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Why It’s Time To Redefine Customer Experience in Financial Services
Over the past 18 months, financial services organisations have experienced massive change on all fronts. Many have responded with great grit and innovation, while some are still calibrating to the new normal. Whatever the case might be, there’s now a clear path to a new kind of success: the customer-centric model.
What do I mean by customer-centric model? In simple terms, it’s a matter of stopping at nothing to understand the individual customer and their needs like never before. Companies are discovering that seamless, personalised, and omni-channel customer experiences yield great outcomes.
LIKE.TG’s Trends in Financial Services report supports this shift in focus, while highlighting the need for companies to catch up. Our research found that 68% of customers say recent challenges have elevated their expectations for digital-first solutions. Yet, only 27% feel the financial services industry is customer-centric.
In other words, a gap exists between company offerings and customer needs. The good news is that there are provable ways and means to close it.
Defining evolving customer needs
I often make a joke that contains a nugget of truth. I say that pre-pandemic, I flew 250,000 miles per year. Since the pandemic began, I’ve had 250,000 Zoom meetings.
Whether or not the figure is an exaggeration (and I’m not sure it is), it speaks to the changing face of all industries. People now expect that most, if not all of what occured face-to-face, is now possible from the comfort of their own homes. Regardless of when everything reopens, this expectation is here to stay.
The financial services industry is no exception. Where there was once a defined line between what transactions happen in a bank or insurance branch and what happens online, we’re now seeing a blended model. Institutions with their fingers on the pulse are migrating all in-person activities to the digital space.
This is changing the dynamics of how we engage with the financial world. Customers now expect easy, end-to-end processes that allow them to open an account, apply for a loan, or secure a mortgage without having to leave their desks.
Hyper-personalisation: so much more than a buzzword
While it’s human nature to want quick and hassle-free experiences, we also need those experiences to feel personal. Customers now expect companies to understand them and their unique desires and goals, even when face-to-face interaction is at a minimum. Enter hyper-personalisation.
Companies that are experiencing significant growth have one thing in common. They are not only able to address any question, query, or concern with immediacy, but are also able to predict what a customer needs and when.
Hyper-personalisation is an extension of customer centricity. It’s a means of leveraging technology and integrating data to get a 360-degree view of an individual customer, and making the most of every interaction to enrich that view.
Companies can do all of the above without ever forgetting that in-person interactions can complement digital experiences.
Share of mind, time, and trust
If we are to put the toughness of recent years to the side for a moment, now’s a very exciting time to be alive. The customer-centric model, coupled with the powerful platforms that enable it, offers a clarity of purpose, and —perhaps ironically— level of intimacy that industry has never before experienced.
Financial services companies that successfully place the customer at the centre of everything now own a disproportionate share of mind, time, and trust. What I mean by that is when a company meets customer needs through seamless, personalised, and omni-channel experiences, customers feel like their time and efforts are respected.
Achieving customer-centricity takes commitment and effort. But once it is achieved, growth increases exponentially alongside customer satisfaction. The more we open the conversation and bridge the gap between company and customer, the more both parties are rewarded.
How to achieve customer centricity
It’s no coincidence that higher levels of customer centricity are reached through organisational unification. The more a company is able to streamline and integrate data and processes, the more they are able to get a clear view of the individual customer.
That is why LIKE.TG’s Customer 360 and its CRM for financial services exist: to satisfy the unmet needs of both business and consumer.
For a business, a CRM unifies all teams so that they are seeing through the same lens. The customer benefits from being seen from one shared view. The relationship between the two is now bound by a single source of truth.
For the financial services industry, this unification is imperative. After working in banking for 25 years, I know that most companies are dealing with oceans of customer data siloed off in different formats. When integrating Customer 360 with Financial Services Cloud, not only can a company bring all that customer data together, but they can gain insights that make it actionable.
For the business, this means radical spikes in efficiency and precision, as well as a direct line to increased customer loyalty and revenue growth.
Inspiring case study: Union Bank of the Philippines
Before lockdown, Union Bank of the Philippines had made the decision to make customer care its number one priority. They engaged LIKE.TG and set up a command centre that facilitated immediate and seamless omni-channel service for customers.
Thanks to the scalability and reliability of Service Cloud, they were able to satisfy the large uptick in customer interactions during the first lockdown (tens of thousands in March 2021 alone), while offering new end-to-end services such as account activation. Such a feat would have been deemed unthinkable only 18 months previously.
Companies like UnionBank realised that the pandemic challenged the old ways of working, and the only way forward was to keep customer experience at the centre of every decision.
Financial wellness in the new normal requires ecosystems that engage the customer and their evolving needs in an instant, and it’s an inspiring evolution.
The Dreamforce 2021 Magic Lives On — On LIKE.TG+
Dreamforce 2021 was filled to the brim with insights from industry experts, Trailblazer stories, product demos, inspiring keynotes, and entertainment.
We enjoyed bringing this event to life and streaming it to screens around the world. But the fun doesn’t have to end. The sessions from Dreamforce 2021 are now available to watch on demand through LIKE.TG+.
You can search for episodes by role, industry, and topic, so it’s easy to find the insights that are most relevant to you. Here are some of the event’s top moments that we think everyone should see:
Marc Benioff makes the case for becoming a Trusted Enterprise
One of Dreamforce’s can’t-miss sessions is the keynote address from LIKE.TG Founder and CEO Marc Benioff.
Now more than ever, customers want to engage with businesses that are trustworthy, responsible, and good corporate citizens. Today’s businesses need to look beyond profit and think more about impact, Benioff says.
He devoted his keynote to how businesses can meet these expectations and help the world address major crises like trust, inequality, workforce shifts, and sustainability. The Trailblazer community is key to finding solutions — so much so that Benioff referred to them as ‘Trustblazers’.
How can businesses be the greatest platform for change? Learn more about the Trusted Enterprise from Marc Benioff here.
LIKE.TG leaders shed light on the future of work in Asia Pacific
During the Dreamforce Asia Pacific Takeover, top LIKE.TG leaders from the region gathered for a panel discussion. The group discussed the evolution of customer experience, how businesses in the region have adapted to the changes of the past two years, and the digital transformation imperative.
“ASEAN has always been a growth region that is powered by the millions of local and international businesses we have here. COVID has impacted all of them in different ways, and each one continues to find different ways to emerge stronger after the pandemic. One thing is for certain, though: every company is facing a digital imperative. Our customers have realised they’re going to need digital transformation if they’re going to survive,” said Sujith Abraham, SVP and ASEAN GM.
Although panelists joined from a variety of locations and spoke to local experiences, common themes emerged. They shared how businesses across the region accelerated their digital transformation agenda in order to keep customers and employees connected through work-from-home orders and lockdowns. Now that some countries are nearing vaccination milestones, the panel also shared how this transformation can continue to evolve for a work-from-anywhere world.
