actual sales value themselves. Have we been charting the wrong number all this time? Let’s take a look at the data:
We can see Christine and Andrea ranking top, but look across to the target and percent of target values: they’re behind their quota! Perhaps, then, we’ve been visualising the wrong value all along. Let’s take a look at the account execs ranked by percent of target. It turns out that Dan, Allie, and Wanda are the superstars who are above quota. Dan’s way ahead, even though his actual sales value is the lowest in the team.
These tips will help improve your charts, but they are just the starting point. You can accelerate your learning by joining thousands of other data-inspired people in our Tableau Community.
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This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
*Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
How PETRONAS Wows Its Customers With Digital Transformation
How do you turn a staple purchase like petrol into a positive customer experience? That’s one of many challenges PETRONAS has overcome while shifting from a product-centric business to one that’s customer focused.
Established in Malaysia in 1974, the progressive energy and solutions provider is now one of the world’s most recognised brands. It has a presence in over 100 countries and a global workforce totalling more than 46,000 employees.
Aadrin Azly, Chief Digital Officer at PETRONAS, joined us at Dreamforce to share how the business is transforming for the future with LIKE.TG Customer 360. Here are highlights from Aadrin’s session, including best practices on how to move from vision to value.
Kick-start your transformation journey with early wins
PETRONAS’s journey with LIKE.TG began with a project to improve the experience of retail customers. The project included the implementation of Service Cloud to manage the resolution of equipment failures within petrol stations.
With support from LIKE.TG Professional Services, PETRONAS completed the project 100% on time and on budget. This was in spite of the project kicking off just weeks before the pandemic and everyone pivoting to work virtually.
“LIKE.TG sent in their A team and stuck by our side. They were there with us for every call and every stand-up and we navigated every challenge together,” said Aadrin. “We are now reaping the benefits, including reduced downtimes and an increase in resolutions from 76% to 94%.”
Put customers at the centre of your business
The success of the retail project led PETRONAS to think about what to do next. PETRONAS’s customer interactions inside petrol stations represent one of many touch points it has with its wider customer base. In fact, the diversity of its portfolio means that some business customers interact with many people and departments.
“I once visited a customer who told me that they couldn’t see me until 4pm because they were too busy. It turns out they were busy with PETRONAS. They had a total of four meetings with us that day which is something that should not have happened,” said Aadrin.
PETRONAS realised it needed to stop looking at the business from a supplier point of view and start seeing things from a customer point of view. This gave rise to the PETRONAS360 vision which puts the customer at the centre of the business.
PETRONAS360 brings together customers, partners and employees across the enterprise to provide a single source of truth to deliver innovative and sustainable solutions and grow new markets that create exponential value at scale.
Aadrin shared the process PETRONAS and LIKE.TG went through to co-create the vision for its digital transformation and secure internal alignment.
“Digital transformation is not easy. You need a seat at the table or sponsorship from management to drive it through. At the same time, you need people on the ground who will feel the program hits their pain points. So we spent the first part of our journey speaking with stakeholders and staff to co-create our vision,” said Aadrin.
Stay on track with clear and measurable goals
PETRONAS wanted to avoid a never-ending transformation. So once the business had clarity on its vision, it set very granular and measurable KPIs. These included a US$43M increase in revenue over five years, a 15% reduction in customer churn, and a 33% uplift in productivity.
Aadrin shared that the clear KPIs acted as a North Star for PETRONAS’s digital transformation, helping everyone to stay focused on what they needed to achieve.
“Breaking things into bite-sized pieces meant we could quickly pivot when things went wrong and celebrate when things went right. And celebrating those small wins created unstoppable momentum to drive our transformation.”
Take a data-driven approach
PETRONAS has applied a data-driven approach to its entire transformation and tracked results every step of the way. This has involved breaking KPIs down into more tangible and measurable goals.
“You sometimes see big value goals like $16B or 42x and they are impossible to track. I think it’s more important to identify the enablers behind the value you want to create and track those religiously,” said Aadrin.
The focus on measurement is reflective of PETRONAS’s wider commitment to becoming a more data-driven organisation. Work is beginning with MuleSoft to help PETRONAS unlock data from various on-premise and cloud-based systems, including LIKE.TG. The data will be orchestrated into functional data hubs with APIs to enable easy reuse and consumption. Data will also be protected from vulnerabilities with standard security policies and governance across all APIs.
On top of this, PETRONAS has started to train teams on no-code and low-code data visualisation with the goal of democratising data science.
Drive digital adoption with human-centred design
PETRONAS’s digital transformation is ongoing. Since launching Service Cloud, the business has deployed a dealer portal on Experience Cloud and adopted Sales Cloud for management of accounts and opportunities. It is also set to go live with a number of other LIKE.TG solutions, including Energy Utilities Cloud, Manufacturing Cloud, Tableau, and Marketing Cloud.
Asked how PETRONAS drives adoption of new technologies across its diverse range of businesses, Aadrin highlighted the importance of human-centred design.
“You need to start by identifying who will use the solution and understanding their pain points. And you can’t just ask them about their pain points as they will provide a list of a thousand things and the solution will become too expensive. So observe and understand their pain points because the moment you understand those pain points, driving adoption becomes easy.”
PETRONAS service transformation with LIKE.TG has heightened customer experience and productivity.Chief Digital Officer Aadrin Azly demonstrates how PETRONAS is executing on its vision to deliver in this video. WATCH NOW Learn more about how LIKE.TG Professional Services helps customers move from vision to value and deliver proven ROI. Download “The Total Economic Impact™ Of LIKE.TG Professional Services”, a 2022 Forrester Consulting study commissioned by LIKE.TG.
Your First-Party Data Strategy Matters — Especially During Tough Times
As budgets tighten, marketing departments may shift their focus toward efficiency. Here’s how a smart customer data-led strategy can hit both targets.
When businesses see signs of economic uncertainty, the natural reaction is to cut costs and try to do more with less. However, there’s one area where your marketing team shouldn’t look to trim: harnessing the first-party data you collect directly from customers.
This information gained through call center interactions, mobile app behaviour, and loyalty programs, among others, can be very helpful during lean times.
Let’s take a look at three areas where these data assets offer a boost:
1. You can reduce cost per acquisition (CPA) economic uncertainty
With an unpredictable economic future, limiting the CPA for new customers only becomes more important. Focusing on marketing campaigns fuelled by that first-party data can reduce your CPA — improving cost efficiency and growth.
CPA is calculated by dividing the cost of your marketing campaign by the number of customers (or conversion events) that you can attribute to that spending. But for many organisations, optimising this formula has felt like a never-ending quest.
So what does first-party data have to do with reducing a company’s overall CPA? A lot. When you have a better understanding of your current customers — with data, you’ll know how to speak to future ones. This first-party data comes directly from your customers, going right into channels you own.
Tapping into this data means understanding which channels, campaigns, and offers work for your customer base as a whole and across key segments.
