效率工具
How PPIS Is Using LIKE.TG To Build Stronger Communities in Singapore
Persatuan Pemudi Islam Singapura (PPIS), or the Singapore Muslim Women’s Association, (PPIS) has been empowering women, children, and families since 1952. The non-profit organisation is striving to build stronger, more supportive communities with a range of services including childcare support, early childhood education, after-school care and enrichment, family casework and counselling, and fostering.
That’s an ambitious mission, and PPIS has embraced digital transformation to achieve it. The organisation is using LIKE.TG to optimise and automate donation, volunteer and event management workflows to increase productivity, boost efficiency, and get the most value out of its resources.
Transitioning from manual paper-based workflows to digital processes has required an organisation-wide shift across a network of 17 PPIS centres spread throughout Singapore. It’s a project that Thariq Aziz, Senior Manager IT Facilities Department at PPIS, says needed to start with basic digitisation.
“When I joined PPIS in 2019, the workflows were very manual and paper-based,” he explains. “It required lots of filling out physical forms and signing off with wet ink. There was no such thing as digital signatures, and no Zoom. Donations, volunteers, and counselling were managed in Excel spreadsheets.”
The transformation journey begins
For the organisation’s digital transformation to be effective, Aziz knew processes need to come before tools. So he took a step back and put time into researching departmental workflows and identifying where and how digital tools could add value.
His first stop was the Human Resources (HR) department. Digitising forms and signoffs with web-based applications achieved early success transitioning away from manual, paper-based workflows. But that was only the tip of the iceberg.
“That early digitisation led us to LIKE.TG’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP),” Aziz says. “Our first deployment was a client management system (CMS) for SYM Academy that’s responsible for all our family counselling and therapy services. Prior to LIKE.TG, clients were tracked in Excel and session notes were recorded in Word. LIKE.TG enabled us to bring this all onto a single CMS platform.”
The new Salesforce-based CMS gave Aziz the proof of concept he needed to expand the organisation’s digital transformation. So he hired Farique De Silva, Project Manager CRM at PPIS, to lead the next major LIKE.TG deployment. That came in the form of a new customer relationship management (CRM) platform for the donations department.
A single source of donor interaction
Farique explains that donation volume is seasonal, so PPIS needed a CRM that could effectively manage bulk donation periods. LIKE.TG replaced the organisation’s existing government-provided tool for donation management, and De Silva and his team spent two months migrating the data into the new CRM.
“Contact 360 now provides a single source of donor interaction across the organisation,” he explains. “This helps the fundraising team engage with the most active donors. We then deployed the Opportunities module for end-to-end donation management. So if a donor submits a donation via our website, they are now interacting with LIKE.TG end-to-end.”
Stripe and PayPal are also integrated with LIKE.TG for transaction management, and customised automations are used to create, update, and cross-check donor records. “All those steps used to be manual,” De Silva explains. “If a donor had made donations a year apart, it would have depended on the memory of the team. Now all that is managed in LIKE.TG.”
The LIKE.TG CRM is also significantly boosting efficiency for the finance team. Before LIKE.TG, every month a member of the finance team would spend a whole work day reconciling donation receipts for annual submission to the tax authority. That process is now completely automated with LIKE.TG.
“A customised report is generated in LIKE.TG to submit to the tax authority, and the finance team looks at it at the end of 12 months,” De Silva says. “Just automating that one process with LIKE.TG has saved us 12 work days per year. And in 2021, we only had to manually tweak two records out of more than 7,000.”
Increased productivity with automated workflows
PPIS now also runs volunteer and events management through LIKE.TG. De Silva explains that automated volunteer applications through LIKE.TG enables a single volunteer manager to oversee more than 800 volunteers.
“To work with children, our volunteers need to go through additional screening, so the application process is not simple,” he says. “New applicant records are automatically created and cross-checked in LIKE.TG, then tagged as volunteer applicants. Then our volunteer manager can simply search for volunteer applicants with the relevant interest or skill set for a particular campaign or event.”
At that point, the volunteer manager interviews selected volunteer applicants, and only successful candidates are updated to volunteer status.
“That means the organisation doesn’t have to immediately take on the workload of processing and interviewing every volunteer applicant,” De Silva adds. “That process only occurs when a volunteer is assigned to a campaign or event, which is a significant time saving for us.
“The idea is that we no longer run a collection of individual systems. Donations, volunteers, and events are all integrated into a single CRM and LIKE.TG is the backbone of it.”
Supporting people with technology
The organisation’s LIKE.TG transformation won’t end there. Next up, says Aziz, will be improvements to the CRM, and a new knowledge management system. He also envisions an integrated front-end platform to provide a simplified user experience for PPIS clients.
“Our main goal is to help people. That’s the bottom line,” Aziz explains. “We want to build a front-end platform that supports our clients’ progress through the PPIS lifecycle.
“We want to use technology to help our clients navigate many different issues and connect them with the support they need. I know we can achieve that with LIKE.TG.”
Learn how LIKE.TG’s Nonprofit Success Pack (NPSP) can help your organisation do more good.
Want To Be More Efficient and Productive? Automate More of Your Business
Imagine how much more productive and efficient your work would be if you could take all of the repetitive, routine, and manual work out of your day. Imagine if that kind of work were simply done for you, freeing up more time for value-added work that can drive success for you, your business, and your customers.
A growing number of companies are going beyond simply imagining it.
The big trend
Companies have been investing in business automation for decades to eliminate manual tasks and enable employees to focus on things that drive growth. Those investments have accelerated as automation has become more sophisticated and spread to every corner of the organisation. Eighty-five percent of organisations said in a2021 Deloitte studythey are rethinking how work gets done, and are moving from task-based automation to end-to-end automation. Thirteen percent said their organisation has implemented over 50 automations, up from just 4% who did so in 2018.
Why it matters
Business leaders are prioritising technology investments that drive efficiency and productivity, and business automation is at the top of that list. Companies that take a broad view of automation (beyond simple, task-based desktop automations) have saved a lot of costs and increased productivity.
What your company can do
Apply automation anywhere, and everywhere
Finance and accounting. Frees up time for more strategic things like analysis, strategy, and collaboration. One example, automated invoicing and approval routing.
Marketing. Helps you target customers with automated messages across channels. Identify audiences, design relevant content and automatically trigger actions.
Customer service. Next generation service automation, using AI, augmented reality and the Internet of Things (IoT) can predict service events and automatically resolve them through digital channels.
Human resources. Automate job application processing, response tracking and interview scheduling, onboarding and offboarding, payroll management and benefits administration.
Sales. A third of sales tasks, including strategy, planning, lead identification, qualification, configuration, pricing, and order management, can be automated.
Want to learn more? Here’s a deeper look
Automating tasks makes workers happier and more productive
Many knowledge workers spend a lot of time manually entering and retrieving information between multiple systems as part of a multi-step, manual process. This is not the best use of a person’s time, and could erode morale and employee engagement.
In the APAC Engagement Research conducted by LIKE.TG, 34% office workers strongly agree that outdated and inefficient technology makes them feel unhappy and unmotivated at work. And this lack of motivation adversely affects the quality of their work. They say their workplace experience could be improved with technology to help them with a variety of business tasks — particularly messaging or collaboration (49%), customer or client communications (45%), and client record management (39%).
When office workers were asked to nominate the issues that negatively affect their engagement at work, the top two were technology-related: when it fails or doesn’t work as it should (60%) and the quality of the technology (51%).
How can companies identify opportunities for automation? Global Field Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of digital transformation office at MuleSoft, Matt McLarty said one large financial services firm did it by asking employees a simple question: What’s the dumbest thing you have to do every day?
“They made it into a contest, with prizes,” he said. “People were so frustrated about wasting their time on this stuff that they volunteered all this information, which created a foundation for the company to automate those things.”
Business automation can be applied anywhere, and everywhere
You don’t need to understand exactly how automation works. You just need to understand its impact and how powerful it can be. Here’s how different departments can use automation to reduce manual processes, cut costs, reduce inefficiencies, and serve customers and employees better:
Finance and accounting
Automating financial planning and accounting functions frees up time for more strategically important things like analysis, strategy, and collaboration with stakeholders. One example is Accounts Payable. Data capture is automated (no more digging through miles of spreadsheets), invoices are automatically matched to relevant documents, and approvals are routed. This is not only more efficient but also reduces the risk of errors.
Marketing
There is no value in having to press “send” on every email, campaign, or social-media post you create. By automating marketing, you can target customers with automated messages across multiple channels. The best tools help you identify your audience, design the most relevant content, and automatically trigger actions like offers based on schedules and customer behaviour. These efforts can then be aligned with a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Customer service
It doesn’t take a human to answer basic questions like “How do I reset my password?” or “Where’s my order?” Chatbots, voice bots, and self-service are already in wide use, freeing up agents to help customers navigate more complex service situations. Next-generation service automation, using AI, augmented reality, and the Internet of Things (IoT), can predict service events and resolve them through digital channels. And it can give customers a total view of service activity for self-service support and automated monitoring.
Human resources
HR systems can automate a wide range of tasks, from job application processing, response tracking and interview scheduling to job offers, onboarding and offboarding, payroll management, and benefits administration. Using analytics, these systems can also provide insights into workforce sentiment, productivity, and engagement.
Sales
One management consultancy estimated that about one-third of all sales tasks can be automated, yet many business decision makers don’t take advantage of the capability. Sales strategy and planning, lead identification and qualification, configuration, pricing and quotation, order management, and post sales are all areas ripe for automation. Early adopters, the firm noted, consistently report increased customer-facing time, higher customer satisfaction, and efficiency improvements of up to 15 percent.
Leaders need to consider business automation a strategic asset
Like other digital transformations, the success of end-to-end automation relies on cultural changes driven from the top and executed in each function. Training, incentives, and key performance indicators are all essential.
Spending on automation, particularly AI systems in Asia Pacific will rise from $17.6 billion in 2022 to around $32 billion in 2025. The impact is profound, affecting the way we work, compete, innovate, and serve customers.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
How You Can Use MuleSoft and Genie Customer Data Cloud to Take Automation to the Next Level
Your business is probably already automating some customer experiences. But you’re likely only doing so with a slice of the data you have about each customer. This prevents you from realising the true value of automation — at a time when it’s critical in helping us do more with less.
Consider a process that starts with a customer interaction on your website and then ends with a complex supply chain request, like an order being placed with your supplier for more inventory to meet your customer’s needs. These types of experiences have been extremely difficult to automate from end to end, with every manual step of the process truly eliminated.
Now, there’s a way you can bring automation across the breadth of your company, delivering a new standard of automation for the business and improving customer and employee experiences along the way.
In September 2022, LIKE.TG unveiled Genie Customer Data Cloud, now powered by Tableau, to help businesses better understand customer data and deliver actionable insights in real time and at scale. Genie Customer Data Cloud now processes more than 100 billion customer records on average daily across the entire Customer 360.
This is a game changer for MuleSoft customers because Genie Customer Data Cloud now enables every business to unlock real-time data across any modern or legacy system.
MuleSoft retail customers can use real-time data from campaigns, loyalty rewards, and point-of-sale transactions to deliver automated, personalised marketing and in-store experiences for customers. Likewise, patient care managers can prioritise high risk individuals at the right time. And healthcare marketers can segment patient and member populations and create personalised care journeys at scale with more comprehensive health data.
Here’s how you can use the power of MuleSoft and Genie Customer Data Cloud.
What is LIKE.TG Genie Customer Data Cloud and why does it matter?
In today’s economic environment, you need to focus on your customers, and it all starts with data. Businesses have massive amounts of siloed, fragmented, and difficult to manage data. In the past, companies needed to build complex data pipelines and platforms, which resulted in issues with data duplication, stale data, and undermined decision making.
Organisations need to seamlessly connect digital and real-world customer interactions to provide relevant, personalised, and compelling moments-that-matter. However, their efforts to drive this real-time engagement are often hindered by the absence of a single source of truth about their customers.
On average, organisations use around 980 applications to run their business. These applications create data silos, resulting in potentially hundreds of versions of “the truth” about a single customer. This challenge is only going to compound as the amount of data created and processed each year continues to increase exponentially.
Genie Customer Data Cloud helps overcome these challenges by processing and harmonising real-time data from third-party systems and LIKE.TG into a customer graph, at massive scale. It includes built-in connectors that bring in data from every channel and stream, including mobile, web, APIs and proprietary data lakes. In addition to the built-in connectors, MuleSoft acts as the real-time data ingress layer for literally any system, anywhere.
Why is MuleSoft so important to Genie Customer Data Cloud?
MuleSoft is fundamental to Genie Customer Data Cloud as both an ingress and action layer. As we mentioned, MuleSoft can help Genie process real-time data from any system, application, or device into Genie Customer Data Cloud. In addition to this, MuleSoft is natively integrated as part of LIKE.TG Flow which enables it to act as the action and automation layer as well. This allows you to seamlessly automate your enterprise enriched by the power of customer graphs and AI-driven insights. Business leaders all over the world are focused on delivering success now by connecting with their customers in more valuable and cost effective ways. Automation is top-of-mind for almost every one of them — 91% of organisations reporting increased demand over the last two years, as we all figure out how to do more with less. The investments companies make now will determine their success today and into the future.
What’s magical about this experience is that data and insights from Genie Customer Data Cloud are as easily addressable as any other object in the LIKE.TG Platform, so when combined with Flow and MuleSoft, we can deliver sophisticated end-to-end and intelligent automation across both the Customer 360 and all other systems in the enterprise.
What excites you most about Genie Customer Data Cloud and MuleSoft?
Our customers rely on MuleSoft to connect all of their systems and data in their ecosystem with a resilient and scalable composable design. As those application networks have matured, our customers can use that same connectivity fabric to compose and automate entirely new workflows and experiences.