As we look ahead to ‘The Great Reopening’ of businesses post-COVID, Abraham suggested that businesses in the region should see the lead up to reopening as an opportunity. He suggested businesses put in place strategies that support employee wellbeing and forge stronger connections between teams. All while supporting customers and exceeding their expectations.
“For us, doing good is part of being a good business. And if you look at the research, it’s shown that strong corporate social responsibility practices not only improve business performance, but increase commitment, affinity and engagement of your employees. This in turn enhances job performance, increases productivity, and lowers attrition. And value creates value,” Abraham said.
“That said, organisations need to find ways to maintain or reestablish their culture so their workforce has the ability to weather the disconnection that might come from working remotely.”
The Asia Pacific Trailblazer community also came together for a virtual game show hosted by Leandro Perez, VP Asia Pacific Marketing. More than 100 Trailblazers from across the region shared their strategies for scoring Trailhead badges and celebrated their years of dedication to gaining new skills. Fun fact: Some participants have been part of the Trailblazer community for more than 10 years!
Watch the Asia Pacific takeover here.
ASEAN Trailblazers gave an inside look into their success
The travel industry faced some of the most challenging disruptions over the past 18 months. Through it all, Singapore Airlines focused on how they could pivot to meet those challenges and keep innovating.
Cecily Ng, AVP and GM, LIKE.TG Singapore, spoke with George Wang, SVP Information Technology, Singapore Airlines, about how the airline adapted to address customer expectations. Digital initiatives played a key role, allowing the company to implement contactless travel solutions to keep customers and employees safe during every stage of travel. Wang also shared how Singapore Airlines continues to innovate with its revamped member rewards platform and duty-free shopping experiences.You can view the full Singapore Airlines interview here.
Retail was another industry that has undergone major changes in order to stay connected to customers. Tim Halaska, Regional General Manager, Digital Strategy, Toys“R”Us Asia, shared the experience of creating a digital strategy to better focus on its ecommerce platforms.
Halaska shared that by bringing all sites onto the LIKE.TG platform, Toys“R”Us has been able to quickly scale up smaller markets online while having a consistent experience across locations. This has lowered barriers to entry and made integrating partners easier.
Watch more Trailblazer stories over at LIKE.TG+.
The public sector stepped into the spotlight
For those working in the public sector, there are sessions available on-demand that reveal how governments and other public institutions can use technology and innovation to build strong and thriving communities.
Using a digital-first approach, public sector organisations are realising new levels of success faster than ever. The session “Public Sector Success: Building Trust Through Transformation” reveals new public sector specific solutions being built. Public sector leaders from across the globe also made appearances at Dreamforce to share insights and expertise.
This past year, all levels of government were challenged to meet evolving mission needs. The session “How Governments Are Building Thriving Communities Globally” dives deep into stories from public sector Trailblazers worldwide, including from the Asia Pacific. Tune in to learn best practices on how to adapt fast, respond, and serve.
You can watch the full Asia Pacific Takeover and more Dreamforce highlights on demand at LIKE.TG+. Click here to learn more.
How To Scale Your Customer Service With Chatbots
When customers reach out to a company for service, they expect fast response times and resolutions, no matter what channel they use. Agents, however, can only handle so many cases at a time. How do you scale support?
Enter customer service chatbots.
These chatbots are powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to answer common customer questions. They help customers quickly resolve simple questions and concerns and free up agents for complex, human interactions.
How to create customer service chatbots
Customer service chatbots tackle simple, repetitive tasks that don’t require the soft skills and experience of an agent. For example, if a customer asks how to reset a password or wants to know an estimated delivery time, a customer service chatbot quickly answers the question by accessing relevant information automatically. At the same time, your agents stay focused on solving complex problems and building relationships with customers.
If your company is just beginning to invest in a chatbot, your first objective is to identify the most common tasks and customer requests to determine what to automate. Keep the following six tips in mind when designing your initial AI-powered chatbot:
1. Personalise every greeting
You train customer service agents to be friendly, greet customers by name, and recognise their status or tier of service. Your AI interface can do the same things within your chatbot. Program chatbots to pull in values like “First Name” for customers who are already logged in, to ensure chatbots greet them in a natural way.
2. Move from static to conversational
Most customers don’t want to fill out a form online and then wait 24 hours to get a response. An AI customer service chatbot that dynamically asks different questions based on customer inputs is more engaging. It also helps resolve the customer’s concern faster. Even if an agent ultimately steps in to help, they will already have the information collected by the chatbot available in their console.
3. Create interactive FAQs
Instead of prompting customers to visit your FAQ page, have chatbots bring the answers to your customers. Load your top-level FAQ questions — including any follow-up questions and their corresponding answers — into your AI interface. With natural language processing (NLP), chatbots recognise language as it’s used in everyday interactions, making it easy for your customers to get the answers they seek.
4. Deploy chatbots to additional channels
You’ve likely enabled service across a few digital channels — like mobile messaging, web chat, and social — so your customers can reach out in the way they prefer. But the average customer now uses nine different channels to communicate with companies. That means there are plenty of opportunities to evolve customer service to meet ever-changing expectations. Start by digging into your analytics to find the channel that gets the most traffic for your business, then find the top ten most common requests on that channel. Save time for your agents by programming your chatbot to answer those requests.
5. Engage customers with rich text and content
Basic text is good for answering simple questions, but rich text — including boldface, italics, fonts, font sizes, and font colors — delivers the wow factor. Imagine being able to insert images or even interactive menus into a chat conversation. Based on customer questions, your chatbot shows a menu of products, a selection of knowledge articles, or more options for customer support, all within the chat.
6. Embed process automation in chatbots
Empower customers to help themselves with guided, step-by-step directions right there in the chat. Ask your team which tasks would be easy for customers to complete on their own. These are the ones your agents could execute with their eyes closed (like replacing a lost credit card). Once you’ve identified a few simple tasks, program chatbots to guide customers from start to finish. In the case of complex issues, the chatbot may still have to hand off the conversation to an agent. But the agent is well-primed because chatbots collect information that helps them resolve each case quickly.
Scale customer service with chatbots
Your customers will appreciate how customer service chatbots provide quick, efficient resolutions to their questions and concerns. Meanwhile, your agents will stay focused on complex customer service challenges instead of answering frequently asked questions. That’s how your business can easily scale support to handle any surge in cases, whenever they come your way.
Learn how AI-powered customer service chatbots can:
Streamline service
Scale support
Satisfy customers
Find out more about scaling your customer service with chatbots.
This post originally appeared in the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
In Conversation With: Simon Sinek
I have long been a fan of the global best selling author, speaker, and visionary thinker, Simon Sinek. Simon is an unshakeable optimist. He believes in a bright future, and in our ability to build it together.
We need that kind of optimism now more than ever. I believe his most recent book, The Infinite Game, is more compelling now than when he first wrote it.