And in the (almost) post-cookie age of limited online tracking, these insights are even more valuable. Anyone who has unlocked the power of lookalike audiences within advertising platforms can attest to the value of first-party data.
The improved performance on your advertising campaigns can be dramatic. But even a small increase in the number of customers acquired per dollar spent is a powerful way to drive efficiency during economic uncertainty.
2. You can increase customer lifetime value
Many times the quickest path to greater overall growth and efficiency is deepening the relationship with your current customers. Facing slowing economic growth, CFOs and investors focus on maintaining current levels of profit or operating margin. This means keeping costs in line with slower revenue growth.
But an effective way to maintain cost discipline without sacrificing growth is enticing your current customers to spend more.
The additional revenue generated from increasing the lifetime value and average order value of your current customers costs less than acquiring new customers. That’s because you’ve already paid to acquire these customers.
Look for ways to offer greater value to your current customers, such as targeted messages and interactive email forms to provide real-time feedback. Engaging customers you already have a relationship with — and using personalisation to give them exactly what they want — is the ultimate efficiency. And you’ll likely get more business from them in the short and long term.
3. You have an always-on focus group
There’s one more important benefit of focusing on first-party customer data assets: the ability to test and learn from your customers efficiently.
The marketing examples around things like message testing and discount offers might be obvious, but there’s also a giant opportunity for the entire organisation to learn and improve.
For example, imagine allowing your product team to A/B test versions of a new concept with your customers before a launch. They could gain valuable feedback on things like pricing, packaging, and design. And this can also give your marketing team a better view into how campaigns might perform.
Just because you’re facing economic uncertainty doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice growth for efficiency. If your organisation pushes for cuts because the economy starts to slow, know that investments in customer data capabilities are not at odds with discipline and efficiency. They are indeed a big part of it.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Automate Your Customer Data and Help Your Commerce Business Grow
The latest State of Commerce report shows that high-performing commerce organisations around the world are seven times more confident in their preparedness to use data to personalise the commerce experience.
They’re also 1.6x more likely to rate themselves as effective at automating processes. Customers who have used LIKE.TG Customer 360 have seen automation of business processes speed up by 27%.
When you have your customer data on one trusted platform, with automated processes handling your day-to-day operations, you can focus on your customer and grow your business.
Automation is critical in the drive for efficiency
Automation allows you to create a more efficient and productive workforce.
In a recent LIKE.TG Success Metrics study, companies across industries and regions reported seeing, on average, a 26% increase in employee productivity* using LIKE.TG automation, plus an estimated 25% savings on IT costs*.
Other benefits of automation are described in the State of Service report — top of the list is time saving, with 98% of those surveyed describing it as a benefit, and 50% saying that it’s a major benefit to their business.
The report also includes benefits such as connection with other departments, reduction of errors, and time for new projects. All of these factors contribute to a more productive organisation — and that’s not all. Forty-seven percent of service professionals also said that automation helped them focus on their customers.
Lower your ordering costs
To meet new challenges and keep customer satisfaction at the forefront, businesses need to streamline operations to reduce costs, improve customer experience, and earn loyalty. That means streamlining order management and automating repetitive and tedious processes.
Order management system in Commerce Cloud Genie enables businesses to grow revenue with intelligent insights and build trusted relationships with real-time data. We’ve seen companies achieve a reduction of 26% in ordering costs* and boost productivity with Einstein AI within the Commerce Cloud. With commerce automation, 89% of LIKE.TG customers achieve positive ROI in only nine months.*
Customers demand personalised digital experiences
Your customers are more online than ever. As reported in our State of the Connected Customer report, customers worldwide expect more than 60% of their interactions with companies to be online this year.
The report also highlights three important considerations:
88% of consumers say that the experience a company provides is just as important as the product or service it provides
73% of customers also say that they expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations
56% of customers still think that companies treat them as a number, rather than an individual.
The State of Commerce report told us that, after revenue growth and expanded customer base, the greatest concern for most industries is deepening customer relationships.
Leaders in the world of commerce are nearly 1.7x more likely to rate themselves as ‘effective’ when it comes to personalised experiences. They’re also 1.5x more likely to be effective when it comes to understanding customer behaviour.
For your business to thrive, you need to create smoother journeys with highly personalised and intelligent shopping moments that make your customers feel truly understood. These insights present an opportunity for any company to offer a personalised digital service to wow your customers with great experiences and drive business growth. And this can be done with a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ needs – which comes from a complete set of customer data.
New channels = more opportunities
One of the keys to digital success is expanding into new channels. As shown in the State of Commerce report, 69% of digital commerce leaders are already investing in new digital channels. These new channels include mobile apps, online marketplaces, and social media platforms like TikTok.
Fifty-seven percent of customers prefer to engage with companies through digital channels — that number rises to 65% for younger generations. Online comes out on top even when it comes to the final purchase — 63% of millennials and 58% of Gen Z prefer buying online over going into a store.
The time to start automating is now
The stakes for not automating the way you handle data are high — even among leaders. In fact, leaders who report that they aren’t effective at using their data are 37% more likely to report not being prepared to handle rising inflation.
More than 60% of customers are already telling us that the majority of their interactions with companies will be online in the coming years. From LIKE.TG Cyber Week 2022 shopping insights, global online sales and digital traffic broke records. The numbers hit an all-time high of USD$281 billion, up 2% compared to 2021, and USD$68 billion, up 9% compared to 2021. If the trend continues, that number will only get higher.
Prepare your automation strategy now, and you’ll be ready to grow in the future. The second edition of the State of Commerce contains analysis of buying data from over 1 billion customers worldwide. Download the report today to find out how you can handle your data to grow your commerce business more efficiently.
*Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across Singapore, the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
How To Drive Efficient Growth and Scale Your Startup
As startups in Southeast Asia face significant market opportunities, many are looking to accelerate business growth and scale across digital marketplaces. But successfully transitioning from a startup to scaleup mindset — in a global climate of uncertainty — presents some major challenges.
As customer expectations are rising, there is a growing need for startups to invest in the relevant technology stack to build customer loyalty. Here are some of the challenges and opportunities that startups need to be aware of to drive efficient growth and build lasting customer relationships.
Growth challenges for startups
Scalable businesses are built on future-proof processes. From agile internal workflows that enable organisation-wide collaboration, to delivering personalised customer journeys across all channels — your business processes are the engine of your growth.
Then there’s funding to think about. Access to a constant source of funding will help put your startup on the growth highway. But how do you attract real interest from venture capitalists and investors? And where do you spend that funding to achieve maximum growth?
Startups also need to build an employer-of-choice workplace culture that drives talent acquisition and retention, and prioritises collaboration and innovative thinking.
Critical growth drivers for startups
These can be difficult challenges to overcome on your own. But you don’t need to face them alone. Expert insights from trusted mentors can help fill your scalability knowledge gap and accelerate your growth.