With Genie Customer Data Cloud, our customers can better understand their customers through this real-time unified customer graph. This enables us to bring this insight into every orchestration of their composable enterprise, making them more intelligent and personalised. This enables our customers to deliver the types of seamless and automated experiences their customers are looking for, and to deliver the promise of an automated enterprise overall. I’m excited to see where our customers take this next.
How will Genie Customer Data Cloud and MuleSoft benefit society at large?
As part of our 1-1-1 model we have been supporting the nonprofit sector since 1999, with over 39K+ organisations using our donated software. Countless other organisations use our platform to drive their environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives.
Everything we’ve described above also applies here, including the overall productivity improvement the sector can achieve through data-powered automation. By analysing real-time data, food banks can identify where those who are in greatest need are, along with exactly which goods are in shortest supply. Non-profit organisations can capture a lot more data, helping to scale efforts to build stronger communities. In the renewable energy sector, energy companies can work with their customers to capture more granular energy usage data from devices in the home, so that they can make real-time suggestions for how to optimise their energy usage and take pressure off the grid.
With the power of Genie Customer Data Cloud and MuleSoft, we are excited to bring the immense opportunity of real-time data and automation to these incredible organisations that are helping our communities and the planet.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Engage & Grow Your Subscribes With Automated Digital Experiences
Consumers in ASEAN are more connected than ever with adoption of both fixed and mobile broadband on the rise. Fueled in part by the pandemic and increased digitisation, the ASEAN region has seen the number of internet users grow by 100M in the past 3 years, to 440M in 2022.
With the increasing availability of fibre-based broadband, and continued changes in how we live and work, the demand for high speed internet connectivity will only increase. This is good news for communication service providers (CSPs) as it means there are new opportunities abound. However, increased competition and an uncertain economy mean that capturing these opportunities will not be easy.
It is a given that a CSP needs to have fast, reliable service, and carriers have been setting capex records in ensuring their fibre and mobile networks deliver a great user experience. But if it is a level playing field as far as the network is concerned, how can operators differentiate themselves from the competition and foster customer loyalty and advocacy? Creating a digital-first, automated experience is becoming an increasingly compelling strategy to drive growth.
Enhance service and productivity through automation
Healthy competition among incumbents and alternative network providers (altnets) means communications customers have greater choice than ever before. It also takes more than price and speed to attract and retain their loyalty.
According to our State of the Connected Customer research, 90% of those surveyed in Singapore and 87% of those surveyed in Thailand say the experience a company provides is as important as its goods or services. At the same time, processes like order management remain a pain point for CSPs and in some developing markets, order fall out rates are as high as 35%.
On top of these challenges, fulfilment teams may spend more than 65% of their time managing manual back office and administrative tasks.
Here is where automation can help. For example, by automating quoting, contracting, and ordering with Communications Cloud, CSPs can offer their subscribers a superior buying and customer service experience, as well as streamline processes and free teams to focus on higher value activities.
Optimise engagement with a seamless and transparent experience
There is tremendous competition in the fibre broadband market as well, with incumbents and challengers battling it out to sign up new customers attracted to ultra high speed broadband connectivity. I recently hosted a webinar on how to enhance the fibre subscriber experience, where Lindsay Rodgers joined as guest speaker to share her perspective on fibre rollout in the UK context to a webinar audience comprising APAC service providers and industry players. Rodgers is Company Director at Mint Digital Consultancy and former Director of Digital Transformation at KCOM, one of the UK’s longest-established communications companies.
Rodgers shared key learnings from KCOM’s transformation which involved using LIKE.TG to rapidly modernise its technology stack and support subscriber growth. Rodgers also spoke about how to maximise every subscriber engagement, whether online or face-to-face in the field.
“Many service providers pride themselves on being part of their local communities. So while digital channels are important, so is face-to-face contact. You need to ensure the customer experience flows seamlessly across all channels the customer wants to engage,” said Rodgers.
Transparency is also important to subscribers. They want to be kept in the loop of status of their orders, and their service status as well. That’s something KCOM has improved by replacing siloed, legacy systems with LIKE.TG, which provides a single view of the customer, and all their related services, orders and interactions.
“We increased visibility into orders and how they progressed through to fulfilment. So if something does go wrong, our customer-facing teams have visibility of that without needing to check four or five different systems,” said Rodgers.
Speed time to market with a modern platform
While driven by different objectives, KCOM shared the need to transform quickly. They also both used LIKE.TG’s out-of-the-box capabilities to deliver fast results.
“One of the benefits of using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform is the ability to leverage all the investment that goes into that platform. So we wanted to keep our solution as out-of-the-box as possible and make sure we could take advantage of future feature releases,” said Rodgers.
KCOM’s vision for a minimum viable product also helped the company stay focused and complete its deployment in five months. The solution included fully digital journeys for B2C and wholesale subscribers and an automated ordering process. The solution also increased KCOM’s business agility, setting it up to deliver new products in days instead of weeks.
Wow your subscribers for more efficient growth
LIKE.TG can help you to deliver digital first, automated journeys that save time, money, and improve operational efficiencies. We can also help you deliver personalised experiences at every touch point, so you can wow your subscribers and drive efficient growth.
Meet Ng Teck Lung: Finding Success Through Lifelong Learning
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 Ng Teck Lung, a LIKE.TG Administrator with Ninja Van. Teck Lung left a successful IT career to become a private-hire driver so he could spend more time with his family. Now, he’s reskilled as a LIKE.TG Administrator for a successful mid-career direction change.
By early 2016, Singapore-born Ng Teck Lung had built a successful IT career. He started out in the mid 1990s as a Lotus Notes programmer, and worked as a software consultant for various companies until joining BlackBerry as a technical support analyst in 2005. From 2011, he took on senior project management roles at Prudential and e-Cop.
But Teck Lung’s successful career came at a cost to his work/life balance. His busy work schedule meant he was missing time with his young family. So he decided things needed to change.
“Working as a project manager or a technical support analyst in a global contact centre often meant working at weekends, and I missed some of my daughter’s major milestones,” he explained. “So I decided to leave and partner with ride-hailing platforms as a private driver. That was when the incentives were really good, and being self-employed gave me the flexibility I wanted to spend more time with my family.”
Teck Lung says he very much enjoyed his new career choice for around four-and-a-half good years. “I was able to build a stronger relationship with my daughter,” he says. “I would drive her to school and pick her up each day. That was private time for us that I valued very much.”
Unlocking the silver lining
Then the pandemic hit. Lockdowns and restrictions heavily impacted Teck Lung’s driving business, and he and his family were soon living on their savings.
“I heard about the SSG SkillsFuture programme, and decided to reskill as a LIKE.TG Administrator,” Teck Lung says. “LIKE.TG appealed to me because it is the number-one CRM in the world and is still growing exponentially, so I felt that I wouldn’t have any trouble finding a job in the LIKE.TG ecosystem.”
Teck Lung participated in the SGUnited LIKE.TG Career Kickstarter Programme, a previous reskilling course supported by Trailhead Academy, and he used the Trailblazer community to expand and extend his LIKE.TG knowledge.
Teck Lung even set up Slack groups for subject modules to share study notes with his fellow students. Slack provided a place for students to ask questions and share knowledge, and was so popular that Teck Lung’s lecturer asked to participate.
This was an excellent introduction to the spirit of collaboration and knowledge sharing that runs through the LIKE.TG ecosystem and the Trailblazer community.
“The Trailblazer community is full of friendly and experienced professionals who are always willing to advise and help. I learned together with fellow local Trailblazers, and we helped out one another by exchanging and sharing knowledge.”
Finding success with LIKE.TG
Teck Lung is now certified as a LIKE.TG Administrator, Associate and Platform App Builder. He has completed 28 trails in Trailhead, earned more than 200 Trailhead badges, and is a Double Star Ranger.
He also took a proactive approach to his employment search. He built his own LIKE.TG dashboard to efficiently manage the progress of more than 40 job applications, and is now successfully employed as a LIKE.TG Administrator with Ninja Van.
Teck Lung says his role at Ninja Van provides the flexibility he needs to continue to spend valuable time with family — thanks, in part, to LIKE.TG.
“LIKE.TG is a cloud platform, so all you need is an internet connection and you can work practically anywhere in the world,” he notes. “LIKE.TG gives people the flexibility to travel and work from different places.
“Trailhead works in the same way. It fits into your own learning schedule, and you can even use it to develop LIKE.TG skills while you’re on holiday.”
Seizing the opportunity
Teck Lung’s journey is proof that it’s possible to successfully change direction mid-career, and find valuable new opportunities within the LIKE.TG ecosystem that can really change lives.
“My advice for aspiring jobseekers is to quickly seize this great opportunity to build a LIKE.TG career. Learning in Trailhead is free and the CRM platform itself is still growing strongly, so there are lots of products to learn and something to suit everyone” he says.
Teck Lung explains that it’s key to begin reskilling with a clear goal in mind, “The LIKE.TG platform is huge, so it’s important to set short-term and long-term goals to direct the career path you have chosen, and continue to progress with a focus on continuous learning.”
“Join the helpful local communities to expand your knowledge and networks. Participate in online discussions in professional networks on LinkedIn or in the Trailblazer Communities on Trailhead,” Teck Lung concludes. “Finally, take the opportunity to pay it forward by sharing your knowledge with aspiring Trailblazers in the future.”
How Boys’ Town Uses Automation to Bring More Value to Their Clients
Boys’ Town has a long history of helping children and youth in need. The Singapore-based charity was founded in 1948 as a residential care facility for disadvantaged boys. Since then, the organisation has significantly expanded. It now supports girls and boys with a range of youth services including residential care, fostering, respite care, youth outreach, adventure therapy, and clinical intervention.
Today, Boys’ Town is using significant digital transformation to modernise paper-based manual workflows and increase process efficiency with LIKE.TG automation. Yet the organisation’s goal remains the same — to help youth in need learn the strategies and skills they need to cope with trauma and thrive as valued members of Singapore society.
“Most successful implementations in our sector are a means to an end,” says Tan. “Technology must always be vision- and user-centric, always empowering both our staff and youth. LIKE.TG helps us achieve that by increasing process efficiency, allowing our team to add more value to the lives of our clients.”
However, with more than 70 years’ of operational history, modernising the organisation has been a long road. Tan explains that digitisation began about 10 years ago, with the first step to move paper-based workflows onto Microsoft and Google tools.
“Those old processes always required a lot of human intervention,” he says. “For example, our donation processes in the past required staff to print a huge amount of receipts and manually send them out to donors via mail. Today, this process has significantly reduced and we cannot imagine going back to those days.”
Integrating apps and consolidating data in one single platform
Tan says LIKE.TG has been a game changer for Boys’ Town. It is more integration-friendly than other CRM vendors the organisation was considering. “We found that other CRMs we were considering did not provide the same ability for customisation, and integration was not as straight-forward as LIKE.TG.”
Customisation and integration ability has been critical for Boys’ Town’s digital transformation. Tan and his team has used LIKE.TG to customise a set of integrated apps that consolidate donor, volunteer, and client data on a single platform.
“We use LIKE.TG as our main platform, and we have customised four core apps,” he explains. “Our Donation Analytical Datamart (DAD) management system processes and stores donor data. It is used to issue donation receipts and submit tax deduction information to the tax authority.
“We also have a Volunteer Management System (VMS) that automates online volunteer registrations and screening of volunteers, and an Integrated Case Management System (ICMS) that processes and stores case management data. Finally, we use our Residential Program Management System (RPMS) to manage all data relating to our residential boys such as their school and program attendance and medical records.”
Tan explains that the DAD and VMS are integrated through LIKE.TG to create a single source of truth for donor and volunteer interactions. The ICMS and RPMS are also connected to provide a central Salesforce-based front-end system that youth and social workers can use to track and consolidate client data.
Increasing efficiency and productivity with automation
Tan explains that LIKE.TG’s capacity for customisation has helped to automate processes across the organisation. And this has returned significant efficiency gains that reduce the administration burden on Boys’ Town’s dedicated Youth, Case and Social workers, as well as their Community Partnerships team.
“It was difficult to store and search for donor, volunteer, and client data before implementing LIKE.TG,” he says. “For example, multiple donations can be associated with one donor, and dozens of cases can be attached to just one of our approximately 1,500 clients. Since adopting LIKE.TG, it has become incredibly easy to trace and find links between records that we would otherwise not be able to match up.”
Tan says it is difficult to quantify the time savings achieved through LIKE.TG. There was no explicit measurement or studies made because the organisation has implemented process automation over time. However, the Community Partnerships team has estimated the time-savings to be in the range of 30-40%. Likewise, for the Youth Work and Social Work teams, they save an estimated average of 15% and 30% of their time, respectively.
“The automated workflows that we do within LIKE.TG are the cherry on top. Automation saves so much time that would otherwise be consumed by tedious activities and duplicated efforts.”
For example, online donations, donor records, and client case notes and approvals are now automated through LIKE.TG. Automating client reports for appointments, attendance, and other useful data also provide a unified client view. This allows youth, case, and social workers to share the same source of client information.
“Those are just a few of the many automated processes within our LIKE.TG ecosystem that help our team focus on doing more for our clients,” says Tan. “Their time is now better spent with our clients’ parents, teachers, and other stakeholders. LIKE.TG takes the admin burden off them.”
Putting the client at the centre of everything they do
Despite some internal resistance and uncertainty in the early stages of the LIKE.TG implementation, Tan says LIKE.TG is now critical to the organisation.
“It took some change management, training, and time to get to where we are today. But my colleagues are definitely grateful to have LIKE.TG. We cannot imagine going back to a time without a centralised online database that’s easy to use and navigate. It is now a digital pillar of our organisation that we can’t do without.”