In the book, Simon sets out why leaders who embrace an infinite mindset build stronger, more innovative, and more inspiring organisations. That’s an important message, and one of the reasons why I was honoured to sit down with Simon for an exclusive session featured in our annual Dreamforce event.
Finite versus infinite games
Sujith Abraham: What do you mean by finite versus infinite games, and what is an infinite-minded leader?
Simon Sinek: A finite game is defined as having known players, fixed rules, and an agreed upon objective. There’s always a beginning, a middle, and an end. And if there’s a winner, there has to be a loser.
Infinite games, however, are defined as having known and unknown players, the rules are changeable, and the objective is to perpetuate the game for as long as possible. We play infinite games every day of our lives. However, leaders often don’t recognise the game they are playing.
There is no single winner in infinite games. Take the business world, for example. No single person, or company, ‘wins’ business. But so many leaders talk in terms of beating their competition and playing to win a game that has no finish line.
Finite-minded companies tend to suffer a decline in trust, cooperation, and innovation. Infinite-minded companies, on the other hand, typically outperform and out innovate their competitors.
Success is not about trying to beat the competition
Sujith: It seems to me that when we play with a finite mindset in an infinite game, we make decisions that sabotage our own ambitions. We may have quarterly metrics but are trying to deliver a long-term plan. What is your perspective on this?
Simon: This is a symptom of organisations that are competitor-focused rather than customer-focused. Finite-minded companies are obsessed with beating their competition. Infinite-minded companies are focused on their own vision, and how to get there.
For example, your company may have a better product than your competitor. But then your competitor innovates and releases a new product that makes all previous products — including yours — obsolete. This happens often in the tech space.
Succeeding is not about trying to beat your competitor. It’s about trying to out-do yourself. Finite-minded companies only think about what their competitors are doing. Infinite-minded companies innovate and change the game.
What leadership courage looks like
Sujith: At LIKE.TG, we talk to customers all the time that want to innovate and change their industries over the long term. How can companies create space to manage short-term pressures while they focus on the infinite game?
Simon: It comes down to leadership courage. Effective, infinite-minded leaders must have the courage to withstand short-term pressures while they stay focused on delivering their long-term vision.
This is not easy. Short-term pressure comes from many sources, maybe even from your own investors. Some shareholders will push you to make decisions that are good for short-term profits, but will hurt the company in the long-term.
Other shareholders will support you to do the right thing for the company, even when it may mean suffering short-term losses. This is the group you want to listen to and lean on.
Have the courage to tell the first group that they either believe in your team and your long-term vision, or they don’t. You want investors who are going to support your long-term vision.
The difference between stable companies and resilient companies
Sujith: We all find ourselves in difficult times. Can you explain the distinction between building a company for stability versus building a company for resilience?
Simon: Stability and resilience are two very different things. Stable companies tend to be immobile. They are able to make it through difficult times, but they are just surviving. They tend not to innovate through challenges, and therefore don’t come out stronger.
Resilient companies have a different mindset. They are able to adapt and adjust to changing market conditions. They identify the residual value in their products or services. Then they find innovative methods to deliver them to their customers in ways that are relevant to the new conditions. That’s how resilient companies can come out of difficult times stronger than when they went in.
Sujith: At LIKE.TG, we often find ourselves helping organisations unlock information and drive entrepreneurialism. However, we find that when some organisations become stable, they get risk averse. Do you believe resilient companies are more risk prone?
Simon: Companies built for stability are typically more conservative because they don’t want to risk their stability. Finite-minded leaders tend to favour short-termism because they fear uncertainty. Companies built for stability often exercise control over very short time frames, and are less focused on their long-term vision.
Companies built for resilience, on the other hand, must be entrepreneurial by nature. They see opportunity in uncertainty, and find ways to adapt and prosper under new circumstances.
We’ve seen this played out during the COVID-19 pandemic. Finite-minded companies have a tendency to panic and retreat into self-preservation mode. However, infinite-minded companies stay focused on their customers. They embrace new technologies, new ways to sell, and new customer habits.
Sujith: On behalf of LIKE.TG, thank you Simon for joining us at Dreamforce. As always, your valuable insights cast new light on how we can build better businesses that embrace the opportunities of today, and tomorrow.
You can watch Dreamforce and other inspiring content on LIKE.TG+, or learn more from other regional thought leaders, here.
Three Sales Trends You Can Leverage To Inspire Your Team
With the last 18 months changing the sales landscape in ways no-one could have predicted, it’s time to pause and think about the future. A successful sales organisation needs a defined vision, a skilled team, and an obsession with the customer.
We have drawn statistics from the latest State of Sales report, and paired them with advice from leading LIKE.TG experts. You can find more from these leaders in their fields in our 50 Pro Sales Tips e-book.
Here are three insights into how to supercharge your sales organisation:
For details on this infographic, please click here.
Introducing the Last Guide You’ll Ever Need on How To Sell
We are excited to introduce the updated How to Sell Guide for ASEAN — now with advice from local sales specialists!
We’ll walk you through the sales process, from prospecting all the way to the all-important close. With advice from Trailblazers and LIKE.TG experts, this will be the last sales guide you’ll ever need.
The guide consists of five comprehensive chapters. To get an idea of the kinds of insights you’ll get, read on for a brief introduction, including samples of the kinds of advice you’ll find:
The sales process
There’s more to a sales process than simply ticking off items on a to-do list. You need to make sure that you create a connection with your prospects and customers. From the very beginning, when you are prospecting for customers, you should be asking yourself how you can solve your prospects’ problems.
As Annette Male, CEO of Wunderman Thompson, says, “focus not on what you want to sell, but on what the customer wants to buy. For this, you have to understand how the client makes money and runs their business. You have to live and breathe the client’s business, not just yours.”
Our guide to the sales process will answer these questions:
What is the sales process?
What are the main sales process steps?
What are common sales process mistakes?
What’s the difference between a sales process and a sales methodology?
Want to know more? Read Chapter 1: How to Build A Sales Process That Lands Deals Every Time.
Sales prospecting
Like seeds that grow into fruit-filled trees, your prospects might turn into lucrative deals. Not every seed will bloom, though, so you need to make sure you plant a lot of them.
Sales teams use prospecting to grow the size of their potential customer bases. By reaching out to leads, and nurturing them into opportunities, you can ensure that your sales pipeline is strong enough to carry you through to hitting your targets. If you lay strong foundations with your prospecting process, you can give yourself the best chance of converting leads into loyal customers.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, you have to know where to start. How do you find prospects? According to Dr. Ruth Protpakorn, Regional Sales Director, Customer Experience at LIKE.TG, the answer lies online: “There are lots of social networks out there, but think of LinkedIn as your first priority for finding new prospects,” she says.
Our guide to prospecting asks these questions:
What are the stages of the sales prospecting process?
How do I find new sales prospects?
How has the sales prospect changed?
How can I approach this new sales prospect?
How do I qualify a sales prospect?