With capable mentorship and careful go-to-market planning, startups are better placed to develop an effective growth strategy that prioritises three critical growth drivers.
Customer centricity: Put your customers at the centre of everything you do to drive personalised, intuitive customer journeys.
Smart investment: Allocate resources to key growth enablement areas, while avoiding investing in blackholes that don’t impact revenue.
Process optimisation: Improve your business productivity with automation and tools that optimise your workflows and reduce operating costs.
Process optimisation is key here. As startups continue to grow, it is important to focus on growing efficiently. Your technology stack is the foundation of all three growth drivers.
From a CRM that delivers a 360-degree customer view, to real-time reporting that informs investment decision making, and automation tools that optimise business processes — the right tech stack can take your business from a high-potential startup to a rapidly-growing scaleup.
LIKE.TG research has shown that by consolidating systems together in Customer 360, it lowers IT costs by 25%*, increases employee productivity by 26%*, and customer satisfaction by 32%*. With LIKE.TG, companies can grow efficiently by improving productivity and automation, reduce the number of technology providers they need to manage their business, save time and money, and reduce complexity.
Accelerate your growth with LIKE.TG’s MasterClass
Sounds great? But how do you actually get it done?
LIKE.TG’s MasterClass Accelerator 101 webinaris helping to connect startups with the expert mentorship you need to successfully navigate Southeast Asia’s vibrant USD$360 billion (SGD$500 billion) internet economy.
In this webinar, I joined other industry experts to discuss how you can innovate, grow, and scale your startup with the right tools from the right people.
Daisy Hoang, SVP of Sales and Success at KatalonDaisy is a senior revenue generation and management executive with extensive experience scaling go-to-market strategies for SaaS technology companies. She spoke about how an efficient technology stack is the foundation of hyperscaling at Katalon.
Danny Chong, Senior Investment Director at Gobi Partners ChinaDanny is a highly successful venture capital professional with a focus on funding early-stage startups in Greater China and Southeast Asia.
Growth insights from startup experts
In the webinar, Daisy, Danny, and I set out a roadmap to help startups move from exploring your potential to scaling your company across countries.
We discussed how to gain access to the opportunities that enable startups to accelerate their growth, and how to use the right technology to create a competitive edge in the digital-first future.
In our discussion, Daisy speaks about building a tech foundation ahead of the curve. “Some of the investments [Katalon] made last year, we actually thought were a bit early for us to make those investments. Maybe six months early. But it is now paying off big time by helping us really scale and onboard the team.”
“I encourage everybody, as part of your scale up journey, to proactively identify areas that are prime for automation. Pulling tech resources early to help scale, record, document, and then at the end bring up the ROI, is extremely important,” she advises.
You’ll learn from this masterclass how to view digitisation as an opportunity to grow faster in Southeast Asia’s digital economy, and how to build a tech stack that will help to:
Optimise your operational processes
Deliver personalised customer journeys
Support an employer-of-choice workplace culture
We also talked about how to best navigate the funding journey, including current trends venture capitalists are seeing in successful startups, and how to get noticed by investors.
Small business is big business
If there’s one key message that I’d love for you to take away, it’s that small business is big business. The right tech stack can give an early-stage startup the agility and competitive power of a large enterprise player. I see it happen every day at LIKE.TG. We’re constantly helping our customers to drive cost savings and scale their business efficiently. Many of our customers use Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to create a single source of customer truth, break down departmental silos, deliver personalised customer journeys, and create collaborative workplace cultures that drive efficient growth.
This is how high-potential startups become highly-successful companies.
For more growth insights from startup up experts, watch MasterClass Accelerator 101: How you can innovate, grow, and scale your startup now.How can a CRM help startups and SMEs grow more efficiently? Get the recipe for success now.
Why Website Personalisation is Your Best Friend in a Changing Economy
When the economy shows signs of slowing down, marketing budgets are often the earliest casualties. However, not all marketing investments are created equal, and website personalisation will help you regardless of the economic climate.
There are several reasons why your business should focus on website personalisation. The first is customers now expect personalised experiences from nearly every brand they engage with. Over the last decade, companies like Amazon, Google, and Netflix have shown how technology and data can create seamless and often delightful customer experiences.
It’s not just that Netflix has thousands of shows and movies for us to watch. It’s that the streaming service’s homepage is curated and ever-evolving with our tastes. That’s website personalisation at its best and something we come back for (and expect).
According to LIKE.TG’s State of the Connected Consumer report, customers say that being treated like a person, not a number, is very important to winning their business. 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Customers are less forgiving about a disjointed experience or having to make a big effort to find what they want. And since websites have become the most essential digital experience for many businesses, they are among the first places where customers will form impressions about your brand.
Customers are using their high standards for experience to judge whether to do business with you. So personalising that experience should seem like a no-brainer for most organisations, right? Not always.
Here are three more reasons why website personalisation is important in a shifting economic climate.
1. Website personalisation can make up for stagnant advertising budgets
For most brands, the biggest percentage of marketing spend is allocated to top-of-the-funnel activities, which centre on boosting brand or product awareness to new customers. This includes advertising or sponsorship campaigns.
These often are the first marketing cuts during slow economic periods.
Many executives believe that if customers aren’t currently in the mindset to spend, it’s better to reduce the outbound marketing used to acquire them until the storm passes. This is an effective cost-saving measure when economic growth slows, but the cuts reduce the number of prospects seeking out your brand and going to your website.
Since there are fewer visitors to your site, each one increases in value. Simple maths says you need to convert more of these customers to make up for the drop you’re experiencing in overall site visits. Personalisation will help you improve your site’s overall conversion rate and overcome the traffic drop by giving those users more reason to come back.
2. Website personalisation automates a shorter path to conversion
Leaner times result in leaner marketing teams. Companies will ask their marketers to do more with less. Efficiency and streamlining processes should be your business priorities.
There’s no better way for marketers to address this new directive than by automating how we engage with every customer. Creating an automated website personalisation experience is a highly visible way to show your commitment to efficiency. And it’s way better than making frequent updates to pages and design templates.
Automation is a more efficient path to conversion and upsell in a single site visit versus waiting for conversion across several visits or never experiencing it at all. For example, LIKE.TG uses personalisation to create a tailored experience for every customer who visits our website. Visitors are shown content based on their interests. The experience is relevantand appropriate, designed to meet their expectations each time they come back.
3. Website personalisation helps you build better relationships
When budgets for new customer acquisition are trimmed, there’s more value in deepening relationships with your current customers.
You probably already have good relationships with many of these people. Now you should be doing all you can to extend them. The best way to show your current customers that you’re invested in the relationship is demonstrating your understanding of them.
This can be as simple as showing relevant content and offers whenever they arrive on your site. Providing a personalised experience to returning customers is the modern equivalent of saying “welcome back” in a bricks-and-mortar store. This goes a long way in driving up each customer’s total lifetime value.