Looking to the future, Tan says technology will continue to play a role in Boys’ Town’s ongoing evolution. But the needs of their clients will always be at the heart of future implementations.
“For the next three to five years, we will continue to develop more inter-service and inter-organisational collaboration initiatives, as well as tightening existing governance and compliance policies,” Tan concludes. “Everything we do will be about continuing to make sure our organisation is a better place for children.”
6 Ways to Make Sure Your IT Investment Pays Off
Many executives spend a lot of time evaluating and justifying the benefits of new tech investments — especially during times of change.
But once they make that decision to spend, they don’t spend enough time considering how to ensure it pays off. That is a costly oversight. In fact, a little bit of planning and organisation can make the difference between realising significant value and wondering why they made the investment in the first place.
Here are six steps to help you drive and measure success on your IT investment. These reflect LIKE.TG’s methods that can help you get the most value from your technology investments, regardless of your company size, maturity level, or industry.
1. Use our V2MOM framework
What’s your vision for how this technology will shape the future of your business? If that isn’t already clear, it’s time to bring the right executives, partners, and users together to align on it.
This vision should be broken down into discrete business goals and outcomes – like faster customer onboarding or higher subscription-based revenue. Without that, you lack the compass that guides the purchase. Business goals and outcomes keep you focused on the results that matter.
We recommend using a process we follow called the V2MOM, which stands for vision, values, methods, obstacles, and measures. The V2MOM is a framework that ensures everyone is focused on the right priorities and moving toward the same goals.
2. Map success metrics to your goals and outcomes
How do you measure the success of your investment? Answering that is an important but often overlooked step in establishing your vision for change.
You can choose the right success metrics by following these guiding practices:
Make them SMART
The metrics you select should be SMART, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound. It’s not enough to say ‘revenue growth’. You need to be specific about the driver of growth, such as opportunity win rate vs. reduced customer churn vs. improved product mix. Be clear on how you will measure certain metrics, and make sure your targets are achievable and realistic. A lot of projects have unrealistic targets that are doomed to fail in the applicable time horizon. It’s alright to have an aspirational five-year target, as long as the intermediate milestones are more realistic.
L’Oreal set a goal to increase average order value (AOV) across its family of more than 200 D2C websites, all powered by Commerce Cloud. It aimed to accomplish this by using Einstein Product Recommendations, so users could be targeted with AI-powered recommendations based on a consumer’s browsing or purchase history. Closely tracking performance of these strategies and metrics over time helped L’Oreal discover that this technology generated 15%-20% of all sales for one of their brands and helped them see double digit increases in AOV from its websites.
Don’t forget leading and lagging indicators
The set of metrics should include both leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators serve as an early warning sign providing you with timely insights to take corrective actions in pursuit of your stated goals. Lagging indicators simply provide the results and measurements as you can observe them at the time of review. While useful, they don’t help with forecasting.. Together, these two indicators provide the comprehensive dashboard you need to monitor your IT investment.
However, most IT investment justifications focus on lagging indicators like revenue growth. But leading indicators — such as monthly active users or incoming calls around a new product launch — can be useful in ensuring revenue growth.
Don’t confuse use with value
Many companies use adoption metrics — like what percentage of users log in every month — as a proxy for the utility of the solutions deployed. While you certainly need your people to adopt the new technology you invest in, that alone isn’t enough.
You should define success in terms of the value created, whether that’s increased revenues, reduced inefficiency, or improved cash flows and productivity. A value tree that combines all these outcomes into a composite metric such as net present value (NPV) or return-on-investment (ROI) is usually useful to summarise the value realised succinctly.
3. Establish the baseline
One of the most prevalent and challenging situations we encounter in analysing value realised is that the customer often does not have reliable baseline values for the metrics being monitored. For example, they can tell you what the opportunity win rate is in the current quarter, but they may have no idea what it was six quarters ago. To avoid these challenges, establish the baseline and the operating guidelines at the outset: what are the metrics, how are they calculated, which data sources will be used, how often will they be measured, and who in the organisation will help you get that done?
4. Create an accountability pyramid
Any large transformation program requires good governance, including executive sponsorship, cross-team collaboration, efficient communication, and effective decision-making. While we have seen many different approaches, the most effective one has three tiers:
the steering committee at the top of the pyramid, which sets the strategic direction and champions the overarching mission
the operating committee (typically including a technical account manager), which meets quarterly to monitor progress, eliminate roadblocks, and inform course correction
the execution team, which manages the program on a day-to-day basis
That kind of accountability pyramid helps to foster agile ways of working that ultimately allow you to create value faster.
5. Know your accelerants and obstacles
Accelerants are people or things that help you move fast or build momentum quickly. They are often the change agents who will use their influence and energy to get the project off the ground. Or they may be well-defined pain points in a niche area that create quick wins and useful lessons, helping you expand the transformation to other parts of the organisation. Knowing who they are or where they lie can help you move fast and improve time-to-value. Sometimes these change agents will sit inside your organisation and other times it may make sense to bring in expert partners to help bring your vision to life quickly.
Obstacles are people or things that can slow down the momentum or otherwise hinder you from realising the value of your digital capabilities. A common question asked in these planning meetings is, ”Why will this initiative not succeed?“ The goal is to then prioritise those potential roadblocks and proactively address them. For instance, if adoption is a big concern, plan for extensive training as part of your rollout and bring in change experts.
6. Execute, monitor and adapt
Having established the business goals, metrics, baseline, and transformation coalition, you are now ready to start the journey. This step is all about executing on the plan and collecting relevant, timely data to inform how you are doing. You need to remain curious about the signals you are seeing. If the leading indicators signal trouble ahead or if the resulting key performance indicators (KPIs) appear less than satisfactory, you should inform all the key stakeholders and promptly address the root causes of the issue.
One of our large customers noticed that its sales representatives were using LIKE.TG to enter opportunities when they were ready to close deals but otherwise kept all sales activities and key contacts in Excel and PowerPoint. This limited the power of automation, intelligence, and collaboration that make Customer 360 so valuable. You can’t uncover problems like this if you’re only looking at utilisation metrics. The lesson here is to monitor performance and adapt as soon as issues arise.
Making smart IT investments is critical to your long-term success, especially in today’s tough economic environment. But turning those investments into great returns and success stories requires thoughtful planning, disciplined execution, and continuous improvements.
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Supercharge Your Automation for Bigger Cost Savings & More Efficiency
Chances are your company has already spent time and money automating business processes that were once done manually. But that’s not enough to deliver the best customer experiences, biggest cost savings, long term growth, or greatest efficiency. What is? Intelligent automation.
What is intelligent automation?
Intelligent automation combines robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), analytics, data, and more to create an end–to-end process that can learn and adapt on its own. Organisations that have already moved beyond piloting intelligent automation achieved an average cost reduction of 32%, according to Deloitte’s most recent automation survey.
Here we’ll cover how you can bring next-level efficiency to your business.
Two-thirds of companies have implemented some task-based automation, which is the fairly simple automation of a single process within one business unit. For example, creating a service ticket, automatic credit approval, or automated email promotions.
According to Matt McLarty, global field CTO and VP of the digital transformation office at MuleSoft, the task-based automations used at many companies today aren’t reusable, scalable, or sustainable enough to deliver the value that’s so important right now. That’s because they lack the context and sophistication that businesses need to truly transform their business and serve customers better.
Some examples:
a chatbot that doesn’t recognise a customer or their order history, and offers automated responses that don’t address the customer’s problem
a meal kit service that can’t say why your box hasn’t been delivered because it has no visibility into the logistics provider
an automated HR system that’s siloed from an employee success system.
“A lot of the RPA solutions are very much focused on recording how a process works, and automating it,” McLarty said. “But if there’s an exception in that process, as there often is, all you’ve done is delay solving the problem by putting a bot between me and the person who will actually resolve my issue.”
Intelligent automation provides context
Intelligent automation provides context around your data so you get a deeper understanding of what’s happening. The context, which gleans meaning from images, text, and speech, detects patterns and can make recommendations, predictions, and decisions.
Real-time connected data is a key to contextual automation, whether it’s internally automated business processes, or the ways in which companies automate interactions with partners and customers.
We are in the relative early stages of this advanced automation, but it’s on the radar of many organisations. Deloitte’s survey found that AI is the next most desirable automation technology, with 46% planning to implement it in the next three years.
How to identify new intelligent automation opportunities
Once a company has delivered a handful of automations, the dividends tend to level off. That’s because the company is not able to easily identify new processes to automate, said Joe Surprenant, sales leader across Deloitte’s AI and Data Ops practices. Companies need to mine their data and processes to uncover these new opportunities.
“Once you’ve exhausted heat maps and the idea box from process owners, you need a hybrid approach that includes both digital discovery tools and process expertise to identify the gaps,” he said.
The technology that makes that possible is called process intelligence. It’s the data that’s collected to analyse the individual steps within a process or workflow, and can help an organisation identify bottlenecks and improve efficiency. While only about one in five companies surveyed by Deloitte use process intelligence (PI) today — several companies develop PI technologies — it is a fast-growing sector.
“Process intelligence has opened up the eyes of many of our clients to show them things they did not know,” Surprenant said. For example, he said, one large company used process mining technology to analyse its end-to-end direct material purchasing process. The analysis identified steps in the purchase order maintenance process which had a higher manual activity and rework rate. This insight led to the development of a maintenance automation solution using a combination of RPA, business process management (BPM) workflow automation, and analytics, ultimately driving $40 million in annual savings.
Another retail client used PI to uncover the root cause of a disconnect between the sales, payment, delivery, and return functions within its supply chain. These insights were leveraged to create a consolidated customer journey app to quickly trace and resolve issues across these functions. This led to a 23% reduction in order returns, $46 million sales risk mitigated, and 7% improvement in net promoter score.
Process intelligence is beneficial in three ways:
It digitises and accelerates the discovery of automation use cases. In effect, it automates automation.
It provides an additional data point for what some business users suspect may be an area ripe for automation.
It saves companies the time and money of hiring consultants to interview process owners to identify automation opportunities.
What you need to think about
Implementing more sophisticated, contextual automation is about much more than technology. Success requires a fundamental rethinking and re-engineering of your processes, all centred around your customers’ needs.
McLarty, who works closely with customers on their digital transformations, suggested these first steps:
Consider the end-to-end customer experience
Map the entire customer experience, from end to end, how all those pieces are interconnected, and what customers need at each step. Most companies, he said, consider just one piece of the puzzle — commerce, service, or marketing, for instance — and automate just that one element.
Real-time, connected data is a game changer in contextual automation. Next-generation customer data platforms integrate data from every customer interaction, from any system, channel or data stream, into a unified customer profile. Having this 360-degree view helps you see your customers in totality. For example, it helps you see how a service interaction with a customer impacts a marketing promotion for that customer.
Meet your customers where they are, like never before
With a real-time CRM, you can connect all customer data at scale, from any system or device, and harmonise it into a single view.
Consider the technology that underpins a great solution
Is your technology repeatable and scalable? You should seek tools that can uncover different processes to automate in your organisation. These tools extract the metadata from the process, and turn it into an automated workflow.
MuleSoft is the enabling technology connecting data from any system or channel.
“The automated solution has to have connections into the predictive analytics that are synonymous with artificial intelligence and all the data sources, so it can tell you everything you need to know,” said McLarty.
It’s hard to overstate how transformative AI-based contextual automation will be. Surprenant said it will be equivalent to the cloud.
“We’re not there yet,” he said. “But when we get over the curve to where companies are automation-first when they design business processes, and they’re truly embracing a digital worker mindset, it will be as big if not bigger than cloud.”
Infographic: 3 Strategies That Will Engage And Wow Your Customers
In our latest State of Marketing report, CMOs cite customer preferences and expectations as the #1 factor influencing their digital strategy. Customers are constantly changing how they interact with businesses, and the things they care about are also evolving. According to the report, 71% of marketers say that meeting customer expectations is more difficult today than it was a year ago.
Keeping your customers engaged is an ongoing challenge for marketers, and we spend a lot of time and resources trying to keep our audiences loyal to our products. As shown in the State of the Connected Customer report, from here on out, customer engagement is digital-first. It’s estimated that more than 60% of customer interactions were online last year, up from 56% in 2020, and that trend is continuing.
Engaging customers across the channel mix
Your customers’ preferred channels are likely to be a mix of the old and the new. Email is still the most popular method for getting your message across — the number of outbound emails increased by 15% last year, accounting for around 80% of all outbound messaging. However, It’s not the channel that saw the fastest growth. Adoption of TV and over-the-top streaming platforms has grown by 27% since 2021, likely due to people spending more time at home in recent years.
On average, consumers use nine different channels to interact with businesses. Delivering engaging and relevant messages across all these channels is a challenge many marketers are facing now. Here are some ways you can boost customer engagement in old and new channels:
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3 Steps To Increase Your Contact Centre Revenue
Your Contact Centre Can Earn Money for Your Company, Too
In today’s changing economy, companies are seeking ways to optimise spending and do more with less. That’s especially difficult at contact centres, where siloed data, disconnected systems, and labour shortages already lead to long wait times and higher costs for your business. While these challenges may affect your contact centre revenue, they also significantly impact customer experience.
The good news? A few practical steps can help you increase customer satisfaction and turn your contact centre into a revenue generator. Here’s how.
1. Reduce call handling time with tools for service agents
The cost to operate a contact centre can reach US$5.60 per 3-4 minute direct consumer call. One of the best ways to cut costs and boost contact centre revenue is to reduce call length and ensure that customer requests get resolved in just one phone call. This requires equipping your service agents with the proper tools.
For starters, a 360-view of the customer — including order history and relevant profile information — will ensure that agents have all the data they need to understand each customer’s unique experience or issue. Collaborative tools like a digital HQ can also help speed up resolutions by removing team silos and streamlining communication between sales, service, marketing, and other teams.