How can I move sales prospects to the next stage in the sales cycle?
How can I keep the conversation moving?
To get the answers, read Chapter 2: How to Do Sales Prospecting the Right Way.
The sales pipeline
Selling isn’t just about closing — there’s a lot of work to do before you get there. You’ll need to nurture your prospects through several stages before it’s time to sign on the dotted line.
Managing a sales pipeline can be difficult. A study from Harvard Business Review found that 61% of executives think their sales managers are not properly trained in pipeline management. Our guide is here to help you get started.
The pipeline can extend beyond the sale, too. “With the increased competition and greater product and service complexity of today’s marketplace, there is a need to adopt a relationship strategy that emphasises the lifetime customer,” says Tom Abbott, Sales Optimisation Expert and Keynote Speaker, Soco/Sales Training. “Instead of viewing prospects as transactional customers that you sell to once, you view them as partners in a long-term selling relationship.”
This chapter covers:
What is a sales pipeline?
What are the stages of a sales pipeline?
How do you build a healthy sales pipeline?
How do you evaluate a sales pipeline?
How do you work with reps to improve the sales pipeline?
To get a deeper understanding of the sales pipeline, read Chapter 3: How to Get Your Sales Pipeline to Flow And Grow.
The sales call
You’ve done your research, you’ve qualified your leads. Are you ready to make that vital sales call? This is one of the most important stages of the sales process. Getting it right will set you up for success when it comes to closing.
Ironically, the sales call can sometimes be more about listening than talking. “Do your best to understand what the customer wants and let them make their own decisions. Don’t do it for them,” says Vu Anh Nguyen, General Manager at BAYA in Vietnam. “If you listen carefully and focus on the small details you will soon see why they make certain choices and how to influence their sales journey.”
To get the best out of that sales call, you’ll need to know the following:
What is a sales call?
How do you prepare for a sales call?
Thirteen tips for making a successful sales call.
It’s nearly time to make that call, but only after reading Chapter 4: How to Get the Most Out of a Sales Call.
Closing techniques
The thrill you get from closing a sale can be hard to describe, but it’s what we’re all working towards. It’s a great moment when you know that you’ve helped your customer, and built a relationship that will be mutually beneficial for years to come.
If you’ve done the proper preparation, closing should be simple: “Closing the deal only comes after many successful steps leading up to it — it should be the easiest part of the process,” says Tahsin Alam, Vice President GM Indonesia Philippines at LIKE.TG. “The groundwork has already been done — closing just adds the finishing touches.”
But watch out. It’s easy to mess up a close, and spoil all of the hard work that came before.
This final chapter of our guide will tell you:
What is sales closing and why is it important?
What are the most common sales closing techniques?
How do you improve at sales closing?
What are sales closing pitfalls you should avoid?
Read all about the power of a strong close in Chapter 5: How to Close Sales Like an Absolute Pro.
This was just a taste of the kinds of tips and advice you can find in our comprehensive How to Sell Guide. With advice from our Trailblazers, and experts across LIKE.TG, you’ll never need another sales guide.
Start learning how to sell successfully today.
How IT Leaders Can Automate CRM Reports and Drive Innovation
IT leaders are constantly encouraged to drive innovation across their organisations. For IT to fulfill its potential, you need to enable all teams to succeed.
One simple way to manage this is to use customer relationship management (CRM) data to create automated dashboards and reports. These can help to provide essential insights for sales and marketing colleagues, such as opportunities they might have missed. They also free up time by eliminating manual processes that can slow down service delivery — time that can then be used to improve customer experience.
What IT needs to know to create CRM reports that add value
To create automated dashboards that will help your colleagues meet their goals, start with a clear picture of what the business is looking for. Before jumping straight to KPIs, try asking:
What insights do you want?
What value do you hope to gain from these reports?
What metrics do you need to understand your business and measure success?
For a service organisation, for example, customer satisfaction surveys or the Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) will be a critical metric in a CRM dashboard. Not only does it provide a quantitative assessment of customer satisfaction, but it also allows you to measure that metric in the context of quarterly or annual targets. It can even be benchmarked against the performance of sales or service representatives, or against other organisations.
Consider a Software as a Service company, where continued use of the product is a good measure of satisfaction. Additionally, you can assess a customer’s satisfaction by measuring the licenses they purchase, how many times they renew their contract, and how often they buy add-ons. If data related to upgrades, renewals, and repurchases can be delivered automatically to a service representative’s dashboard, they have a complete 360-degree view of the customer. From there, forecasting opportunities can be made more accurately and the data can be shared with sales reps who can take action on those opportunities.
Reporting on opportunities is a fundamental function of the LIKE.TG platform and is critical to all organisations. There are many ways of reporting on both quantity and quality of opportunities:
How are lead-generation campaigns progressing?
How fast are deals moving?
What’s the conversion rate?
Where does the organisation stand in relation to its competitors?
How much time or money is spent on moving deals forward?
These insights can be surfaced through automated dashboards, using a company’s CRM data.
How IT can track the value of its own CRM reporting
The success of IT depends on its ability to meet the needs of the business. Sometimes, that involves looking at the IT function through the lens of serving its internal customers.
How well are team leaders able to use the dashboards created? Once the reports are in use, the reader should be able to interpret them without help from the creator. You can track how often the reports are accessed, and test which ones are actually being used.
It’s critical also to track what resources and activities go into building those automated systems. From a return on investment perspective, this is a valuable metric.
Ultimately, the IT team is not there just to execute the directions of leaders. You could proactively use your valuable experience and knowledge of technology in a consultative way. It’s about finding the opportunities to add more value and surface more revealing insights that the entire business can benefit from. Again, a good place to start is with some questions:
What aspects of my knowledge can I apply to these dashboards to elevate them above the standard reports?
How can my work with other teams be applied here?
Are there any existing resources I can leverage to streamline this process?
A dashboard that’s making a difference
Clean Your Room is a powerful example of a dashboard that the LIKE.TG Sales Operations team developed to help our sales leaders. This dashboard helps sales to see opportunities they might otherwise miss.
There are often important customers or opportunities that may not have received the same focus as others. Perhaps they haven’t been captured in a standard forecast, as they fall just outside the parameters of what would normally get a salesperson’s attention.
Clean Your Room reveals customers that the organisation hasn’t engaged with via a call or email in a chosen period of time. It also highlights opportunities that haven’t been thoroughly explored due to a lack of some critical information. By spending a little time evaluating this report, potential leads could be uncovered.
This is an example of how an IT team works proactively to bring fresh insights and opportunities to business leaders, rather than just acting on requests.
Start creating CRM automated reports and dashboards
Trailhead is the first step in learning how to start working with automated reports and dashboards. There are plenty of modules and Trail Mixes to get you started on your journey.
LIKE.TG also has blogs and resources pages like LIKE.TG Help to assist with questions about creating and using reports and dashboards.