To go even deeper, ensure that this personalised experience stretches across all customer touchpoints, including service and sales. Sharing this critical customer experience data across your organisation is a bridge to building long-lasting relationships.
Keep these website personalisation points as you drive forward in stiff economic headwinds. Your organisation will see fiscal and relationship benefits in the short term and in the years ahead.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Spending Smartly on Tech Is Key in Times of Economic Uncertainty
This article was written in partnership with Sushil Panta, Senior Director of LIKE.TG Business Value Services.
Are you taking a hard look at your budgets? You wouldn’t be alone. With all the talk about economic headwinds, many companies are pausing new programs, focusing only on what is essential to keep the business afloat. But there’s a better way to navigate economic uncertainty: find ways to become more efficient, like automation, and invest in them smartly.
Even when you’re understandably cautious about spending overall, investing in the right technology can actually save time and money in the short term. That’s even more true over the longer term, because whatever the future holds, you can bet digital transformation will be key to navigating it successfully.
One thing we know is that every recession is followed by an expansion. The latter often lasts much longer than the former, as was the case after World War II, the dot-com bubble, and the Great Recession. The trick, then, is not to run away from all new investments, but to run toward the right ones.
But how do you know which are the right investments? The answer is simple: The right investments create the greatest benefits at the lowest relative cost, while maximising speed for success now.
I’ll explain each of those components below and give your business a better framework through which to make some of your most important spending decisions.
How do you measure the benefits of your tech investments?
The best way to define the benefits of any investment is through the eyes of your customer. Be clear on the pain points you need to address and the outcomes you seek to reduce complexity for them.
Using your current processes and performance metrics as a baseline, and by making a reasonable estimate about your future improvements as a result of new technology, you can then estimate quantifiable benefits. These could include incremental revenue growth and hard-to-quantify but highly strategic benefits such as employee engagement.
Let’s explore these sources of benefits in more detail:
Grow revenue through current and new streams
Revenue growth is not just about selling more of the same products to the same customers. It is increasingly about activating new revenue streams that might be more predictable and profitable, acquiring new customers, and entering new markets. However, you need to know when to send what offers to whom to maximise conversion. Technology can help with that.
For example, you don’t want to send a marketing offer for a new product when the customer hasn’t heard from your service department on a pre-existing issue, or to a customer who may be behind on an invoice payment. On the other hand, good application of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help uncover a customer’s changing buying patterns or identify “at-risk” customers.
Simplify + streamline + automate = more efficiency
Efficiency gains are about simplifying and streamlining complex processes, automating manual tasks, and removing redundancies. The average enterprise uses a whopping 976 applications. Vendor and system sprawl, often the result of adopting point solutions to fill immediate needs department by department, create far greater inefficiencies down the road. Vendor consolidation is one important way in which companies can reduce these complexities, both for their IT infrastructure and their bottom line.
Here’s an example of what that can look like: RBC Wealth Management, a division of RBC Capital Markets, LLC, is a values-driven financial institution providing clients with customized strategies to grow, preserve, and share their wealth. By consolidating 26 systems into one, RBC Wealth Management reduced maintenance costs by 50%, while continuing to deliver on client and advisor expectations.
Create better productivity pathways
Productivity gains are about getting more outputs for the same inputs or the same output for less inputs. In today’s constrained supply chain and volatile labour market, the need for improving your forecasting, supply chain planning, and employee engagement has never been greater. These are all areas that the right technology, combined with the right strategy, people, and processes, can improve. The right technology allows you to do more with the data you have, driving productivity and better results with intelligence and automation.
So what does a productivity benefit look like?
Take ADT, for instance, a leader in home and commercial security that strives to deliver safe, smart, and sustainable security solutions. ADT leverages automation and intelligence to drive cost savings, deliver faster customer support, and increase agent productivity. In fact, ADT has been able to move 40% of service appointments to virtual.
Remember, your goal is to maximise ROI
New revenues? Increased efficiencies? Productivity gains? They all sound great, but what will that cost? Of course we all want to keep costs low, but it’s important to remember the overall goal is not to minimise investment per se, but rather to maximise return on investment (ROI).
Take it from Schneider Electric. The global leader in energy management and automation is transforming the way the world uses energy. Schneider Electric drives efficiency across the company — enabling its sales reps to close deals 30% faster and save $2.7 million in IT costs over a three-year period.
Or consider the path taken by GE Appliances. With Service Cloud, the company’s agents have a single source of truth to clearly see where customers are in their ownership journey. Plus, the company can handle more calls at less cost by pairing Service Cloud Voice with partner telephony from Amazon Connect, increasing first-call resolution and decreasing handle times by up to 12%.
“The return on investment for the technology we’ve employed is really agent efficiency and the ability to connect with the owner and create that human experience,” said Angie Corbett, senior manager of ecommerce sales and digital engagement. “That’s priceless.”
We see the right technology will deliver the greatest benefit at the lowest relative cost. That being said, maximising your benefit at a manageable cost is essential. Here are some best practices:
Select a cloud-first CRM strategy, which is supported by the fact that more software spending is moving to the cloud. With a cloud-first approach, you can manage costs more effectively through lower maintenance costs, a pay-as-you-go model, improved security, and better enablement of a mobile workforce.
Pick a single, integrated CRM platform rather than a patchwork of expansive point solutions that require a great deal of custom integration. Those patchwork solutions not only cost a lot of time during setup but are also hard to maintain, brittle, and less scalable. A platform mindset supports building integrated, end-to-end customer journeys, which is essential to close the divide between many enterprise IT platforms and their customer expectations.
Pick pre-built industry solutions, which will help you accelerate time to value and reduce implementation costs, by introducing industry-specific objects, real-time data insights, workflows, and analytics, all out of the box, thus minimising the need for custom developments.
The value of maximum speed for success now
Speed is about how quickly you can go from buying a product to using it to drive business outcomes.
For your CFO, it might mean the payback period. For your IT executive, it might mean the time between the implementation planning and phase 1 rollout. For your customers, it might mean the ease of doing business with you anytime, anywhere, and through any channel. Whatever your success measurement system, speed is integral to achieving it – now more than ever. Speed gives you adaptability, and adaptability gives you the power to not only survive but thrive.
Ideally, you end up with the kind of impact seen by SmartRent, a leading smart home solutions provider that focuses on driving automation and efficiency for its customers. SmartRent leverages automation capabilities to eliminate manual tasks and streamline processes, increasing employee retention by 92% and saving employees 120 hours in onboarding time. Speed-to-impact is essential for getting employees onboarded to deliver customer value quickly.
It is possible to cut costs and reduce complexity while creating resilience within your company. You can do this without compromise by consolidating systems and investing in the right technology for your business. With automation, intelligence, consolidation, and self-service, you can maximise value and create customers for life.