One of the most common reasons that customers contact support is to check order status. With self-service options and order management tools, you can eliminate most of these calls — and save a significant amount of time and money. If customers do call to check on their order, a connected order management system can streamline the request. In fact, one report found that the right order management tools can improve first-call resolution by up to 20% and reduce call handling time by 25%. Connected tools give service agents a comprehensive view of order and inventory data, better equipping them to quickly handle customer requests.
2. Implement self-service to save time and money
Technology, including chatbots and artificial intelligence (AI), can handle straightforward questions, requests, and transactions so agents can prioritise high-touch matters. During Cyber Week 2022, global chatbot usage grew by 57% year over year as retailers used automation to keep the biggest shopping week of the year running smoothly. In fact, 88% of service organisations that use automation technology reported benefits such as reduced errors, more time to help customers, and more time to tackle new projects.
Technology also frees up time for service reps to help new customers configure products, up-sell and cross-sell shoppers who have complex requests, and more. The result: higher average order value, increased customer satisfaction, and lower call volume — which all add up to more contact centre revenue.
You can also implement digital knowledge centres so customers can quickly find answers to frequently asked questions without calling a rep. Online communities where customers offer each other advice and discuss your products is another way to reduce call volume while driving brand loyalty.
Contact centres are a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to customer experience. Customers want a genuine human experience with your brand. It’s just important to ensure that calling a contact centre isn’t the only way to reach your company for answers or help.
3. Focus on the post-purchase experience to drive loyalty
Customer acquisition can be a major cost for companies. Fortunately, contact centres can turn every call into an opportunity to retain customers and drive loyalty. This is especially impactful during post-purchase calls.
Common post-purchase transactions include exchanges, returns, modifications, and even discounting. These types of transactions can be a make-or-break moment when it comes to retaining a customer. One study found that more than three-quarters of shoppers (76%) who highly rated their returns experience with a retailer said they’d shop with them again because of it.
So, how do you ensure reps can make the most of these valuable moments? Start by making sure every customer feels heard. The contact centre is an important part of your feedback loop, and it’s critical to give service reps the right resources to flag any issues with product quality. Returns reporting tools can help you track patterns over time, which means you can course-correct as quickly as possible to ensure customer satisfaction and avoid boomerang products.
Boost cost centre revenue by unifying marketing and customer service
Your marketing and customer service teams share the same goal: to deliver exceptional experiences for every customer, at every point of contact. The key to unlock these experiences? Give your sales, service, and marketing teams the right resources to make every part of the customer journey feel seamless. This will do more than just improve your customer experience: it will reduce costs and drive contact centre revenue.
Stay on top of the latest service trends. Find out how to take your contact centre customer experience to the next level from our State of Service report.DOWNLOAD NOW
This post originally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Infographic: Boost Sales Productivity With Tips That Work
As we enter 2023, sellers are facing a world in which they are being asked to deliver more, using fewer resources. Supply chain issues, inflation, and shifting regulations are just some of the factors that are making the job of a sales professional more difficult. In fact, 82% of sales reps say they’ve had to adapt to new ways of selling, and they’ve had to adapt quickly. Sixty-nine percent of reps say that this has made their job harder than it was before the pandemic.
Sales teams are also finding they have less time to sell than they used to. According to the latest State of Sales report, the average rep spends only 28% of their time on actual selling. The rest of their time is spent on time-consuming admin, data entry, and prioritisation of leads, among other tasks. This can lead to a hurried sales process and less time to hit quota.
Recent history has permanently changed the way that our customers expect companies to behave, and the ways they want to interact with sales reps. The latest State of the Connected Customer report showed that 57% of customers prefer to engage with businesses through digital channels. The proportion gets even higher for younger customers. Most customers don’t limit themselves to a single method of communication, either – the average customer will use nine different channels when communicating with companies.
The road to sales success
So what can sales reps do to succeed in sales today? Part of the answer lies in the tools that we use to sell. Technology is an essential part of selling, and using the right apps can reduce costs while also boosting productivity and helping you save time.
Sales Cloud users have seen a boost in sales productivity of 29%* – achieved through automation of everyday activities. At the same time, Customer 360 provides real-time customer data, speeding up the sales timeline and allowing you to focus on high-value activities.
Here are just some of the ways you can find sales success today:
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*Source: 2022 LIKE.TG Success Metrics Global Highlights study. Data is from a survey of 3,706 LIKE.TG customers across the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, France, Australia, India, Singapore, Japan and Brazil conducted between June 8 and June 21, 2022. Results were aggregated to determine average perceived customer value from the use of LIKE.TG. Respondents were sourced and verified through a third-party B2B panel. Sample sizes may vary across metrics.
Increasing Pathways for Students To Join LIKE.TG in Singapore
The last few years have rapidly accelerated the shift to digital-first experiences and the adoption of new technologies. According to SkillsFuture Singapore, the demand for digital skills, such as software testing and experience design, has doubled over the past 4 years.
Worryingly, this is creating a growing digital skills gap. According to LIKE.TG’s Global Digital Skills Index, more than three quarters (76%) of global workers say they don’t have the skills they need for the future of work. To close this gap will require vast amounts of reskilling and career shifting on the part of companies, educational institutes, and policymakers.
LIKE.TG has always been committed to workforce development programmes focused on training, reskilling, and helping people get hired for the jobs of the future. For example, our free online learning platform, Trailhead, allows people to skill up for jobs within the LIKE.TG ecosystem. To date, more than 3.9M learners have skilled up on Trailhead and 1 in 3 say they found a new job with the skills they learned.
Doubling down on our efforts to close the digital skills gap in Singapore, LIKE.TG will be collaborating with The Institute of Technical Education (ITE) to train 7,500 ITE students on digital customer relationship management (CRM) skills over the next 5 years. LIKE.TG’s Trailhead Academy will work with ITE to provide an enhanced curriculum and a new mentorship programme, equating to approximately S$8.7 million in value.
(L-R) Mr Sujith Abraham, Senior Vice President and General Manager, LIKE.TG ASEAN, Ms Cecily Ng, Senior Vice President and General Manager, LIKE.TG Singapore and Taiwan, Mr Tan Kiat How, Senior Minister of State, Ministry of Communications and Information, Ms Alice Seow, Principal, ITE College West, Mr Alvin Goh, Director, School of Business Services, ITE College West at the MOU Exchange Ceremony for LIKE.TG and ITE
Building a strong foundation for a career in tech
As part of this new collaboration, LIKE.TG will customise and embed guided learning paths from Trailhead into the ITE curriculum across all three colleges in Singapore. The courses provided will focus on LIKE.TG administrator and developer roles. They are projected to provide at least 7,500 ITE students with the skills and credentials required to kick-start their career in the technology industry or generate pathways to further tertiary education.
A dedicated mentorship programme will also be introduced for the first time. For each cohort, 60 ITE students will be mentored by LIKE.TG employees and supported by trained ITE lecturers, and will undergo exams to obtain resume-worthy certifications such as LIKE.TG administrator or developer. The students will be given case studies to apply their skillsets and hands-on case competitions simulating real-world environments to gain practical skills. Under the MOU, Trailhead Academy will also partner with youth development organisation, Halogen Foundation Singapore to provide these students with soft skills training.
The mentorship programme seeks to empower ITE students to connect to opportunities and eventually land a role in the LIKE.TG ecosystem, which is projected to create 18,600 jobs in Singapore by 2026. This includes roles such as LIKE.TG administrators and developers within companies that use LIKE.TG, or as independent consultants to companies that are looking to implement LIKE.TG solutions or seeking digital transformation strategies for their organisations. The program is slated to start in October 2023 alongside ITE’s official curriculum.
Enhancing student training to provide holistic education experiences
Beyond contributing to ITE’s curriculum, LIKE.TG will conduct Train-The-Trainer sessions with ITE staff to equip them with the expertise in emerging CRM trends and new LIKE.TG technologies.
By providing more opportunities for holistic educational experiences and training for the younger generation, we hope to be able to propel Singapore’s digital talent pool and democratise the access to education.
Did you know that you don’t have to be a student to join the LIKE.TG ecosystem? Anyone can create a Trailblazer account via Trailhead. Click here to find out more!
4 Ways These Two Businesses Improved Efficiency Through Automation
“I would say automation now is a must for all companies.”
That was the opinion of Khun Gigs-Kasin Suthammanas, CEO and Co-Founder of Finnomena Group, in a recent discussion on the State of Service.
And he’s not alone. Businesses around the world are looking for ways to automate, improve productivity, and reduce costs. In the face of increasing costs and evolving customer demands, organisations are turning to trusted tools and platforms to help them with their automation requirements. According to a recent study, LIKE.TG customers who use Customer 360 are achieving 27% faster automation of business processes, and a 26% increase in employee productivity. At the same time, by consolidating the apps they use, they are reducing IT costs by 25%.*
Khun Gigs was joined for the conversation by Konlawachara Trakulsuk, known as Khun Bank, General Manager for Product Management at Central Group, and Dr Ruthairat Protprakorn, Regional Sales Director at LIKE.TG.
The group discussed the various ways that Finnomena and Central Group have been able to automate their operations across service and sales.
Automated contact centre tools make things easier for agents
Khun Gigs explained how automated call routing has cut down on admin time for service agents, and also led to more customer satisfaction.
Many calls that Finnomena deals with involve personal customer data, information about savings and revenue. “We have 200,000 customers and 300–400 new customers daily,” said Khun Gigs. “What if you called in and our contact centre recognised you and directed your call to the advisor you talked to previously. How great would that be?”
By routing customers to an agent they have encountered before, Finnomena can reduce admin time and increase customer confidence. In fact, LIKE.TG customers have reported that automation tools provided by Service Cloud have led to a 27% reduction in service and support costs.*
LIKE.TG tools for contact centres extend beyond simple call routing. Khun Bank gave an example related to Central Group brand PowerBuy.
“When someone makes a purchase from PowerBuy, there will sometimes be after-sales activity when there are cracks, defects, or repairs. Sometimes customers can’t explain the situation via voice and text services, and it consumes a lot of the agent’s time.”
Central Group would find that service agents were using their own devices to receive photographs or make video calls so they could better understand the issues the customer was facing. Of course, this was not a secure way of communicating, either for the agent or the customer.
But, using Visual Remote Assistant in Service Cloud, Central Group empowered their service agents to communicate using photos and video functions within the app, speeding up the entire process and creating a happier outcome for the customer.
“We have closed the gap. All the data is secure and in the right place for future investigations. We have reduced the handling time and connected better with customers, and we can close the case successfully,” said Khun Bank.
Automated account creation and verification speeds up the customer experience
Another innovation that benefits both customers and service agents is the automation of account creation and verification at Finnomena.
In the past, customers would register and have to wait two days before they received a call from the Finnomena agent.
“Our process took two days to work over data on the cloud, to identify if they were an existing customer, and to find out who they had spoken to in the past. All of that before the sales assignment stage,” says Khun Gigs.
“I knew that wasn’t right – when customers express their interest it means they want the product or service straight away.”
LIKE.TG helped customise all Finnomena’s customer journeys. After the LIKE.TG implementation, data within applications became real-time. Today, if you register with Finnomena online, an agent will call you back within 2 hours.
“I’m so happy with this solution. We have seen a better conversion rate. And we can serve customers when they want us,” said Khun Gigs.
Automated cross-sales and lead scoring increases sales productivity
As seen in our State of the Connected Customer report, customers expect more than 60% of their interactions with businesses to be online. At the same time, nearly half of all customers said they have switched brands in search of better customer service.
To stay ahead of this trend, Central Group has introduced its Chat Shop service. It’s a multi-channel digital assistant, accessible through social media channels, the Central app, and online stores. When Chat Shop customers want to go shopping, but don’t have the time — the service offers a personalised service, suggesting products and services the customer may be interested in.
The Chat Shop team gets 10,000 to 20,000 contacts monthly, either through ads or via direct message. LIKE.TG technology has helped Central Group agents increase the conversion rate, closing more deals and offering suggestions for upselling and cross-selling.
“LIKE.TG is very important in helping our customers and streamlining our processes. We can use our sales data across channels, and for customer segmentation. This is our plan to improve customer service,” said Khun Bank.
There’s even more on the horizon. Finnomena is exploring how it can leverage Sales Cloud’s automated lead scoring capabilities to make its sales pipeline even more efficient.
Finnomena is receiving as many as 400 new leads per day, says Khun Gigs.
“We have a data team that analyses the data — that team is working on a lead-scoring model that will allow us to automatically prioritise the best of these 300–400 new leads,” he says. “We’ll use LIKE.TG to automate the referrals to the right sales advisors, which leaves our team more time to sell.”
Employee happiness = customer happiness
Back to that quote that we started this article with, when Khun Gigs said that “automation now is a must for all companies.”
In our State of Service report we learned that 85% of service decision makers agreed that there was a direct link between employee experience and customer experience. One way of improving the employee experience is to ensure that they have the tools and information they need to serve the customer effectively and quickly.
“It is not right to make your employees suffer with manual work when you have a lot of customers. Many tools are available now,” Khun Gigs continued.
The good news is that high-performing organisations are already providing their teams with the tools and data they need. Eighty-eight percent of agents at high-performing service organisations agree that they have access to complete information about customers’ sales interactions.
Scale Service Efficiency To Reduce Costs And Grow Customer Loyalty
Service organisations are striving to meet heightened customer expectations in increasingly uncertain economic conditions. According to the State of Service report, 60% of service professionals stated customer expectations increased during the pandemic. Customers also value the experience offered by businesses much more than they did before. In 2022, 88% of customers said that their experience of a brand mattered as much as its products, compared to 80% of customers in 2020.