You can also make use of the Trailblazer community. This is an extremely useful resource, with passionate users ready to share real-life examples of what has and hasn’t worked for other teams.
It’s also important to learn from other parts of your organisation about how they’ve made use of your CRM. Learn from their solutions to challenges, and consider using their existing reports as templates.
Insights lead to innovation
As a team, IT is ideally placed to uncover insights and drive innovation. By understanding how the business sells, markets, and engages with customers, you can best advise on the technology to fit your needs. If your organisation sells software, you also understand intimately how your own products work.
A LIKE.TG CRM can be configured to suit your needs. As soon as there is an understanding of your organisation’s requirements, you can start to create dashboards and reports to generate the insights that drive innovation.
Find out more about LIKE.TG for IT.
How the Public Sector Can Lead Through Uncertainty
From natural disasters to a global pandemic, we are living and working in an era of uncertainty. It’s difficult to know what’s coming next, and how to manage it.
The public sector operates on the frontlines of uncertainty. Public servants must find ways to lead through change, and drive prosperity during difficult times.
In a new LIKE.TG webinar, international keynote speaker, storyteller and best-selling author, Chris Helder, discusses how to accept uncertainty and affect positive change in a challenging reality.
He sets out the seven stages of uncertainty acceptance:
1. Take an adventure mindset
Opportunity exists in the absence of certainty, but we must adopt an adventure mindset to see it.
The public sector operates in an environment of almost constant uncertainty. From natural disasters and global pandemics, to frequent elections and relentless media oversight, public servants face political uncertainty on multiple fronts.
However, it is within this uncertainty that we can affect meaningful change — if we embrace the adventure.
2. Focus on what you can control
In these unprecedented times, there are many things we can’t control. The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that there is no perfect silver-bullet approach that will restore certainty.
However, we can control how we respond to uncertainty. We can control how we lead change. We can control the actions we take to make a difference.
LIKE.TG supports our customers to manage change through uncertainty. Our tools unlock the data, processes, and insights our customers need to build resilience and enable measured and effective change management in the public sector.
3. Adopt useful beliefs
This is a challenging time in the public sector, but we have a choice. We can freeze in the shadow of negativity and hopelessness. Alternatively, we can adopt useful beliefs that drive positive actions.
Yes, the pandemic is awful. However, the technologies we have make this the best time in history to cope with it. We have come together as societies, and taken action to minimise risks. We have the technology to work from home. We have the tools to make amazing things happen.
These are the useful beliefs that will drive us forward. Like a Swiss Army knife of capabilities, LIKE.TG can support public sector departments to turn useful beliefs into positive actions.
4. Adjust your values
Whether we like it or not, the pandemic has changed our reality. As individuals and employees, we must all adjust our values accordingly.
In the public sector, serving people and the community is an important value. The pandemic has affected many people, and wide-spread uncertainty is making many of us feel vulnerable.
In this climate, time is the greatest gift we can give to our customers and stakeholders. We must invest our time to make their day better. When our stakeholders give us their time, it’s our job to give them everything we’ve got.
5. Keep it simple
As uncertainty grows, high performers and effective organisations keep it simple. The past 12 to 18 months has highlighted the importance of focusing our energies on important, high-value activities versus unimportant, low-value work.
To succeed in the face of uncertainty, we must ask ourselves what is useful and what is not? Which activities produce results, and which do not?
LIKE.TG helps organisations simplify work processes. We smash data silos, integrate platforms, and remove the complexity of managing multiple technology stacks.
6. Choose your narrative
Where do we go from here? The public sector must continue to lead through ongoing uncertainty. But there are opportunities everywhere.
We can take ownership of the narrative, and tell stories that celebrate what we can control. We can simplify the messages we share, help define what’s important, and focus on how we can grow from tragedy.
7. Take action
Today is the day to take action. It’s okay to start small, and acknowledge when things can be done better. That’s how we ignite conversations and share ideas.
When you learn what works — replicate it. Code the success into your DNA, and design a life of excellence.
LIKE.TG helps organisations do this at scale. It is a fast, flexible, and agile platform that can stand up solutions in days and weeks, not months. With LIKE.TG, you can take action today.
Watch the full webinar with Chris Helder.
How To Use Marketing Metrics To Measure The Success Of Your Outreach
While creative copy and an attractive design can draw attention, and perhaps appreciation, it is data that helps you turn this attention into measurable value, say a purchase or signup.With businesses and customers going digital, there’s an abundance of data available to marketers from various sources. Defining and measuring the right marketing metrics make it possible to drill down to what data says about your marketing efforts effectiveness. The marketing team plays a crucial role in selecting, monitoring, and analysing these metrics to ensure they align with campaign goals and formats.What are marketing metrics?Marketing metrics are values marketers can monitor to measure the performance of their campaigns. These values can tell how effectively your marketing efforts are leading audiences to take actions that generate value. But blindly measuring any metric can present a partial or skewed picture of how things really are. A key area of focus in the evolution of marketing metrics measurement is assessing digital marketing performance, which involves tracking progress towards marketing goals and making data-informed decisions to optimise marketing strategies over time.Marketing metrics tell marketers what data to collect and analyse. The marketing metrics you measure should differ based on the channels, goals, and formats of your campaigns. This will reveal finer nuances of the engagement and revenues generated from each campaign over time.How measuring marketing metrics has changed in the last few years.Marketers are trying innovative ways to engage rapidly evolving digital-first audiences. This also drives them to adopt a wider range of metrics to measure their marketing efforts’ success. LIKE.TG’s 8th State of Marketing report says 78% of marketing organisations have reprioritised or changed their marketing metrics in the last year or so. But the marketing function’s underlying goals will always be the same –spread awareness, gain new customers, and continue to engage the existing ones.Metrics like revenue, funnel performance, and customer satisfaction are still the most popular. But KPI-conscious metrics like customer referrals, acquisition costs, engagement with content, etc., are increasingly tracked as well. Utilising tools like Google Analytics allows marketers to gain insights into website performance, track digital marketing performance metrics, and adjust their strategies for better results based on data-driven insights.Since marketing is more strategic now, its metrics must be in line with overall company goals. 