Boost Your Employee Experience to Improve ROI on Customer Experience
It goes without saying that customers are at the heart of organisational success. A positive customer experience translates into strong customer advocacy, better return on investment (ROI), and recurring revenue.
Successful organisations have found a key element to delivering great customer experience —excellent employee experience. Many customer-centric companies vouch for astrong correlationbetween happy employees and satisfied customers.
TakeM1as an example. This Singapore’s telco empowers its employees to work more efficiently with new tools and applications. With LIKE.TG technology, training time is 50% faster for new sales and service employees. It eliminates repetitive and mundane tasks, making it easier for them to serve customers better. In the long run, efficiency and productivity gains in operations lead to cost optimisation.
Why does a happy employee equal a happy customer?
In his book ‘Customer what?’, customer experiences (CX) specialist and author Ian Golding talks about howempathyis the biggest factor in creating a positive customer experience. However, empathy should not be limited to the customer and must also be directed at your staff. If you don’t get it right for your team, they won’t direct it toward your customers.
Customer experiences frequently mirror how employees feel about their work; thus, happy and supported staff are more likely to facilitate excellent customer experiences. Employees who are happy and engaged at work are more likely to have a positive outlook, be more attentive, use innovation and creativity in their interactions with customers, and represent your business to them in the most favourable manner.
So, how can you ensure a great employee experience?
Build your Digital HQ on Slack to help teams break down internal silos, foster cross-functional working relationships, and provide the right people with the right information at the right time.
1. Remove barriers in communication
Frequent and effective communication is one of the first steps to an enhanced employee experience, whether in a physical, remote, or hybrid setting.
In aresearch conducted by LIKE.TG, connected tools and communication methods improve return on investment (ROI) greatly. Marketing teams on Slack experience 16% faster campaign execution and carry out 8% more campaigns per year. Sales teams using Slack saw an average 13% increase in deals closed and reduced onboarding costs by 39%. Service teams experience an 11% average increase in customer satisfaction and a 9.2% average increase in a company’s net promoter score with Slack. Overall, there is an increase in employee productivity by 26%* using Slack. In return, companies saw an increase in ROI from improved customer satisfaction and reduced cost of customer service tickets.
How can your teams leverage the power of real-time communication with Slack?
Slack allows your employees to discuss specific projects and issues in one-on-one conversations or within small groups. Urgent request? No problem, just tag the person to get their attention instantaneously.
You can also create separate channels for different topics, teams, or groups – to which access for employees can be extended or restricted as needed. Invite people from outside the company to these channels.
For brief meetings, Slack provides huddles, either within a channel, between coworkers, or for the entire team. And if you need to provide context — exchange files, documents, images, and videos from your device or directly from the cloud within a message.
No time to send a written note? Start a video or voice chat within Slack. In fact, Slack supports all the widely used video conferencing services.
2. Make it easier to find information
Searching for a particular message from hundreds of email threads and private conversations requires a lot of time and effort. In Slack, you can simply pin messages to designate which ones you wish to find later. Or use the search function to find specific chats or messages, or even to analyse archived conversations. There is a wide variety of modifiers available in Slack that you may use to focus your search and locate the particular note you’re looking for. This allows your teams to spend their time more productively on value-added tasks.
3. Enable seamless collaboration across teams and time zones
Need to speak with someone, but they’re out of the office or in a meeting? Schedule the message to be delivered when they come back online. While sending a message, Slack will suggest times and let you know what time it will be in the recipient’s time zone. Or you can also set a custom time for message delivery if you know when the recipient will be back at their seat. This ensures important messages are not misplaced, while ensuring that they don’t interfere with an employee’s me-time or focus hours — a foolproof way to nudge those employee experience scores higher.
4. Let go of the surveys for a bit!
It is quite possible that the employees do not open or fill in the feedback surveys designed to boost employee engagement rates. The reasons could be many — lack of time, lack of interest, or complicated process. But in the process, you are losing out on valuable information such as which workers feel appreciated and engaged, who needs training programmes, what are the possibilities for skill development and so on.
Make Slackbot your friend. Get the friendly assistant to ask your employees some relevant questions on a weekly basis. These could include something along the lines of “Are you satisfied with the recognition you get for your work?”, “Are you happy with how frequently your direct manager provides feedback?”, “Do you recognise how your efforts support the objectives of my organisation?”, etc.
Employees can complete this in just a few minutes, encouraging regular feedback cycles across the organisation. Additionally, Slack also lets you run employee appreciation programmes to recognise and reward excellent work and high-performing individuals.
5. And finally, leverage technology to take the struggle out of work
Leveraging technical solutions is almost always good for increasing the employee experience. You can simply automate routine, repetitive processes inside and outside Slack simply by using clicks rather than extensive coding. Plus, your team can access almost any app from where they work, thanks to the more than 2,400 apps listed in the Slack App Directory.
Technology + engaged employees = Satisfied customers
Employees can make or break your success story no matter how great your customer-facing app is or how resilient your supply chain is. Engaged, motivated employees go the extra mile to serve the business, providing better customer service and keeping customers satisfied. Thus, it is important that employers put in place the right processes and tools that empower employees to do this.
WithLIKE.TG and Slack, you can take multiple steps to enhance employee experience. Choose from the countless ways to tailor Slack to your remote team’s needs, and establish a strong remote work culture that keeps employees engaged, and empowers them to provide great customer experiences.
Learn more about how LIKE.TG + Slack can help you empower your teams and build your Digital HQ.
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Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics. This post originally appeared on the I.N.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Get Insights Faster With Winter ’23 CRM Analytics Release
With our CRM Analytics Winter ’23 release, you can tap into insights faster and make real-time predictions with external Snowflake data. According to a recent survey of over 3,500 customers, organisations using LIKE.TG estimate significant cost saving, efficiency, and productivity benefits. On average, organisations get insights 29% faster with CRM analytics*. This release will help you get the most from Einstein Discovery models and make analytics easier to access.
Let’s look at some of the exciting features in this release:
With Live Prediction on Snowflake, you can make real-time predictions using external Snowflake data
Accelerate time to insights with new enhancements in UI
With the new enhancements in CRM Analytics Home, unify all your analytics assets in one place and easily discover insights using contextual capabilities
Get a deeper understanding of your model with new and improved metrics and variable importance with Model Inspector
Make more informed predictions with your live Snowflake data
Within CRM Analytics, you can now deploy models to make real-time predictions with live Snowflake data.
LIKE.TG and Snowflake share native integration that lets you access, combine, and analyse your data to grow your business. This release takes that integration to the next level, allowing you to create real-time predictions in Einstein Discovery — integrating live data outside of LIKE.TG with data from Snowflake.
One advantage of CRM Analytics and Einstein Discovery is that no other machine learning platform can combine incredible LIKE.TG Customer 360 data with external datasets to boost your predictive models. You can join live data seamlessly, like any other traditional dataset, and boost predictions with minimal effort.
In the demo below, see how you can get real-time predictions by creating a story from a deployed model that uses live product usage data and training data from Snowflake.