Service leaders are faced with the challenge of meeting growing customer expectations in an increasingly uncertain economic climate. They don’t just have to plan for service success, but they also have to do it more efficiently while cutting costs. This pressure to do more with less can impact service quality – with 78% of service agents in 2022 saying it was difficult to balance speed and quality, up substantially from 63% of service agents in 2020.
So how can service professionals grow customer loyalty by delivering faster, more personalised service? How can they scale service efficiency while achieving cost savings?
Maximising service ROI
Delivering a superlative customer experience can build strong customer connections and increase loyalty. According to the State of the Connected Customer report, 94% of customers stated that good customer service makes them more likely to make another purchase. This means customer service can actually be a revenue generator rather than a business cost. With the right technologies, a business can empower their service professionals to become frontline brand ambassadors – who can identify and maximise revenue opportunities.
Let’s look at a few ways to achieve service success efficiently and at scale.
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Stats shown as ‘ASEAN’ reflect the responses of 2,000 survey respondents from Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam, out of a total of 8,050 responses across 36 countries used in the report.
Want a Golden Hoodie? ASEAN Trailblazer Shibu Abraham shares top tips
When Shibu Abraham started out on his LIKE.TG career more than 15 years ago in Malaysia, a Golden Hoodie was the last thing on his mind. But after a career marked by a dedication to passing on his knowledge and a passion for lifelong learning, he was honoured at Dreamforce 2022 with his very own Golden Hoodie.
“I’ve never spoken at an event like Dreamforce,” says Abraham, “and initially I thought I was speaking at a smaller breakout session. But then my session got moved to the main keynote stage, and I started to get really nervous!
“I was rehearsing all the time – just to make sure I didn’t embarrass myself on stage. When I was watching the main keynote session, I was sitting there thinking ‘that’s where I have to stand tomorrow!’”
Abraham had no idea that he was receiving the coveted Golden Hoodie award.
“After I’d given my presentation, they asked me to stay on stage for a second – I wondered whether I’d forgotten something,” he said. “But I turned around, and there was Guilda Hilaire holding the hoodie.”
What is the Golden Hoodie?
The first Golden Hoodie was awarded in 2016. The LIKE.TG community already loved the iconic black Trailblazer hoodie, so a gold coloured version was created to celebrate special stories.
You can’t buy a Golden Hoodie – they are only awarded to Trailblazers who have shown dedication in teaching others, used LIKE.TG to make a difference, or overcome the odds in their LIKE.TG career.
“Usually the Golden Hoodie is given to someone with a really inspiring background – never in my dreams did I think that I’d be in that league,” says Abraham.
A dedication to learning and sharing knowledge
Abraham was first introduced to LIKE.TG in 2007 by his manager, Prasan Vyas.
“He’d attended Dreamforce, and he already loved the LIKE.TG platform and the ecosystem,” Abraham says. “When I joined his team, he told me ‘LIKE.TG is the next big thing.’”
Abraham remembers it wasn’t long before a big client asked for help on a LIKE.TG implementation.
“After that, customer demand started to increase,” he says. “We were a pretty young business then, and were trying to grow as a practice. As soon as our customers started asking for LIKE.TG, that was a turning point – there was no going back.”
As part of his long career in the LIKE.TG ecosystem, Abraham has dedicated his spare time to sharing his knowledge with his network. It’s for this reason that he’s now wearing the Golden Hoodie.
The power of the LIKE.TG Community
Through his involvement with local user groups, the wider Marketing Cloud community, and his popular blog and YouTube channel, Abraham has spread the word about the power of LIKE.TG, and helped many people on their own journey.
“The LIKE.TG community is one of the best out there,” he says, “and it’s driven by its members. We’re a bunch of passionate people.
“Find out if you have a local user group you can join – almost every city has one. When you’re starting out, it’s good to have someone you can ask for advice, who can offer a helping hand.
“There’s also the Trailblazer Mentorship program. There are experienced people who have been through the exact same journey that you’re going through, and they can’t wait to pay their knowledge forward.”
Knowing which questions to answer
So how does he choose what knowledge he needs to share?
Again, Abraham goes back to his beloved LIKE.TG community. “People will send me questions on my social profiles, or in the comments on my YouTube channel,” he says.
“So I start to see patterns in what people are asking about. Then I can build content to answer those questions.”
Encouraging women into the LIKE.TG ecosystem
Abraham says it’s important to him that women are encouraged to pursue tech roles – something he puts into practice in his day job.
“Most of the leads in my team are women,” Abraham says, “especially on the architecture and technical side of things. One of them, Meera Nair, is also a LIKE.TG MVP.
“Their stories are very inspiring. Some of them are coming back to work after extended career breaks, and the beauty of a cloud-based system is that they can work from home on a flexible basis. At UST, we take every opportunity to encourage women to grow their careers with us.
“LIKE.TG itself is committed to equality, and it makes us very proud that we can align with that value too.”
Advice for your LIKE.TG career
“I would always tell my team that they should make sure that they are developing their careers,” Abraham says, “and they would often say to me ‘we don’t have time for that.’
“So I decided that I had to take my own advice, and show them that with a little balancing of your time, it’s possible to work on your career progression while keeping up with your full time job.”
Abraham says there are two things you need to focus on:
Upskilling
“Never stop learning – there is always something that is changing. LIKE.TG regularly releases new features, and you need to make sure you’re on top of them. I always say that if you don’t keep yourself updated, you’re outdated.
“So I tell my team to use T-shaped learning. You can build your specialist knowledge – that’s the vertical of the ‘T’. But you also need to have knowledge of what’s going on around you, so that you can talk to people. That’s the horizontal bar in the ‘T’. You need both to succeed.”
Market yourself
According to Abraham, personal branding is very important in today’s climate.
“I don’t think people market themselves enough,” he says.
“Marketing yourself can start in your own team – by establishing your abilities, you will gain a reputation for expertise in that area. That brand recognition will go a long way in your career roadmap, and help you get promotions, new roles, and so on.”
The Dreamforce experience
Even though he’s been passionate about LIKE.TG for over a decade, 2022 was the first time Abraham had a chance to visit Dreamforce.
“In one word, Dreamforce was overwhelming,” he says.
“I actually went into the venue on the day before the big event, and it was nice and quiet,” he remembers. “But on the day of Dreamforce, it was something else. It was so busy! People from the LIKE.TG community lined the streets, inside the buildings – everywhere.”
Of course, Abraham’s experience of the event was a little different from most Trailblazers.
“Straight after I received the Golden Hoodie, I didn’t know what to say. People were coming from left and right congratulating me, and I was still trying to take in what had happened. It took a few days for it to really sink in,” he says.
Not everyone knows what a Golden Hoodie represents, though.
“After I got off stage, I called my wife and told her that I had received a Golden Hoodie,” Abraham says. “But of course she doesn’t really know what that means. The next morning, when I was able to explain its significance, she was very proud.
“There was another funny moment, straight after I got the hoodie. My friend Scott took me to a restaurant round the corner. When we got there, a man said, ‘nice hoodie, where can I buy one?’ and I had to explain that he couldn’t!”
How to Close More Sales Deals While Saving Time and Costs
In today’s changing economic landscape, businesses need solutions that can boost productivity while saving time and cutting costs. As customer expectations continue to evolve, sales teams in particular need to do more with less.
The pressure is on to close more deals and meet sales targets today. But at the same time, sales teams also need to identify opportunities for tomorrow. Tiffani Bova, Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at LIKE.TG, calls this dual challenge the ‘seller’s dilemma’.
So how can sales professionals focus on the near-term while also planning for the future? To drive long-term growth and success, they need to rethink their sales strategies to adapt to new ways of selling.
Optimise, transform, innovate
According to our State of Sales research, 72% of sellers’ time is spent on non-selling activities during an average week. These activities often comprise critical but tedious tasks like deal management and data entry. As a result, their ability to meet sales targets is being impacted – 83% of sellers expected to miss their quota in 2022. When sales operations help sellers reduce their number of non-selling tasks, they can help optimise the time available to sales teams to connect with customers and close deals.
To enable this optimisation and improve selling efficiency, sales processes may need to be transformed. This can mean automating tasks which sales teams may be completing manually. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can also mine customer data to help with sales forecasting and territory mapping to further free up time for sales teams to focus on selling. Adopting these transformative technologies can provide data-driven insights to help teams have meaningful conversations with customers. It can reduce the time spent on sales management, while allowing them to focus more on their own core skills and be innovative in addressing customer pain points. This can make selling a more rewarding experience while also helping them achieve sales growth.
Boost efficiency and cost savings with AI and automation
Sales automation can boost productivity. Deploying a platform like LIKE.TG Sales Cloud can help automate and streamline workflows to make sales teams more efficient. For example, when a sales representative books an order in, it is automatically sent to the customer and upon receiving their e-signature, an auto invoice is generated. Such streamlined order management and centralised view of customer data enabled by LIKE.TG have helped Browzwear reduce the manual handling of each order by 65%. The company’s use of Tableau for data-driven decision making has helped save time spent in verifying numbers and data, thereby improving data transparency and efficiency. This has accelerated their digital transformation and helped Browzwear scale up efficiently to achieve 60% year-on-year business growth.
When automation is paired with AI, it can help significantly reduce manual work like lead scoring. By carrying out a sales analysis of past deals, AI like Sales Cloud Einstein can help prioritise the leads most likely to convert. This can keep sellers focused on meaningful conversations to close deals faster with customers. As the State of Sales reveals, eight in 10 leaders and sales operations professionals say AI has improved the use of sales representatives’ time.
Unlock your sales superpower
As sales representatives hone their skills to beat the ‘seller’s dilemma’, Bova says it’s important for them to understand their own strengths. Instead of trying to do too much, they should focus on their own ‘selling superpower’.
“If sellers feel they are good at something, say at understanding customer pain points, I say do more of that,” says Bova. “When sellers try to be something that they’re not, it comes off as inauthentic. They never really feel comfortable and confident with it.”
While building relationships with customers will always be important, Bova believes the successful sales reps of the future will be those that use technology better than their competitors.
“At the end of the day, this is about human and tech – not tech or human alone. Whether you’re using a CRM or chat, email or video, you are using tech. And those that really lean into using tools like AI and machine learning for lead scoring and forecasting, will really build on their own strengths.”
So, how can sellers go about using technology to build long-lasting relationships and boost their sales?
Set up for sales success
To achieve long-term sales success, it is important to have a strong digital foundation. This enables sellers to be agile and innovative by tapping into the power of technologies like automation and AI.
Streamlining your tech stack to support your sales strategy can help deliver improved efficiency and cost savings. But where can you start?
This e-book offers guidance on using the right technology and human skills to achieve sales success, now and into the future.
Download it now for:
✔️ Success tips from LIKE.TG experts, partners and Trailblazers
✔️ Effective techniques to refresh your sales strategy
✔️ A sales readiness checklist – to get you ready for the future of sales
Achieve sales success by downloading your free Selling Smarter Not Harder e-book now.
How HEPMIL Media Group Drives Efficient Growth With Real-Time Data
HEPMIL Media Group strives to engage millions in Southeast Asia through thought provoking and entertaining content. The network of technology-driven media companies boasts a weekly reach of more than 50 million people across multiple content platforms. It generates more than 3 billion monthly views via the HEPMIL Creator’s Network (HCN).
But that’s only the beginning. HEPMIL has also helped leading global brands including McDonalds, Disney, and Starbucks connect with GenZs and Millennials in Southeast Asia through effective social media campaigns.
It all started in 2012 when HEPMIL Co-founders Karl Mak and Adrian Ang turned a viral meme about the McDonald’s curry sauce shortage into SGAG — an influential comedy platform in Singapore. The company replicated its success in Malaysia with the launch of MGAG in 2015 and in the Philippines with PGAG in 2018.
Also in 2018, the company launched cross-platform tech channel SGEEK. It then expanded its regional presence in 2021 with HEPMIL Media Indonesia, HEPMIL Singapore, and HCN in Malaysia and the Philippines.
Tackling the reliability challenge
The company’s revenue is predominantly generated through sponsored brand content and client campaigns on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Michelle Tan, General Manager at HEPMIL Singapore, says customer engagement and building long-term client relationships has been critical to the company’s rapid growth — particularly in the short-term world of social media.
“Our goal is always to be authentic and trustworthy partners to our clients, mainly because in the social media space there are so many creators and younger startups that are very focused on short-term goals,” she explains. “But we strongly believe in building and maintaining long-term client relationships. To achieve that, we need to be reliable and transparent.”
That was a challenge in the early years of the company. Michelle says quick access to up-to-date client data is essential to building trust in customer relationships — and online spreadsheets were not a suitable tool.
“We started with Google Sheets, and there were definitely instances where people didn’t fill out mandatory fields, which led to missing client data. As the business grew, we also started to lose track of the master document, so updating Sheets was a problem. That meant up-to-date client data was often difficult to find or not available.”
Michelle says this lack of reliable, real-time data also made reporting to senior management and shareholders inefficient. “Whenever a request came from senior management or shareholders, we’d have to spend a lot of time crunching numbers and checking that the data had been updated. We needed intelligent automation software that would solve this.”
The power of data-driven decision making
Sales Cloud was the solution the HEPMIL team needed. Chiang Ling Yi, Regional Product Lead at HEPMIL Media Group, says the company is now using Sales Cloud to manage the entire client lifecycle — from leads to project closure.
“Enquiries submitted via all our brand websites now flow directly into Sales Cloud, and the Business Development Lead in each country assigns different team members to follow up,” he explains. “Then there’s a customer discovery process, a proposal stage, and finally moves into an active project. This is all managed in Sales Cloud.”
Ling Yi says Sales Cloud has also transformed the company’s reporting capabilities. His team has customised more than 10 Sales Cloud dashboards that enable real-time data reporting across departments.