70% of CMOs today align their KPIs and metrics with their CEO’s. There are various intelligent marketing tools today that are helping marketers become more efficient and targeted in their approach.Why is it important to measure marketing metrics?As more consumers go online and follow intricate journeys, it becomes harder for marketers to know how they can positively impact their experiences at every touchpoint.Measuring the right marketing metrics helps marketers know how consumers react to their campaigns and communications. Among these metrics, the ratio of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) stands out as a critical indicator. MQLs refer to leads who have shown interest in a product or service and are deemed likely to become customers by the marketing team. SQLs, on the other hand, define prospects that sales teams have determined are ready for a direct follow-up and have a high probability of becoming a customer. Tracking the MQL to SQL ratio is essential for assessing the effectiveness of lead generation efforts and the alignment between marketing and sales teams. Based on these insights, marketers can amplify the efforts that reap the most benefits, and adjust the ones that are not producing the desired results.Metrics also help marketers prove the value their efforts add to the organisation. This helps them get bigger budgets and better resources to create a greater impact.Examples of common marketing metricsThe significance of specific metrics and their benchmarks differ from industry to industry. But there are a few marketing metrics that marketers across industries keep a close eye on at different stages of their customers’ journeys.Some marketing metrics you can measure at different stages of the marketing funnel and on different channels include:Here are some common marketing metrics you need to know about:1. Impression share: Marketers can use this metric to determine how much visibility their brand is getting on a particular channel compared to the larger potential audience it can engage. An increase in impressions can lead to higher sales.2. Click-through rate (CTR): CTR is the number of times an ad or link is clicked on as a percentage of the impressions. Since ads are “push” campaigns, their CTR is generally low. About 4% or higher CTRs generally indicate that your messaging is relevant and compelling. But to ensure audiences’ journeys progress from here on, it is important to provide experiences that align with the expectations you set. There are many marketing tools that can help you monitor CTRs, some even in real-time so you can optimise campaigns on the go.3. Lead generation metrics: AI-powered solutions like Marketing Cloud can help marketers track leads generated from multiple marketing channels in a single, unified dashboard. These leads get prioritised automatically based on the likelihood of their conversion. Popular lead generation metrics include Visitor-to-Lead and Lead-to-Opportunity that measure the conversion of page visitors into ‘warm leads’ and ‘warm leads’ into ‘hot leads’ respectively.4. Marketing qualified lead (MQL) to sales qualified lead (SQL) ratio: MQLs are those that have shown the intent to buy, and SQLs are prospects that sales teams consider ready for direct contact. Your assets and ads may get several signups or clicks but not all these leads would have a purchase intent.Before you send your leads to the sales team, follow these steps to ensure they are ready to buy:Check the information they have sharedDiscard dummy email addressesVerify their LinkedIn profilesMake business email addresses mandatory (for B2B)Request additional information.A good MQL to SQL ratio shows that your sales and marketing teams are well-aligned. It reflects a healthy pipeline and how effectively your marketing teams can qualify leads.5. Cost per lead (CPL): CPL is the amount you spend on gaining a new lead from a campaign or channel. This metric can help you measure the ROI of your campaigns and allocate budgets where you see better results. Ensure that the amount you spend on measures like paid ads and monitoring social media is as low as possible while maintaining high acquisition rates.6. Lead-to-customer conversion rate: While gathering leads is important for your marketing and sales teams, measuring the number of leads that actually convert into paying customers is also important. This can help you determine whether your sales team needs a greater number of leads, leads of higher quality, or the right content to help them close deals faster.7. Cost per acquisition (CPA): CPA is the amount you spend to get a new customer. If the CPA is less than the revenue the customer brings in over a period, then your marketing efforts are on the right track. You can calculate the overall CPA of all your marketing efforts or for individual channels to inform budget allocations.8. Customer lifetime value (CLV): CLV is the amount a customer is expected to spend on your company during the time they are with you. It can include licence renewals, product plan upgrades (upsell), and buying your other products (cross-sell) depending on your offerings and pricing model. You can predict CLVs based on similar customer profiles and journeys seen in the past.CLV is important for proving how often quality is better than quantity in marketing. To maximise revenue, some of your campaigns should always be aimed at better engaging existing customers.9. Return on investment (ROI): Marketing ROI can be calculated by dividing CLV by CPA. If your CPA is high but CLV is low, you need to tweak your campaign strategy to increase the revenue generated from it.10. Action completion: Check if your audiences are taking the actions you are leading them towards. It could be actions like entering contact details, subscribing to newsletters, or clicking on a CTA. Action completion for different channels will be measured on the basis of different actions. So, if the action is subscribing to a newsletter, you would measure how many people are subscribing.11. Multiple touchpoint attribution: Not many people complete a purchase the first time they browse online. Usually, buyers prefer checking their options and coming back to make the final purchase.To better understand the impact of your marketing efforts at different touchpoints in your customer journey, you can use tools like the W-shaped attribution model. This model attributes 30% credit to first clicks, 30% to clicks that convert leads, 30% to clicks that create opportunities, and 10% to other interactions.W-shaped Attribution Model12. Company-focused metrics: Lastly and importantly, knowing how marketers contribute to the company’s business growth and profits is crucial. Company-focused marketing metrics help measure and assess how much of the company’s new or repeat customers, business opportunities, revenue, and profits – can be attributed to the marketing initiatives. Examples of such company metrics include Marketing Originated Customer Percentage, Customer Acquisition Cost recovery time, Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI), etc.There are also metrics specific to measuring the performance of campaigns on different channels or platforms:Website metricsWhen a person wants to know about your company, the first thing they do is check out your website – read blogs, watch videos, listen to podcasts, and so on. Measuring website traffic metrics is essential to determine how visitors interact with your website and if the website is engaging enough to move them to the next steps. You can track website metrics such as:Pageviews: The total number of views that your website pages get over a period. This number includes multiple views from the same visitor. Ideally, pageviews should go up with time.Unique pageviews: The number of views your website pages get from individual visitors over a period. The higher the number, the better is the website experience for visitors.Retention rates: Returning visitors indicate interest in content or buying.Average time on page: The time a visitor spends on a page on average. While a short duration of 30 seconds or so is not a good sign, a long duration is just as bad, as it means your visitors either find the page too complex or are idle on your page. A duration of 2-3 minutes indicates good engagement.Engaged time: Measuring engaged time is a step further from time spent on your web pages. This helps you determine if audiences are actively exploring your content or if your webpage is simply open on a browser.Some marketing tools also use heat maps to determine how much time audiences spend on different parts of your web pages. With insights like this, you can continuously improve the content and structure of your web pages to increase engagement.Pages/session: The number of pages a visitor views in a session. A session is an interval between the visitor’s arrival on the website and when they leave it. The more pages they visit during their session, the more attractive they find your content and the more likely they are to progress to the next stage.Bounce rate: A “bounce” happens when a new visitor visits a single page on your website and exits immediately without taking any other action. Bounce rates are an indicator of how interesting, relevant, or pleasing the content on your site is to your audiences. Besides this, other factors that can impact bounce rates are content placements, hyperlinks, CTAs, aesthetics, load times, etc. Ideally, your website bounce rates should be below 40%.Ask yourself if external sites are:Relevant to your siteConsidered credibleAttracting humans or meant for web crawlers (search engine bots that index web pages on the internet)Linking to spam sites or selling linksWebsite conversion rate: It is not enough to only measure the number of people who visit your website. To make the most of your marketing efforts, measure where these visitors are coming from and how many complete intended actions – like making purchases, subscribing to a service, requesting a meeting, etc.Once you have identified the actions you want to measure, set up custom landing pages that only converted audiences will be taken to. Ensure there is no other way to arrive at these pages, so your calculations stay