The insights you want — where you want them
Another major upgrade in the Winter 2023 release: you can unlock insights faster and within a more user-friendly experience.
You can now move between pages with a single click — no more multi-selection is needed. It’s as simple as creating a flow and selecting that action. You can easily navigate to any detailed page that you want.
You will find a new Interaction tab in the widget panel that allows you to create a selection interaction and add a navigation action. These updates transform a static dashboard into a powerful asset. You can also link a page, component, URL, and lens.
You can also bring in filters for deeper explorations to integrate your content together, allowing you to do more with just one click.
For example, you can access your team member’s profile by clicking on their image and navigating to an opportunity page by selecting it from the account. You can also drill down from a country to a state to a city to get granular insights.
In future releases, we will add more widgets and actions to the interaction framework. Till then, learn more about our user interface improvements in the overview demo video below.
Unify your CRM Analytics assets and content
We’ve completely redesigned CRM Analytics Home to give you one central place for creating, finding, and sharing Dashboards, Lightning Reports, and all your CRM Analytics assets.
We’ve enhanced the user analytics experience with powerful contextual search capabilities, such as browse and find to uncover insights faster and to manage your content easily.
You can easily narrow your search to a specific dashboard type, report, or lens that was last modified by you with new filter capabilities. Using filters, you can manage all CRM Analytics assets, Lightning reports, and dashboards in one place.
And the good part is if someone does not have CRM Analytics, they can still find, access, and manage all their operational analytics content through the Analytics tab.
Check out the demo video to learn more.
Analyse your machine learning models better with Model Inspector
We’ve added Model Inspector to Einstein Discovery to help you better understand machine learning model quality and to analyse models more easily.
Model Inspector allows you to easily evaluate your model and quickly identify which variables are influencing the model’s predictions with an importance score.
Previously, only correlation scores were displayed. Now, we can also look at importance scores. In terms of predicting an outcome, importance shows how much the model relies on the variable.
With new and improved model metrics, you can analyse your model’s performance by comparing it with “No model” or “Theoretically perfect model” from the Gains chart. Additionally, we’ve included predicted versus actual and new residual charts to better understand the model. The predicted versus actual chart is available for all regression models.
The confusion matrix is now much easier to interpret as it shows the labels of the two classes in the outcome variable. This eliminates the need to remember what is positive and what is negative.
You can see these new enhancements to the model evaluation feature in action below. Explore a Binary Classification model that predicts win probability for sales opportunities and a Regression model that predicts quantity sold daily in stores.
The CRM Analytics Winter ’23 release is available now. To learn more about all the new features in this release, visit theCRM Analytics Winter ‘23 release notes.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
*Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
These 4 Marketing Trends Are Reshaping How We Connect With Customers
We surveyed 6,000 global leaders to find out how new technologies and expectations are changing the way businesses build relationships with customers. Here are the key findings and tips for success from our newest State of Marketing report.
Over the past few years, marketing trends have forced brands to navigate uncharted waters. Shifts in customer behaviours, an economy in flux, and emerging technologies are all rocking the boat.
You can help your company weather the storm by embracing tech tools, personalising your customer interactions, preparing for a cookieless future, and prioritising collaboration with remote teams. The key is to focus on the right solution for right now.
We’ve identified four major marketing trends from LIKE.TG’s latest State of Marketing report. These trends are changing the way we work and how we connect with customers.
Trend 1: Tools and trust are ASEAN marketers’ priorities and challenges
New challenges call for innovative solutions. As customer expectations shift, marketers are adapting to meet audiences’ new demands. More than 90% of CMOs around the world say they must continually innovate to remain competitive. Over the past year, marketing organisations have changed their top priorities to make this happen.
As businesses are charged with doing more with less, many ASEAN marketers are looking to leverage marketing tools and technologies. The ineffective use of these tools and technologies is also the top challenge for marketers in Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand.
Trust is another major concern — consumers are growing increasingly uncomfortable with the way their data is handled. Many marketers are working on ways of reassuring their customers and using data responsibly. Marketers in Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand listed issues relating to trust as their top priority.
Marketing tools
Technology adoption, vanity metrics, and a disconnection between marketing and sales can slow marketers down. Many marketers are further prioritising the modernisation of their tech stack, with significant numbers around the world investing in automation and employee productivity solutions. We’ve seen customers experience a 26% boost in productivity* thanks to Slack.
Customer data
The growth of martech tools has created more data than marketers can know what to do with. With more data generated than ever before, businesses are able to target customers with personalised experiences with much greater precision. However, marketers must manage the deluge of data types that come in and balance how to personalise without crossing the ethical line.
Quick tip
If you’re implementing new tech, make sure you don’t end up using it in the same way as the old solution. Martech data is only as good as how it’s shared and implemented. To translate technology investments into business value, you should focus beyond the platforms you’re using and ensure clear, cross-team visibility of your data. Ultimately, this will unlock your tools.
Trend 2: Marketers are redefining customer engagement with smarter, targeted interactions
Data has gone from being a supporting player in a marketer’s toolkit to a critical component in marketing strategy. Marketers need to get the most from technology that uses data to provide more personalised interactions. At the same time, you may find that costs are lowered and processes become more efficient. In fact, customers have told us that LIKE.TG marketing tools lower their customer acquisition costs by 27%*.
Marketing organisations around the world use the following technologies:
90% use a customer relationship management (CRM) system
89% use an account-based marketing (ABM) platform
62% use artificial intelligence (AI)
According to our report, 80% of marketers around the world say customer experience is a key competitive differentiator. They also say that they are hungry for more connected data in order to deliver better experiences. Marketing trends show that organisations continue to increase the number of data sources they’re using each year — with a projected total of 18 in 2023.
Marketers are using technologies like CRM systems and ABM platforms to unify data and deliver targeted campaigns, while leaning on AI to integrate automation into their marketing activities. Three of the top four AI use cases are related to automation, highlighting the importance of scaling up speed and effectiveness with existing resources.
Marketers are also focused on getting the most out of limited budgets and resources to meet audiences where they are. We found that 83% of marketers around the world say their marketing organisation engages customers in real time across one or more marketing channels.
Quick tip
If you want to fully understand your customers’ demands, you’ll need a new way of using the data you have. This is why integrated tech like customer data platforms (CDPs) are more relevant than ever. Using the insights provided by these platforms will help you optimise the critical moments in your customers’ journeys and build better marketing strategies.
Trend 3: The cookieless future is pushed back, but marketers continue to prepare
The decline of third-party cookies has led marketers to look for other sources of customer data. They’re pivoting to data given freely by customers (zero-party data) and data collected directly from customers (first-party data). Marketers we surveyed in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand all said that they are providing incentives to their customers to share data. In contrast, marketers in Indonesia are concentrating on investing in new technologies.