“For example, a business team might use a dashboard to look at what projects are in the pipeline, what’s still in proposal stage, how long each project has been running, what is in each team member’s workload, and what revenue their team is bringing. On a senior management dashboard, we’re looking at things like revenue per country and revenue distribution across regions.”
The company is also using LIKE.TG Inbox for client-facing roles, and Sales Cloud workflow automations are integrated into legacy project management software. “Whenever the business development team updates Sales Cloud, new information is automatically updated on our project management platform,” says Ling Yi.
Real-time insights drive business growth
Michelle says LIKE.TG has delivered significant business value on multiple fronts. “Many hours have been saved in crunching numbers because we can now rely on our customised dashboards. This alone has improved productivity by about 5 percent, and we can spend the saved hours on more productive work.”
Access to reliable, real-time data through Sales Cloud dashboards has also enabled the HEPMIL team to take a more targeted, proactive approach to customer engagement.
“We can now track whether a client’s spend has increased or decreased over time, which enables us to identify areas for change and open up conversations with the client,” Michelle explains.
Perhaps most significantly, Sales Cloud data also enables Michelle to track trends in client demand, and to resource projects appropriately to cut waste and reduce costs.
“With LIKE.TG, we can identify client demand and forecast future customer demand to make important business decisions. For example, one year ago the demand may have been for three-minute videos that needed a 10-person crew. However, now the demand may have pivoted to one-minute videos that require a much smaller crew. I can restructure our creative and production teams based on the current demand. This has contributed to an approximate 20 percent increase in business growth.”
Michelle adds that LIKE.TG has also helped to power HEPMIL’s rapid regional growth. Data insights through Sales Cloud have helped teams in other countries identify and target potentially high-value clients.
“When we use Sales Cloud to track deal size in Singapore, it gives teams in Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia insights into which clients they can potentially reach out to and spend time nurturing a relationship with them in their own region,” she concludes. “LIKE.TG has been critical to achieving that.”
4 Ways to Make AI the New Team Member Your Sales Reps Will Love
For many businesses, AI is like a new star recruit who everyone feels nervous around and cautious about. This is largely because of the myths that still persist about AI taking jobs, requiring employees to become data scientists and machine learning experts.
And yet an AI-enabled sales strategy has the potential to enable sales professionals and drive performance. From sales analysis and forecasting to lead management, AI can help improve efficiency in the sales process. What AI needs then is a proper introduction, not a sudden announcement at a staff meeting or hastily circulated memo that makes sales — arguably one of the lively parts of any business — feel like it’s turning into a technical process rather than a valuable and talented team. The results can be damaging if those on the sales team fail to adopt or take advantage of the AI capabilities in their CRM, or try to find ways to work around it.
So rather than letting your technology investment go to waste, it is beneficial to figure out an approach to AI onboarding that isn’t threatening. This can help integrate these sales or prospecting tools usefully and naturally into day-to-day work.
1. Build trust before the introduction
If you were introducing a new team member to a client, would you bring them to a meeting unannounced? Would you simply tell everyone their name and expect the relationship to thrive? Probably not. Instead you would lay the groundwork — selling your new hire to the client before they ever meet.
Similarly it can work better to lay the groundwork first instead of calling your sales team into a meeting to tell them AI is now part of their toolkit. Start by discussing the team’s own data and sales performance: win rates, losses, goals, and progress. These should be sales KPIs and numbers the team already trusts and values, so they’ll be sure to pay attention.
Only then should you move the discussion into a business case about how AI sales tools might help improve those numbers. Develop your best sales forecast or estimate based on how AI could identify additional opportunities, avoid costly mistakes or predict otherwise unforeseen events. This positions AI as a sales tool useful to the team’s success — not something that will undermine their success.
2. It’s always a race — demonstrate AI’s time-saving benefits for sales reps
Sales reps don’t love administrative work, whether it’s creating and submitting reports, scheduling meetings, answering emails or updating customer records. The reality is, admin work in the sales process also takes them away from the one thing they’re all good at and the very thing they earn commission on — selling. In fact, the average sales rep spends less than one-third of their time selling.
It can really help if sales operations can show, not tell, your team how powerful reclaiming some of that time back would be. Most sales reps love a little competition — they thrive on achieving a goal! So set up a game with reps racing each other and the clock. Choose two competitive reps and give them a pile of data to input into a spreadsheet to create a sales report, and a number of emails to answer and correlate with calendar information to book meetings. Ask them to ensure they update customer records as they go. Use a stopwatch and give them 20 minutes to complete the task. Meanwhile, have a third rep complete the same task using Einstein GPT— you’ll need to make sure they’re familiar with using it.
When time’s up, congratulate the sales rep who accomplished more of the tasks. But before declaring them the winner, talk about how AI can help improve sales management – by automating processes , updating your CRM and eliminating much of what we use spreadsheets for today. And ask the rep who was using AI what they would do with the extra time they didn’t spend on admin. The whole team will see for themselves that the right technology can free them up to do higher-value tasks and achieve sales growth.
3. Make AI the new member of your sales team
When technology behaves like a person — hello Siri and Alexa — it feels less intimidating. So why not give your new AI capabilities the same advantage?
Connect with your marketing department to develop a representative image you’ll use to associate with your new AI capabilities. Show the AI persona’s face on screen in your team meeting, and talk about them as though you are introducing a new admin assistant who will be helping out the team.
Say you were launching an AI chatbot – introduce its persona like any other member of the team. Speak about the AI skills it offers, such as answering common customer questions and managing enquiries, at the same time freeing up the customer service staff to handle the more complex cases that require a human touch.
The point is to demonstrate that if the AI were a high performer with exceptional capabilities, they would be enthusiastically welcomed. So why not do the same for the technology that can deliver those capabilities?
4. Transform your critics into advocates
Getting the new technology’s harshest critics to pitch it can be a great way to turn a sceptic into a fully-fledged AI advocate.
Salespeople thrive on competition and on coming up with ingenious ways to convince even the most resistant customers. You can turn that to your advantage as you bring in AI.
After walking through your business case and demonstrating AI’s ability to supercharge CRM, challenge members of the team to do an on-the-spot pitch as though they needed to convince the company to try the technology out. Offer a real prize for the rep who delivers the most convincing pitch, and maybe add bonus points for those who would characterise themselves as uneasy or doubtful about AI’s abilities. It’s a useful technique to help the team get comfortable with the benefits of AI features in their CRM and can turn sceptics into fans.
Getting fully comfortable with a new team member can take time. But when that new team member is AI, it’s worth putting effort into introducing and onboarding it with an awareness of your sales team’s potential reluctance and a creative approach to overcoming it.
How To Improve Customer Focus: 6 Tips and Strategies
In 2007, after delivering close to 1 billion DVDs into customers’ mailboxes, Netflix realised its customers would prefer something different — inexpensive, simple-to-access entertainment they could watch on demand. Netflix recognised it needed to be more customer focused, even when it meant disrupting its own business model. What is customer focus? Obsessive knowledge of both what your customers need, and how to deliver it.For Netflix, it was a smart move. The company’s video streaming service not only proved to be hugely popular, it also changed how we consume television and movies altogether. Rival DVD rental business Blockbuster failed to adapt to meet the changing market. The rest is history.In an era of changing customer expectations and increased market competition, it’s more important than ever for businesses to have razor-sharp customer focus.What is customer focus?Customer-focused businesses are built around customers’ needs. Becoming one involves concentrating on how every interaction helps the customer, rather than how it helps your business.Putting customers at the heart of everything you do as a business places you in a better position to build relationships, help customers to achieve their goals, and increase customer satisfaction (all key benefits of a robust CRM).Yet many companies are falling at the first hurdle, as they fail to understand customers’ needs and expectations, or to adapt to their actions and behaviours.According to LIKE.TG’s “State of the Connected Customer” report, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations, but only 51% believe companies generally do. Similarly, 62% of customers expect companies to adapt based on their actions and behaviours, but just 47% believe companies generally do.What are some examples of a customer-focused organisation?Fast food giant McDonald’s is known for listening to what customers want and responding accordingly. The restaurant chain introduced an all-day breakfast after feedback on social media and through online surveys suggested widespread interest in breakfast items all day. The company has continued to let a customer-focused mindset guide in-store innovation, rolling out easy-order kiosks to reduce waiting time, and partnering with delivery service Uber Eats.Dollar Shave Club is another company that turned a simple insight — consumers found buying razors expensive and a hassle — into a clever business idea. Subscribers of the service receive razors on a regular basis for a set monthly fee. The company launched in 2011, receiving a major boost in 2012 when a YouTube video starring co-founder Michael Dubin went viral. Unilever has since acquired it in a deal reported to be worth $1 billion.Even small ideas can make a big difference. When designers at GE Healthcare realised that children were terrified of the company’s magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems — with as many as 80% needing sedation before a scan — they set out to make them less frightening.Unable to redesign the multimillion-dollar machines, they focused on the experience, transforming the MRI suite into a kids’ adventure story. They applied colourful decals to the surfaces of the machine, and machine operators were given a script to lead their patients through the adventure. In one version, the MRI is a pirate ship. In another, the MRI is a spaceship transporting the patient into space. Since the redesign, the number of children needing sedation has fallen dramatically and patient satisfaction scores have increased to 90%.How do you build a customer-focused culture?To build a truly customer-focused culture, you first need to ensure you understand your customers and their needs. This involves collecting disconnected sources of customer data into a single, 360-degree view of your customer and, of course, being able to put that data into action to deliver better experiences.These six tips will get you started:1. Listen to your customers2. Make space for ideas3. Break down internal barriers4. Unlock your data5. Appoint a customer-focused advocate6. Create opportunities for learning1. Listen to your customersTo really get to know your customers, put yourself in their shoes and ask:What are their needs?What’s driving their decision-making?’What are their goals?What are they feeling?For example, knowing that a customer’s primary goal is to save time at work and spend more time with family can help you find them the right solution.Enabling a sense of customer empathy. Take a walk in your customers’ shoes to help you gain a new perspective on aspects of your business you’re not close to. For example, you may believe focusing on a product’s high-tech specifications is the best way for a sales representative to seal a deal. But customers may be more interested in hearing how it will help make their life easier.Although sales and customer service staff are on the front line dealing with customers, improved customer focus should be a company-wide priority.Create opportunities for non-customer-facing staff across the business – from the CEO down – to spend time with customers or handle service calls to learn from customers firsthand. Gather and analyse data — such as web analytics, attrition rates, and product use patterns — to gain insight, and invite customers to provide feedback.Surveys are a great way to find out what your customers really think about your business. Or set up a customer advisory board to meet several times a year and discuss industry trends, business priorities, and strategy. Share results of customer feedback throughout your business.Social listening — monitoring what’s said about your brand online — can also be a useful tool for building a customer-focused mindset. Look for direct mentions of your company or products on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and other social media, andtry these strategies for social listening.Check for direct mentions and hashtags featuring your brand and products. Don’t forget common misspellings. You know how to spell your company or product name, but customers may not.Monitor the hashtags your customers use. The terms you use may not reflect how your customers discuss your company or industry. Follow thought leaders, industry influencers, or companies who represent your ideal customer. Track the hashtags they use.Track competitors’ activity. Do you know what customers are asking your rivals? If the same questions keep coming up, consider whether you should address them in your own blog or marketing content.Ask your audience for feedback. Want to know something specific? Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all have polling tools. Or, simply ask your followers open-ended questions.2. Make space for ideasAccording to the “State of the Connected Customer” research, 62% of customers now expect companies to adapt based on their actions and behaviours. This increases to 67% among Millennials and Generation Z.Many businesses have traditionally left new ideas to a select group, but great ideas can come from anywhere. In fact, organisations including Unilever, Ikea, and Lego now actively involve customers in problem-solving and new product development through co-creation platforms and initiatives.As organisational consultant Simon Sinek said, “The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen.”3. Break down internal barriersSilos, swim lanes, bubbles. Organisational experts may use different terms, but the core problem is the same: Customer data lives in multiple systems owned by different departments, which leads customers to have a disconnected experience when dealing with your business.While 78% of customers say they expect consistent interactions across departments, their expectations are falling short: 59% said it typically feels as though they’re communicating with separate departments, not one unified organisation. About two-thirds (66%) of customers said they often have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives.Disjointed data is a significant barrier to creating the more valuable, personalised experiences customers are looking for from businesses these days.Breaking down silos is easier said than done. But to be truly customer-focused, businesses need to work toward building a complete 360-degree customer view. In doing so, they will be able to deliver unified cross-channel customer engagement.4. Unlock your dataTechnologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) raise the bar for business. Many consumers and business buyers are prepared to pay a premium for differentiated, first-to-market products and services, putting businesses under pressure to get ahead.Seventy-five percent of customers expect companies to use new technologies to create better experiences. A similar proportion (74%) expect companies to use existing technologies in new ways to create better experiences.This might mean using a customer’s browsing and purchasing history to make personalised recommendations. Or sending push notifications to a customer’s phone offering a discount on products they’ve browsed. It could also mean using chatbots to collect and qualify information so agents have more time to spend solving customers’ problems.5. Appoint a customer-focused advocateCustomer focus can get lost in the day-to-day business of, well, running a business. That’s why appointing a chief customer officer (CCO) is a great idea.The CCO’s role is to be the voice of the customer and ensure that customer focus is maintained throughout your organisation. They use data and research to champion customers’ needs, help guide the design of products and processes, and identify where teams need to improve their customer focus skills.They also ensure that having a strong customer focus results in tangible benefits to your business, including increased customer satisfaction, less customer churn, and greater revenue.6. Create opportunities for learningAlthough building a customer-focused culture isn’t something you do overnight, implementing these strategies will set you on the path for success.Keep employees updated on progress, invite their ideas and feedback, and provide access to resources such as LIKE.TG Trailhead training modules to help them develop customer-focus skills. Options are many, including the basics of customer journeys and improving customer service agents’ communication skills.Ultimately, by creating a culture where customers’ needs are at the heart of every interaction, businesses create a compelling offer for customers and a significant competitive advantage. But there is another reason businesses should make customer focus a priority.Technologies are disrupting whole industries at an unprecedented pace. Understand what your customer needs to anticipate disruption, or even drive it. As history has repeatedly shown, it’s better to disrupt yourself than drag your heels while someone does it to you. Just ask Blockbuster.