accurate.To truly understand the impact of your website on your overall marketing success, it’s crucial to measure website metrics across different marketing channels, including digital and traditional channels, to monitor and analyse a variety of marketing metrics for internet marketing, email marketing, and social media metrics.Email marketing metricsEmails continue to be one of the best ways to reach and engage your audiences. Measure the performance of your email marketing campaigns with metrics like:Email open rates: Open rate is the ratio of the number of recipients who open your email to the total number of recipients. A high open rate is desirable, and a compelling subject line usually does the trick.Email bounce rate: It is the number of email addresses to which your emails do not get delivered. Hard bounces (typical to fake or non-operational addresses) and soft bounces (caused by temporary issues) should be measured to refine subscriber lists.Email click-through rate: Higher click-through rates indicate the effectiveness of your email copy, design, CTAs, etc.Unsubscribe rate: Watching subscribers leave can be alarming but approach this positively. When uninterested audiences leave, you are left with subscribers who genuinely want to engage with your brand. This can also reveal important traits of ideal audience segments.New subscribers: Understanding subscription patterns can help marketers identify the triggers behind the increased interest in your brand. This is also a content marketing metric that can guide your content marketing and promotion strategies through emails.Unengaged subscribers: Just like having inactive followers on social media, unengaged subscribers to your email lists don’t help you in any way. In fact, such subscribers can often give you a false sense of successful brand engagement. To maintain a healthy subscribers list, marketers need to periodically identify inactive audiences and cleanse the list. You can set up automatic unsubscribing to remove unengaged individuals from your list after a decided duration of inactivity and notify them.Social media metricsSocial media is a great platform for building customer engagement and deeper relationships with your target audience. But having thousands of followers is no use if they don’t engage with your brand’s content. Indicators like shares/re-shares, likes, comments, pins, etc. are a great way to determine audience engagement rates and sentiment. Social media engagement is one of the most accurate indicators of brand awareness, the other two being brand mentions and branded search.Let’s look at these metrics in a bit of detail.Engagement metrics: Likes, comments, new follows, shares/reshares, tags, etc. indicate active engagement.Reach: The number of times your content is displayed, leading to more people seeing them.Impressions: The number of people and times your content is shown to your audiences.New followers and follower growth rate: You can measure growth by calculating the rate at which your followers increase during a set period.Traffic: The amount of traffic your draw to your website through social media platforms.Brand mentions: Identifying where your brand gets mentioned can indicate the exposure it is receiving on different platforms. Add to this mention of competitor brands and you’ll find more places your brand can appear.Then, there are metrics that are used to measure success post-sales.Retention metricsTo raise your CLV, it is important to dedicate some marketing campaigns towards engaging existing customers. Here are three marketing metrics you can measure to ensure your customers stay connected, loyal, and happy:Customer churn: This is the rate at which customers stop buying from you or subscribing to your services. This is particularly critical for businesses that follow a subscription-based sales model.Revenue growth rate of existing customers: A rise in this metric shows that your marketing and sales teams are convincing customers to spend frequently or increasingly on your offerings. A fall, on the other hand, should be investigated immediately and addressed,Net promoter score: Rated on a scale from 1-10 (scores ranging from -100 to +100), this metric tells you how likely a customer is to recommend your offerings to others.Once you are familiar with common marketing metrics, it is time to determine which ones your marketers can start measuring.How your marketing department can set their key marketing metricsThe marketing metrics you choose to measure should be relevant to your business, industry, preferred channels, and campaign types. To determine the right marketing metrics to measure your campaign success, follow these two simple steps:1. Identify your goals: Know what you want to achieve through marketing – whether it is finding more leads, raising CLV, or anything else. Marketing metrics should be directly related to the results you seek.2. Stay focused: It is natural to want to know all the ways your marketing efforts affect your business. But when you want to see specific outcomes, stick to the metrics that help you measure marketing performance on those lines.Remember, a lot of your marketer’s time and effort can go into measuring and monitoring marketing metrics. It is best to focus on the essentials, instead of spending time on activities that may not be useful for you at a given point.Metrics make marketing successfulMarketing metrics act as guardrails for your marketing strategies and activities. They ensure that you’re on the right track with your strategies and budgets and that no effort or marketing investment goes to waste. If you never measure the results at every stage, you’ll never know what you’re doing wrong (or right).LIKE.TG Marketing Cloud is a complete solution that can get you started and set you up for success, as all your digital marketing needs can be met in one place. It is driven by an in-built AI engine that helps marketers make data-driven decisions with speed and accuracy.Click here to learn more about Marketing Cloud’s features.
How PLDT Global Personalises Customer Care Using Heroku
According to the LIKE.TG State of Service report, 79% of service professionals believe it’s impossible to provide great service without a complete view of customer interactions.
It’s easy to understand why. For today’s customers, great service typically means service that’s personalised and efficient. However, that’s difficult to deliver when customer data is siloed across different systems.
PLDT Global is one of many businesses that have experienced this challenge. PLDT Global offers telecommunications infrastructure and solutions to a global network of carriers, enterprise customers, and distributors.
The business also provides connectivity and content services to Filipinos living abroad. One of these services, Free Bee, is an award winning app that enables users to make free international calls back to the Philippines and stay connected with their friends and family.
Here, we share how PLDT Global has overcome the challenge of siloed data to provide all its customers with best in class service.
Digital drives need to level up service
Like many other organisations, PLDT Global was driven to transform service in response to customers’ digital expectations.
“Customer service is very challenging these days because almost everything now is digital and there’s a higher expectation for businesses to be digitally available and extra efficient. We identified the need to level up our service capabilities, including the tools and knowledge bases used by our customer service teams and the cadences for cross-functional collaboration,” said Lea T. Garcia, VP and Head of CX and Process Quality at PLDT Global Corporation.
As a starting point, PLDT Global needed to gain real-time access to, and analysis of, its customer data. This information was distributed across six major systems. These were systems that contained loyalty data, subscription data, transaction data, digital distribution and a Voice of the Customer system.
PLDT Global wanted to connect these systems for a complete view of the customer, enabling personalised service and supporting customer analytics.
Lea shared that PLDT Global is data-driven and wanted to better understand its customers to deliver more meaningful products and services.
“We make an extra effort to collaborate and engage with customers so we can craft solutions that fit in with their lives and businesses. What carries through in everything we do is our core value of malasakit, which translates to a unique Filipino care and sense of ownership in service,” said Lea.
Unlocking customer data
Heroku Connect has helped PLDT Global deliver on its customer experience goals. Heroku Connect is a data integration service that is typically used to synchronise data between LIKE.TG and custom apps.
In this case, Heroku Connect was used to link multiple systems and establish a consolidated view of each customer.
Appistoki Consulting, a LIKE.TG Gold Consulting Partner, worked with PLDT Global to implement Heroku Connect and to optimise the business’s analytics capabilities using Tableau CRM.