As deadlines to phase out third-party cookies continue to be delayed, 75% of marketers worldwide say they still rely on third-party data. However, they aren’t allowing this to impede progress.
Our study shows that 68% of marketers around the world have created a fully defined strategy to shift toward first-party data as they adapt to changes in privacy regulations and calls for data transparency. Streamlining the number of data sources will also help marketers be more efficient and reduce costs.
While not all third-party data is cookie-related, marketers will need to reconcile this strategy with future changes in privacy regulations. Strategies such as providing information-sharing incentives for customers can help bridge the gap by enriching customer data profiles.
The growth of data sources in the near term highlights the need for technology that will help marketers combine multiple data sources into a single view of the customer. Current marketing trends back this up: Around the world, 32% of B2B marketers say that sharing a unified view of customer data across business units is a challenge. The numbers across our region paint a slightly different picture, with some marketers struggling more than others. Only 28% of marketers in Indonesia and the Philippines say that sharing data is a challenge, for example. The number climbs to 32% in Thailand, 35% in Singapore, and up to 45% in Malaysia.
Quick tip
As we approach a future without third-party cookies, you can start to incorporate more inbound marketing into your strategies. You can offer value through content and digital experiences in exchange for your audience’s consent to use their data. After years of investing in brand marketing across various platforms, this approach may feel like a complete turnaround for B2C marketers. But building owned digital experiences will still allow you to access valuable data — with complete control as an added bonus.
Trend 4: It takes more than an investment in tools to unlock collaboration
Remote work has fundamentally changed the marketing landscape, making collaboration that much more difficult. We found that 69% of marketers around the world say it’s harder to collaborate now than before the pandemic.
Many marketers continue to juggle communications, processes, collaboration, and problem solving, all while working in a hybrid world. And they believe this marketing trend is here to stay — 70% expect investments in remote technologies to be permanent. In response, marketers are investing in collaboration technologies to ensure that work gets done, regardless of location.
Marketers who said they use the following collaboration technologies:
Video conferencing: 46%
Channel-based collaboration platform: 45%
Instant messaging or chat apps: 45%
Enterprise social networks: 44%
Email: 43%
Shared documents: 42%
Voice messaging: 41%
Phone: 38%
Virtual whiteboards: 36%
Marketing organisations have adapted to the shifting needs of their workforce, adopting an average of four collaboration technologies to unify global marketing teams.
Taking the lead are technologies like video conferencing, channel-based collaboration platforms like Slack, instant messaging or chat apps, and enterprise social networks. While email makes it into the top five, it’s clear that communication tools that enable instant, asynchronous work are preferred when interacting with one another.
Quick tip
Integrating one platform that streamlines multiple applications and workflows can break silos and better coordinate marketing efforts. But it’s the adoption of the platform that can actually empower teams. Is the leadership team encouraging teams to use collaboration platforms, but are not actually using it themselves? Are content teams using one tool, but designers using another? To thrive in a work-from-anywhere world, collaboration requires an all-in approach to tools and processes that make teams agile and aligned.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog. *Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
Meet the New CFO — Your Most Important Leader in This Economy
Who has the most influence in a company? Increasingly, it’s the chief financial officer.
More CFOs are being promoted to CEO than ever before, according to new research. Approximately 8.1% of sitting CEOs came directly from a CFO chair.
The modern CFO manages more than just money. CFOs are taking broader leadership responsibilities, such as managing customer experiences, hiring and retaining talent, and leading strategic shifts into automation and other areas.
The CFO is a lifeline for company health — and becoming more critical as we head into a time of economic uncertainty. What does this mean for today’s CFO? How is this role evolving as businesses face ongoing disruptions and instability?
Changing characteristics of the modern CFO
CFOs are far more diverse in gender and race than CEOs (and the rest of the C-suite). This year, 16% of CFOs are women, up from 9.7% a decade ago. And 10.9% are racially or ethnically diverse, up from 3.6% a decade ago.
CFOs also have staying power, according to LIKE.TG research. CFOs remain in their positions for 4.8 years, on average — second only in tenure to the average 7.2 years notched by CEOs.
And they have more responsibilities in their evolving roles. For example, they must be:
Complex problem solvers
(Well informed) fortune tellers
Self-aware leaders
Expert delegators
“Traditionally, people have thought of CFOs as a steward” and that includes “running a tight finance ship,” Susan Li, Meta’s new CFO, said at a recent summit sponsored by Fortune. But today, CFOs wear many more hats, like “the efficient operator hat. The CFO is really a partner in steering the business direction and product vision for the company.”
At some companies, the expanding role of the CFO is removing the need for a chief operating officer, added Tracey Travis, executive vice president and CFO at The Estée Lauder Companies, who also attended the summit.
CFO challenges in 2023 — and beyond
The C-suite has relied heavily on CFOs in recent years to help lead in times of economic turbulence, and that will continue in the future. In fact, 75% of CFOs say economic disruption is 2023’s biggest challenge.
Another challenge is how to invest wisely in a downturn, especially in technologies that can help companies become more efficient as budgets tighten. The modern CFO who understands the potential of strategies like automation and platform consolidation can positively affect the bottom line.
The average company uses 976 applications to run its business and store customer data. This isn’t efficient, effective, or affordable.
If CFOs don’t have access to data across the whole business, how can they make informed decisions? The modern CFO must be a digital native — and that comes from deep understanding and partnerships with the CIO and tech team.
The key is focusing on technology investments that deliver value, long-term cost savings, and ultimately, solid ROI. How can companies make the right technology investments during a downturn to deliver long-term value? LIKE.TG COO Brian Millham suggested the key is to lean into efficiency — simplifying complex processes and creating better productivity pathways.
“It is possible to cut costs and reduce complexity while creating resilience within your company,” he added. “You can do this without compromise by consolidating systems and investing in the right technology for your business.”
Skills for the modern CFO
Spreadsheets are still important, but today’s CFO needs to communicate beyond the numbers.
“CFOs are viewed as kind of a deputy CEO,” Alyse Bodine, global head of the financial officers practice at recruiting firm Heidrick Struggles, told Fortune last month. “The ability to lead a diverse set of individuals, both finance and non-finance, across the organisation takes people skills. So, there’s definitely a heightened demand on that skill set when it comes to the finance population.”
LIKE.TG completed hour-long interviews last year with 10 CEOs across enterprise and commercial business. Many said they expected to replace current C-suite team members with leaders who had higher emotional intelligence (EQ) and were better equipped to handle not only stressed employees but a more socially engaged workforce.
This isn’t new news. In 2020, Summit Leadership Partners found that 80% to 90% of high performers in the C-suite were differentiated by high EQ. According to their research, EQ is twice as important for predicting performance in executives than technical skills or IQ.
And EQ could bridge the Great Disconnect between employees and the C-suite.
How CFOs can evolve
It’s no longer enough to steer a finance ship well. As CFOs develop new leadership styles, they should ask themselves the following questions:
Is the way I lead:
making the company stronger?
true to who I am?
necessary to get the job done?