7 Winning Steps for Effective Objection Handling
I’ve led teams of over 100 employees through recessions, corporate pullbacks, and market turmoil. As you can imagine, selling was a struggle through all of it. We learned very quickly that the biggest obstacle to closing new business isn’t the objections themselves, it’s how the team manages the objections.The key to effective objection handling is using a question-based framework that puts the prospect at ease. When done tactfully, the prospect will come to their own conclusion that moving forward is the best decision to make. I’ll walk you through all the steps to managing common objections, including diving deeper with a simple questioning framework, and following objections with gratitude and empathy.First, let’s tackle a few basics:What is objection handling?Objection handling is how a seller addresses a prospect’s concerns about purchasing a product or service during the sales process, often related to timing, price, or stakeholder buy-in. We commonly think of objections surfacing after the sales pitch, but they can happen as early as a cold call and as late in the process as contract negotiations.Why is objection handling important?Without objection handling, deal opportunities (and, ultimately, revenue) would disappear at the first mention of a concern or problem. When reps are trained to handle objections successfully, it’s more likely that deals will continue to move through the pipeline and close.It’s also critical for building trust and long-term relationships: “An objection shows that the prospect is not ready to buy and you need to build more trust,” sales coach Niraj Kapur said.Successful objection handling addresses their fears and concerns, creating loyalty that can lead to multiple sales.What are the main types of objections?While customers may object for many reasons, here are the most common ones:Limited resources: “We don’t have budget for this.”Insufficient buy-in from stakeholders: “I need to check with a decision maker.”Competitor: “Another company has a better solution.”Redundancy: “We already have a solution in place for this.”Bad timing: “This isn’t a priority right now.”The reality is that when prospects give you an objection near the close, the first objection is usually a superficial objection with other potential underlying concerns. The mistake many reps make is then trying to handle what they believe to be the objection and then getting hit with multiple other objections following it, leading to increased sales resistance.Get articles selected just for you, in your inboxSign up now7 steps to perfect objection handlingThe steps below work for all of the common objections. I’ve used them for years, and they always deliver. Start by uncovering key motivations and hurdles for your prospect, then dive deeper with the right questions to uncover their “why.” Pair this with gratitude and empathy to show you’re committed to finding a way forward. When you know their unique problem or need, you can deliver a solution that works and overcome the objection.Here’s how it plays out:Step 1: Run an effective discovery process before closing objections ariseBefore you even get to the demo or ask for their business, spend time on strong, thoughtful discovery that will set you up with a virtually objection-less close. Even if you do get objections at the end, you are now armed with intel that you can use to manage them.It’s important to utilise a framework because it becomes a “cheat code” to close at the end. I use my P.O.W.E.R.F.U.L. framework to guide this, outlined below. Dive deeper into your prospect conversations by asking about:P – Pain. Is it so deep that they have to take action immediately? Or maybe it’s latent pain, meaning they know the pain is there, but they’re not thinking about it. Ask the right questions to get them to level 10+ pain.O – Opportunity costs. What are the opportunity costs? Let’s say they don’t take action for a year — what would the implications be?W – Wants. What company-related wants does your prospect have and how do these tie into business goals? Maybe the CEO wants to be in the INC. 5000 or triple the size of the company. Uncover these, so you can tie your solution to those goals.E – Executive-level influence. Who are the decision-makers? Know who is in the buying process, who the stakeholders are, what’s important for their level of clout and influence, and what they really want.R – Resources. Who controls the budget? That person can change the budget in your favour if they see the value of your solution.F – Fear of failure. Does your prospect fear that their current solution will lead to failure? Meaning, if they do absolutely nothing (status quo), do they believe they will be in trouble?U – Unequivocal trust. What does the prospect need in order to trust you and your solution? How do you provide value and service to earn that trust? This is important because at the heart of any sale or relationship is trust. If there is no trust, deals stall and relationships stagnate.L – Little things. Are you letting little things distract you from securing executive buy-in? A lot of salespeople get caught up in the specifics like, “We have this feature. We could automate this,” and so on, but execs might not be impressed by these. How do you show value and impact instead?Now with a baseline discovery framework, you’ll follow the rest of the sales process to the point of asking for the business. That’s when the closing objections start coming. Use the remaining steps to overcome them.Step 2: When objections arise, thank your prospectAn objection is better than a flat “No,” so when you get one, reply with a “Thank you.” This acknowledges the prospect’s concerns, which builds trust and rapport, while opening the door to additional conversation about their needs and pain points. Keep it simple, like: “I really appreciate you sharing that.”Step 3: Empathise to put your prospect at easeSay things that validate their objection, like: “I hear this a lot. I’m sorry you feel that way. It sounds like this has been very frustrating,” or “I hear what you’re saying and I think I can help.” By empathising with the customer, they’re more likely to open up and share information that can help you frame a valuable solution.Step 4: Ask open-ended questions to uncover the root cause of the objectionIf you’ve successfully executed steps 2 and 3, the prospect should feel more at ease and you want to now take time to uncover what’s really going on. Don’t ask yes/no questions — you want the prospect to share as much information as possible, and one-word answers don’t give you much to work with. Ask open-ended questions that will help you understand what’s on their mind, and use what you learned in step 1 to guide your questioning.For example, if the objection was “I can’t get approval on this,” you might ask, “When you say ‘I can’t get approval on this’…what do you mean, specifically?” Next, you want to make sure that once you overcome this specific objection that they do not come back and hit you with another objection, forcing you to go back and forth with them. This can be as simple as “Aside from X concern, is there anything on your mind that’s holding you back from being less than 100% certain this is the exact solution your company needs?”This is where you want to spend the majority of your time. Imagine the objection is an onion and your questions are like a knife that is peeling the layers back to show you the core of the onion.Once you feel that you truly understand what’s on their mind, head to the next step.Step 5: Urge the prospect to tell you what they like about your productYes, you read that correctly. You’re going to re-clarify the value, but you’re going to have the prospect do it. It goes like this: “Remind me again: What did you like most about our solution?” That’s it. Stop talking. Once they start telling you what they like, it will help reframe their mind. And you’ll see if you’ve done a good job on the front end articulating the value your product or solution offers and how it aligns to what you uncovered in your discovery phase.Step 6: Tie it all togetherFill in the blanks and connect the dots. If they forgot something that they liked but noted earlier, bring it back up. Reiterate some of your key talking points. Show them how your product will address pain points articulated in step 4, or get them to their desired result.Step 7: Back your claims up with proof and customer referencesClaiming your product is the perfect solution is one thing, but backing your statements in step 6 with industry research, customer references, social proof, or case studies is more effective. The more tailored these are to the needs of your prospect, the better. Show them that your product will actually work for their use case and show them why their objection should not exist.Improve your objection handling todaySuccessful objection handling is easier said than done. But at the end of the day, it’s about putting the customer first. Take it from Dini Metha, a former chief revenue officer with 15 years of experience: “Be a person before being a salesperson.” In other words, focus on making a genuine connection. That wins out every time.
3 Service Investments To Help You Thrive In an Uncertain Economy
Trying to figure out how to guide your business through an uncertain economy? Start by investing in customer support.
Macroeconomic conditions like inflation, supply chain challenges, labour shortages, and rapid changes across industries have all disrupted business as we know it. How can you keep up as the global landscape constantly changes? The answer is to invest in customer support.
When your team has an efficient platform — not just a mashup of different tools acquired over the years — they can focus on delivering empathetic, effective customer service.
By going with one comprehensive and connected platform, you can eliminate spending on mix-and-match products. The experience can be streamlined for both your employees and customers. When it comes to investing in customer service, you have to provide your team with the right tools.
As the CMO of Service Cloud, I was excited to sit down with Amy Weaver, LIKE.TG’s president and CFO, at Dreamforce 2022 for the CFO Talk: The Value Customer Service Brings to Your Business, where she gave sound advice to leaders navigating their teams during these uncertain times.
Right from the start, Weaver said, “There is this idea that CFOs are looking to cut costs and that’s not always true. I am really looking for just three things right now: growth, cost-savings, and efficiency.”
Since Dreamforce, I’ve had time to reflect upon my discussion with her. Here are three ways that investing in the right tools and the right actions can help you weather economic uncertainty.
1. Focus on efficiency in your contact centre
As you invest in customer support, one of the first things to consider — especially during an unpredictable economy — is how to create efficiency. The challenge is to become more efficient while continuing to deliver seamless and connected experiences.
When everyone is talking about saving on costs, you can drive efficiency and productivity with things like automation and AI.
“Efficiency has never been more important,” Weaver said. “Literally, every conversation I’ve had with a CFO in the last 6 months has been about driving efficiencies, especially when you’re in uncertain times.”
Companies are facing two situations: they’re either trying to moderate headcount or they’re trying to hire in an unpredictable job market. Both lead to the need for maximum efficiency.
To work efficiently service professionals need visibility into the entire customer journey — all in one place. With this clarity, you can automate repetitive tasks and remove inefficient workflows. You can also create the right workflows once, and deploy them across every need your agents and others across your organisation have.
For example, support engineers who don’t have the right technology to do their job aren’t productive or efficient in their roles. As a leader, if you’re leaving contact centre agents to hunt for information like order numbers and return policies, this can lead to a poor employee experience. These problems are solved by deploying technology that has all their tasks, communication, and collaboration in one place. Automation helped us save 75,000 employee hours on repetitive tasks last year, which enabled our teams to focus on what matters most – our customers.
It’s never been more relevant to enable digital transformation for service teams and the support experience. With the right platform, you can increase the productivity of contact centre agents, managers, support engineers, and frontline workers by giving them all the information they need when they need it, to deliver a personalised customer experience.
And we all know that when your technology investments make your customer service team’s lives easier, your customers’ lives are easier too. This is the magic of efficiency.
2. Empathy and kindness are wise economical investments, too
Being empathetic can help you retain your employees, fostering an attitude that leads to repeat customers through heartfelt customer service. You can invest in customer support by leading with empathy.
During these times, it’s more important than ever to include compassion in your management toolkit. Empathy for your team bridges the gap in trust and transparency between service teams and the customer.
Contact centre agents are on the front lines all day with customers, both the good and the bad. So, as a leader, providing ongoing training and support to your agents improves and builds a comfortable and trusted working environment, and creates an open culture of communication.
“Going back to service and looking at the uncertainty we have right now in the economy,” Weaver said, “we have to shift to look at how we are serving our customers, our employees, and how we are leading as a company. We have to lead with kindness.”
Her view is that this allows teams to further their careers for success because they know that their managers truly want to see them succeed.
In LIKE.TG’s Fifth Edition State of Service report, we talked to more than 8,000 decision-makers, contact centre agents, and customer service professionals. We found that connection and empathy are still at the heart of great service.
To manage what comes next, you need to invest in customer support by focusing on the employee experience. This means not only equipping them with comprehensive technology, but also focusing on your team’s well-being and balance, and the right tools needed to do the job efficiently. It’s a package deal.
3. Invest in customer support with the proper tech
When times change, we often re-evaluate our technology, finding ways to cut costs. But what we’ve found is that investing in technology that will carry you through uncertain times can help you future-proof your business.
One thing that Amy said really stood out to me. By taking the time to understand each team member’s skill set, the support channels, and the tools they use to perform their duties, you can truly understand what would make their life easier.
By understanding what your team needs, you can focus on how they can increase productivity and efficiency. It’s not about cutting costs, it’s about finding the right tool for the job.
When it comes to customer support, this means communication, collaboration, relevant and real-time data, which leads to faster resolution and a better customer experience.
You can do this through a connected service platform that can quickly and efficiently handle any customer interaction, from the contact centre to the field. We found that 80% of service pros say consolidating platforms and vendors drives efficiency and reduces risk. Making the right customer service investment means growth for your team and your customers.
The key takeaway is that you can invest in customer support by investing in your team — and a comprehensive platform that will put your customers first.
Doing this will equip your team with real-time data, automated intelligent workflows, and personalised interactions with customers. And you’ll build a future with cost savings in mind, while you deliver quality of service at scale.
We encourage you to listen to your team’s needs and ask them what they need to succeed. If the goal is to do more with less, find the right tool to do just that. Efficiency means scaling customer support by investing in your team, and the tools that they use, while setting your sights on the future by leaning into change.
This strategy will help you set your team up for success — no matter what comes your way. Automation takes care of the easy stuff for your agents. Intelligence lets you stay one (or many) steps ahead while being proactive about solving customers’ needs. Timely data ensures you have the right information, at the right time — all making for very happy customers.
And, as Amy would say, throughout it all, lead with kindness.
5 Ways to Measure Customer Experience And Drive Growth
Customer experience is not just a contributor to customer satisfaction. It is also a critical differentiator for businesses. Customer experience (CX) takes on new importance at a time when products are losing their unique selling points (USPs) like brand and price.
The LIKE.TG State of the Connected Customer report shows 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services.
To create those outstanding customer experiences, businesses must standardise customer service and evaluate customer feedback.
But first, why measure customer experience?
The advantages of measuring customer experience
Measuring customer experience lets you:
Define customer success standards and create consistent service quality
Use benchmarking to assess and improve performance and productivity
Uncover insights like competitive intelligence that can increase sales and enhance customer satisfaction
Easily identify new ways of increasing business efficiency
Use CX metrics to track return on investment (ROI) and set new goals
Measuring CX helps you learn what customers enjoy most about their experience and what needs to be improved.
How can you measure customer experience effectively?
Here are five ways to measure your CX to increase business efficiency and reach your sales goals.
Monitor customer experience metrics
Use customer-focused metrics like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Efforts Score (CES) and Average Resolution Time (ART).
Look out for scores like Net Promoter Score (NPS), which let you know how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to someone they know. Similarly, Customer Effort Score (CES) can help you get a clear picture of how your customers feel about your business, based on their experience.
Too many numbers? An integrated platform, like the LIKE.TG Customer 360, can help you collate customer satisfaction data from different sources and create relevant custom metrics in seconds.
Collect direct responses from customers
A powerful way to measure your CX is to seek customer feedback with well-designed surveys, questionnaires, and polls. This will give you insight into their pain points and challenges.You can then use this feedback to identify inefficiencies across touchpoints and channels.
Analyse customer churn
It’s a reality for any business that you will sometimes see customers leave. If you can find out why customers have stopped using your services, it can help improve sales and service delivery processes. Customer data including average churn period, channels with maximum customer turnover, and purchase categories that see higher than average churn, can be revealing. Using an integrated service CRM will ensure all your teams can access insights from the CX data.
Study trends in support ticket volume
Customer support is an important part of the customer experience. To increase effectiveness, you can leverage support tickets to identify recurring issues, highlight them to respective teams, and smoothen customer journeys .This helps increase business efficiency and drive customer delight. For instance, if data from Service Cloud shows long wait times are undermining customer experience, you can invest in automated responses for common questions. You can also introduce a self-service portal. These portals can offer FAQs and ‘how-to’ videos or tutorials in the customer’s preferred language.
Map social media sentiment
Tracking customer sentiment on social media is a powerful way to strengthen your CX measurement framework. You can measure sentiment by monitoring brand mentions on social networks and analysing the words used to talk about the company. Identifying positive or negative words, following relevant hashtags, or tracking keywords to monitor your online brand perception are some effective methods. By following conversations related to your brand as well as your competitors, you can stay ahead of the curve in understanding and forecasting your CX score.
Use LIKE.TG Service Cloud to create delightful and cost-effective customer experiences
With Service Cloud, businesses can resolve issues quickly across any channel and provide connected, personalised experiences. Service Cloud helps you access intelligent, actionable data that can enhance customer experiences, reduce contact centre costs, and boost agent productivity.
The end result? Complete visibility into every customer interaction, standardised customer service and a reduction in overall cost.
Join us at LIKE.TG World Tour Essentials Asia and learn how LIKE.TG can help accelerate growth, drive productivity unite teams around a shared view of your customer. Register now
This post originally appeared on the India version of the LIKE.TG blog.
What ‘Real-Time Marketing’ Means? And How Can it Wow Your Customers?
Marketers know it’s important to reach customers in “real time.” But the phrase “real time” means different things to different people. We take a look at what that really means.
If you’re like most marketers, you’ve been hearing the term “real-time marketing” a lot lately. And you’ve probably been wondering, what is real-time marketing? Are we delivering content in seconds? Milliseconds? Even faster?
It can sound like marketers need to live in the world of the Oscar winning film Everything Everywhere All at Once. But that’s not necessarily the case. What matters is that you reach your customers when they need to be reached, with the right experience. Real-time marketing doesn’t mean having all the answers all the time – it’s actually about giving customers what they need, when they need it.
What can a customer data platform do?
A customer data platform can help take your marketing team to the next level, while keeping cost efficiency in mind.
Let’s look at the concept of real-time marketing and show some ways leading brands use it to win customers.
What is the difference between real-time marketing and real-time data?
If you search for “real-time marketing” you’ll find a variety of definitions. They range from the vague (“systematically responding to your customers”) to the prescriptive (“focusing on customer feedback”). It seems that no-one can agree what it really means.
Let’s start with the difference between real-time data and real-time marketing. Real-time data is processed and available for use right after it’s captured. That’s milliseconds. For example, the GPS on your phone captures your location and recommends a driving route in real time.
But while it’s important to capture and process data quickly, it’s not always necessary to act on it right away. This is especially true in marketing, when the customer drives the journey. Real-time does not have to mean right now. It’s delivering the information when the end user needs it. That could be seconds or even hours later.
Travel is a very time-sensitive business. If a customer’s digital profile isn’t accurate in real time, it can trigger unfortunate events. When a customer changes their seat or flight on an airline’s app or website, they expect it to show up in their profile right away. When they later go to a service counter, or call customer care, they expect — quite reasonably — that the service agent will be up to date. On the other hand, the customer is probably not expecting that the airline will send them irrelevant emails or offers.
This example shows us the difference between real-time data and real-time marketing. Real-time systems should update customers’ profiles right away. On the other hand, real-time marketing should happen at whatever speed is the right one for the customer — whether that’s today, in five minutes, or next week.
There are implications for the marketers’ back-end data processing systems and resource requirements.
When the customer is on the website or app, they expect their actions to be processed in milliseconds. But there’s no reason the contact centre can’t be updated in seconds and the email system within minutes.
Managing response rate requirements can lower costs and complexity, as long as this doesn’t impact the customer experience.
What do marketers mean when they say “real-time”?
On most occasions, when marketers say real-time, what they often mean is right-time. It means delivering the right data at the right time, to the right systems, to better connect with customers.
Right-time is doing what is needed to make each moment count for the customer
Real-time is collecting and processing data with no delay
The reason to make this important distinction is there can be major technical and organisational costs to imposing real-time requirements on the marketing team. Some teams have resources to handle it and some don’t.
It’s more important to make strategic investments into the systems that need to be real time — for example, your personalisation platform and customer data platform (CDP) — and understand what’s required elsewhere.
How can you set your real-time data priorities? It helps to remember that marketing has two basic modes:
Respond: You’re reacting to customers when they’re already engaged. They’re on your website, in your app, or visiting you in your store.
Inspire: You’re trying to get the attention of customers and prospects when they may not be thinking about you. You send emails with offers, or perhaps show ads on Facebook and Instagram, etc.
In most cases, it’s the ‘Respond’ mode that requires real-time handling of data. On the other hand, most ‘Inspire’ activities are pre-planned and benefit from complete and curated data. Of course, that data needs to be up to date, but it doesn’t necessarily need the lightning-fast response times of real-time data management.
In some cases, real-time responses can be counterproductive. Take an abandoned cart email. Not many of us would react calmly to a reminder email — or, even worse, a text message — a few milliseconds after we decided to leave. That’s what we mean when we talk about real-time marketing. Get the timing right, and you could attract a new customer. Get it wrong, and you might turn them away permanently.
What can you do with a CDP using real-time data?
When you’re making decisions based on real-time data, you’re able to respond to customers in ways that make sense to them. Upgrading your customer data platform to one built on real-time data can help make sure that you have the answers your customers want — when they want them.
Doing this not only means happier customers, but it also improves your bottom line in a cost-efficient manner, too.
For example, a customer might make a purchase on an e-commerce website that puts them into a high-value segment. The segment change can trigger — right away — that person’s entry into a journey tailored to high-value customers. You can then target them with the right ad the next time they’re scrolling through Instagram.
Recently, we announced Data Cloud, our CDP that uses real-time data to make real-time marketing easier for companies. Making the most of real-time data can help you improve customer journeys.
Anyone considering a CDP to support real-time data management should ask how well it will support their “right-time” requirements. Just having parts of the customer journey happen in real time may not be enough. For example:
First-party data: Many enterprises already have a trove of first-party data, and it should be easy to make use of it in real time with your CDP.
Data actions: Marketers have different ways to communicate with customers, and these different channels need to receive rapid signals from the real-time CDP.
Partnerships: Reliable and easy-to-use integrations with key partners also help eliminate friction in the data transfer process. For example, we recently announced integrations with Snowflake, Amazon SageMaker, Microsoft Azure, and others on the AppExchange.
Any confusion about what is and isn’t real-time fades in importance when we pose a better question: What does the customer really need from us right now?
This post originally appeared on the U.S. version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Infographic: Your Guide to Selling Smarter, Not Harder
The most successful sales people are always looking for ways to learn. Best practices in selling are always evolving, and with advancements in technology accelerating, there is always something new on the horizon.
Rapidly developing technology also means that innovation will become an important process for sellers. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, it’s vital tomake time for innovation.
As Vernon Cheo, Regional Vice President of Sales at LIKE.TG, says, “innovation is driving the future of sales. For example, using AI to automate your processes today is more affordable, faster, and available to everyone. If you’re not applying AI to your organisation right now, you might find you get left behind.”
AI technology isn’t the only thing that is changing the way we work. Customer expectations are driving change too. More B2Ccustomers are buying onlinethan ever before, and most expect personalised offers every time. Eighty-seven percent of B2B buyers told us they expect sellers to act as trusted advisors, but only 61% said they actually trust sales reps.
And your company’s values matter. Eighty-eight percent of customers expect companies to clearly state their values, but only 50% think that actually happens.
An evolving sales landscape
All this adds up to a changing and challenging landscape for sales teams. But how can you stay on top of the latest thinking, make time for innovation, and satisfy your customers? We have gathered advice and insights from Trailblazers, industry experts and our own LIKE.TG specialists into our latest guide,Selling Smarter, Not Harder.
In the guide, you’ll find:
The deal makers — actions you can take today to prepare for the future of sales
The deal breakers — what are some old sales habits that have no place in modern selling?
The future of sales checklist — are you really ready for the future of sales?
Here’s just a sample of what you can expect to find in Selling Smarter Not Harder:
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These 3 Apps Help Your Business Automate Processes, Save Costs, and Improve Employee Experience
In today’s economic landscape, organisations face the challenge of doing more with less. The need for efficiency and productivity has become a top priority for businesses.
As a result, many businesses are now focused on optimising their operations to meet these demands. The complexities of sales, service, and marketing have prompted businesses to improve cross-functional alignment, enhance data quality and accuracy, and modernise technology.
According to theState of Marketing report, CMOs have identified the need to continually innovate to remain competitive, with 91% stating this as a priority. Additionally, 70% of marketers who invested in process/workflow automation view this as a long-term strategy shift.
By leveraging apps such as Slack, Mulesoft, and Tableau all within theLIKE.TG Customer 360, businesses will be better positioned to drive growth and improve both employee and customer experience.
Build your Digital HQ with Slack
Building a Digital HQ withSlackcan transform the way teams collaborate. It’s more than just a platform for communication — it’s a platform where businesses can streamline their operations and increase productivity.
The IDC Marketscape Reporthas positioned Slack as one of the leaders in worldwide collaboration and community applications. This is due to its easy integration of apps within the Slack environment, making it popular among developers. The platform’s low-to-no-code interface is also user friendly, allowing anyone to create custom workflows that automate routine tasks and improve efficiency.
AtAureus Academy, in addition to facilitating daily collaboration between departments, Slack is used to motivate employees and celebrate their achievements. By recognising employee contributions and successes, Aureus Academy creates a positive work culture and increases employee engagement.
Another organisation that has leveraged the power of Slack isIBM. With 3,500 apps integrated and 3,400Slack workflowscreated every month, the company has significantly improved its productivity and streamlined its processes. By automating routine tasks and enabling real-time collaboration, IBM has achieved faster time-to-market for new solutions and a more agile workforce.
With Slack, both Aureus Academy and IBM have created a more connected and productive workforce. This enables employees to work together in real time to solve problems, make decisions, and drive growth. This not only helps to improve team dynamics but also has a positive impact on the overall performance of the organisation.
Put enterprise-level analytics in the hands of everyone with Tableau
Data analytics can help organisations make informed and effective decisions. A global survey conducted by LIKE.TG reveals that73% of business leadersrecognise that data reduces uncertainty and drives better decision-making.
When it comes to choosing a data analytics platform, ease of use is a top priority for many business users. They want a product that delivers clear business value and empowers non-technical users to perform advanced analytics without the need for IT support.LIKE.TG Tableauhas enabled this.
Named a leader in the2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Analytics and BI Platforms, Tableau is a powerful data visualisation and analytics tool that helps businesses gain valuable insights from their data. As part of LIKE.TG Customer 360, it allows every employee in your company to easily connect, visualise, and share data across the entire organisation.
TakeM1as an example. Tableau allows its business teams to analyse data on their own and access real-time insights without having to rely on data analysts for reports. This results in faster decision-making and more efficient use of data. In the long run, it improves productivity and frees up employees’ time to focus on more meaningful work.
With Tableau, businesses can make data-driven decisions and gain a competitive edge in today’s fast-paced business landscape.
Integrate data from anywhere with MuleSoft
Part of LIKE.TG Customer 360,MuleSoftis a powerful integration platform that helps businesses connect, integrate, and unlock data from any system. A leader in theGartner Magic Quadrant for Integration Platform as a Service, Worldwide (iPaaS), it uses the power of AI to deliver real-time insights and personalised experiences.
In the latestState of Service report, 79% of decision-makers say new technology solutions result in faster time-to-market. 77% of decision-makers who partner with IT say it helps the organisation save on software costs. This is the case forM1.
MuleSoft has been critical in enabling M1’s IT team to bring legacy technology and modern platforms together. MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform integrates its backend systems and automates its business processes. As a result, MuleSoft helped the team to go to market 25% faster than originally planned and saw a significant reduction in operational costs.
With MuleSoft, companies can streamline their workflows, reduce manual effort, and make better use of their data, enabling them to make informed decisions and drive business success.
Slack, Tableau, and MuleSoft are three powerful tools that can work together within LIKE.TG Customer 360 to help businesses automate processes, save costs, and improve the employee experience. With these tools, businesses can go to market faster and ultimately improve their bottom line.
Learn more about LIKE.TG Customer 360 at World Tour Essentials Asia on 25th May.