It takes a different lens to solve today’s — and tomorrow’s — problems. The modern CFO who can think creatively and differently, and develop thoughtful strategies for investing, is well poised for the road ahead.
Ultimately, it’s the CFO who signs off on major investment decisions and takes the risk of investing in innovation versus tightening belts. Leaders should bet on the CFO that invests in the future versus pausing progress.
Download our ebook to learn how toPrepare your Business for a Digital Futuretoday.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
Drive Cost Savings for Your Business With These 5 Winter ’23 Innovations
Innovation is a top priority at LIKE.TG. In fact, innovation is one of our core values, and it’s reflected in everything we do.
We release new innovations three times a year, many of which come from ideas and feedback received directly from our customers via the IdeaExchange. And we know that there’s no better time to listen to our customers than right now.
In a time of economic uncertainty, our customers told us that getting the most out of their LIKE.TG investment is more important than ever. So, we’ve put together a list of ways you can use our Winter ’23 innovations to drive cost-saving and efficiency for your business. This new release will also help you maximise your LIKE.TG investment.
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1. Create preventative maintenance plans
Service Cloud Preventative Maintenance enhancements let you create preventive maintenance plans for equipment based on usage. This keeps your customers updated at all times. The next maintenance can either be determined by fixed cadence or it can be automatically adjusted based on the usage when the previous work was completed. These enhancements will enable better maintenance planning, repair time, and integration into the scheduling process, significantly reducing unnecessary spare parts expenditure and labour costs. window.SfdcWwwBase && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent.updateChapter(document.scripts[document.scripts.length - 1].getAttribute("data-uuid")); if(!window.vidyardEmbed){ window.videoUtils && window.videoUtils.loadScriptOnce("https://play.vidyard.com/embed/v4.js", "Vidyard", true); } else { window.vidyardEmbed.api.renderDOMPlayers(); } (function($) { // Add 'Configuration' global object with details of our Adobe Analytics instance window.Configuration = window.Configuration || {}; var rsid = (typeof Server !== 'undefined') ? Server.getAccount() : ''; $.extend(window.Configuration, { PUBLISHER: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', MCID: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', NAMESPACE: 'LIKE.TG', CHANNEL: 'LIKE.TG', RSID: rsid, TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.sc.omtrdc.net', HEARTBEAT_TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.hb.omtrdc.net', DEBUG: false }); }(jQuery)); // End of IIFE
2. Enrich profiles with cloud storage
CDP Connector for Google Cloud Storage, a new Marketing Cloud feature, reduces integration and maintenance costs. It leverages a pre-built connection to bring data from Google Cloud Storage into Customer Data Platform. Now, you can leverage cloud storage attributes to enrich customer profiles and optimise segmentation and personalisation.
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3. Do more with commerce
New enhancements to B2B and B2B2C Commerce help you:
Enable recurring revenue models for B2B and B2B2C using Subscription Management’s pre-built integrations that connect Revenue Cloud to Commerce Cloud.
Enable shoppers to quickly search for products on B2B websites and gain more insight into shopper intent with Semantic Search.
window.SfdcWwwBase && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent.updateChapter(document.scripts[document.scripts.length - 1].getAttribute("data-uuid")); if(!window.vidyardEmbed){ window.videoUtils && window.videoUtils.loadScriptOnce("https://play.vidyard.com/embed/v4.js", "Vidyard", true); } else { window.vidyardEmbed.api.renderDOMPlayers(); } (function($) { // Add 'Configuration' global object with details of our Adobe Analytics instance window.Configuration = window.Configuration || {}; var rsid = (typeof Server !== 'undefined') ? Server.getAccount() : ''; $.extend(window.Configuration, { PUBLISHER: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', MCID: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', NAMESPACE: 'LIKE.TG', CHANNEL: 'LIKE.TG', RSID: rsid, TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.sc.omtrdc.net', HEARTBEAT_TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.hb.omtrdc.net', DEBUG: false }); }(jQuery)); // End of IIFE
4. Spot bottlenecks and collaborate from anywhere
Users can now collaborate faster by completing tasks in Experience Cloud using Flow Orchestration enhancements, specifically Flow Orchestration’s Work Guide. In addition, admins can empower other users to help spot bottlenecks and fast-track work using supervisor permissions. You can now allow anyone to participate in workflows from anywhere. window.SfdcWwwBase && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent.updateChapter(document.scripts[document.scripts.length - 1].getAttribute("data-uuid")); if(!window.vidyardEmbed){ window.videoUtils && window.videoUtils.loadScriptOnce("https://play.vidyard.com/embed/v4.js", "Vidyard", true); } else { window.vidyardEmbed.api.renderDOMPlayers(); } (function($) { // Add 'Configuration' global object with details of our Adobe Analytics instance window.Configuration = window.Configuration || {}; var rsid = (typeof Server !== 'undefined') ? Server.getAccount() : ''; $.extend(window.Configuration, { PUBLISHER: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', MCID: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', NAMESPACE: 'LIKE.TG', CHANNEL: 'LIKE.TG', RSID: rsid, TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.sc.omtrdc.net', HEARTBEAT_TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.hb.omtrdc.net', DEBUG: false }); }(jQuery)); // End of IIFE
5. Increase automation and customer retention
Enterprise Self-Service for Communications Cloud allows you to eliminate steps, scale transactions, and improve customer satisfaction. It automates move, add, change, or delete services (MACD) for bulk and multi-site subscription management. In turn, this will help you reduce cost-to-serve, while increasing automation and customer retention. window.SfdcWwwBase && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent && window.SfdcWwwBase.videoComponent.updateChapter(document.scripts[document.scripts.length - 1].getAttribute("data-uuid")); if(!window.vidyardEmbed){ window.videoUtils && window.videoUtils.loadScriptOnce("https://play.vidyard.com/embed/v4.js", "Vidyard", true); } else { window.vidyardEmbed.api.renderDOMPlayers(); } (function($) { // Add 'Configuration' global object with details of our Adobe Analytics instance window.Configuration = window.Configuration || {}; var rsid = (typeof Server !== 'undefined') ? Server.getAccount() : ''; $.extend(window.Configuration, { PUBLISHER: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', MCID: '8D6C67C25245AF020A490D4C@AdobeOrg', NAMESPACE: 'LIKE.TG', CHANNEL: 'LIKE.TG', RSID: rsid, TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.sc.omtrdc.net', HEARTBEAT_TRACKING_SERVER: 'LIKE.TG.hb.omtrdc.net', DEBUG: false }); }(jQuery)); // End of IIFE
Drive cost savings and transform your business using brand new features from theWinter ’23 release.
Find out more
Check out these other posts to learn more about our products:
What is LIKE.TG Genie?
What Is a CDP?
What is LIKE.TG Customer 360?
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of theLIKE.TG blog.