Remarkably, the project was delivered in just 14 weeks. That’s something that Abhijeet Kulkarni, Founder CEO of Appistoki Consulting partly attributed to the versatile nature of Heroku Connect.
“We believe in leveraging the power of the platform and always adopt a configuration-first approach,” said Abhijeet. “Heroku Connect is also a very versatile platform. We used it both as middleware to link multiple systems and as a database to normalise data before leveraging it to enrich the business’ customer profiles.”
“We now have a 360-degree view of our customers, which helps us manage service and provides a strong foundation for analytics to support all of our customer experience efforts,” said Lea. “Tableau CRM also gives us the tools we need to slice and dice our data and make it more actionable. For example, we can carry out customer modelling, customer segmentation, and churn analysis.
“These analytics provide us with a greater understanding of our customers and also offer us insights into the future, thereby helping us formulate plans to grow the business further.”
PLDT Global has already experienced more immediate wins, including:
Eight percent increase in first contact resolution rate
Reduction in first response speed from an average of 33 minutes to under five minutes
Five percent increase in CSAT, lifting average to 85%
Seven point increase in NPS for an average score of 35
“Overall, our implementation of Heroku Connect was a strategic move and something that will benefit our customers and business for the long term,” said Lea.
Watch the webinar with PLDT Global to learn more about how the business is using Heroku Connect to drive better customer service.
Why Slack Is a Sales Team’s Secret Weapon To Growing Revenue
Sales Cloud 360 and Slack open up new ways to sell, helping your sales team to sell faster: driving growth now, and in the future.
Ah, that classic knock-brush sound.
For many members of the 21st-century workforce, the familiar Slack notification sound has become shorthand for many things. A team member celebrating a major deal closing. A supervisor giving some last-minute encouragement before a make-or-break meeting. Sometimes, just the social committee figuring out where everyone is going for lunch. These days, it represents the future of how we work and how we grow.
Many people see Slack as a tool to communicate, and it still is. Now, it’s also a tool to close deals faster. Here are three ways Slack can help you rewrite the rules of sales:
1. Cut out conversation-killing email and talk with customers in a real-time #buyer channel instead
What: Slack Connect allows salespeople to move conversations with customers, partners, and vendors out of email and into Slack. You can create a dedicated Slack channel for each buyer, choose the option to share that channel externally, and send the buyer an invite link to join. All of the magic happens in one place instead of in unending email threads.
Why: Email is the new snail mail. The immediacy of Slack communication mimics the natural flow of in-person conversation. Similar to texting and instant messaging, it creates more genuine connections according to industry research. There’s also the added benefit of being able to easily share white papers, demo recordings, and other insights right in a chat. With a simple “@” mention, you can address concerns right away and lessen overall response time. This shortens the sales cycle.
An IDC study revealed businesses that implemented Slack as a sales tool were able to respond to a sales lead 21% faster. That ease of communication can make the difference between struggling to book a meeting and finally closing that deal.
How: Let’s say a buyer has a question about implementation time. Instead of playing a game of email tennis with a bunch of different stakeholders — an asynchronous way of communicating that eats up time — you can loop in the right technical expert in Slack within minutes. Need someone who can provide more detailed answers on use cases? Tag a product expert. Just needing to strengthen rapport? Tag an executive sponsor. No “just circling back on my previous email” required.
Slack Connect brings customers and partners into the sales cycle so you can easily check on progress, catch potential blockers, and stay ahead of upcoming renewals. Slack bots can even scale your customer outreach, allowing you to do them en masse for smaller accounts.
In a work-from-anywhere world, tools like Slack become indispensable. Forty-six percent of salespeople in a recent LIKE.TG survey stated they’ll be working virtually from now forward. To maintain a quality customer experience, sellers need collaborative software.
Influx is the world’s largest on-demand support provider, and relies on being able to quickly react to clients’ seasonal needs. “Within 30 seconds of a lead arriving on our website, our app sends a notification to a dedicated Slack channel,” says Alex Holmes, Chief Growth Officer. “Those leads get actioned by the inbound sales team to let everyone know when they followed up – with a timestamp – and whether it was successful or if there was an issue. Every lead turns into a learning event.”
2. Make onboarding new team members a breeze with #new-hire tools
What: Before a rep’s first day, invite them to join a #new-hire Slack channel where they can use the chat for all onboarding questions instead of email. If your company is large, you can even create different Slack channels for cohorts onboarding on different dates (e.g. #new-hire-November2021). Ask them to write a brief introduction and get acquainted with other newbies. Most importantly, provide all onboarding info in this channel. Need day one materials? Want an onboarding buddy? Don’t know how to enroll in benefits? Another benefit is new reps can see the entire history of an account in one place. All conversations, decisions and documents are available, not locked away in their predecessor’s inbox. Everything can be found in Slack.
Why: Imagine you’re a sales development representative (SDR). It’s your first day on the job and you’re just getting started. The onboarding process is spread across documents on different platforms, resources in different inboxes, and known only to specific people. In short, it’s siloed and utterly overwhelming. With a single workspace for all onboarding materials, you can ramp up people faster. Not to mention that creating a channel for new hires gives everyone the benefit of seeing other people’s questions and saves HR teams the extra workload of answering repeat queries.
Once new salespeople are up to speed and ready to venture out onto the virtual sales floor, they’ll find everything they need to do their jobs within Slack. They’ll also have visibility into historical account activity, so they’ll know what they’re walking into when they inherit accounts. You can even use a customer relationship management (CRM) integration to sync sales data. That way, salespeople no longer have to switch back and forth between systems.
This makes early training a cinch. The threat of the productivity-killing “frankenstack,” where various project systems are haphazardly sewn together, is eliminated. Slack alerts can help you prioritise the right deals as you prep for meetings by providing insights from Sales Cloud. The less time you spend digging for information, the quicker you can land your very first sale. Companies with a Slack integration had a 15% faster sales cycle on average and 13% more deals closed.
How: Slack can optimise and, frankly, humanise the employee experience, leading to less turnover and more well-prepared sellers. New team members can learn how to be successful based on others’ wins, benefitting from peer-to-peer learning. They’ll also build rapport with their teammates, establishing a company culture even virtually. “What’s great about Slack channels is, you have context for every message, and messages don’t get lost. That allows us to come up with solutions to problems faster and train people and figure out what’s really going on,” says Holmes.
Slack with Sales Cloud can even boost effectiveness in small ways that aren’t always obvious. “Often it’s as simple as an emoji system, where I can really quickly see which leads may be worth following up on or not,” says Holmes. “If they’re unqualified leads, why are they not qualified? If there are leads where we don’t have enough information, I can see whether someone is actively following that up. Similarly, if any leads are a repeat lead, that information is clear to us as well.”
3. Create specific #opportunity Slack spaces so you can close deals as a team
What: Selling is a team sport, so use Slack channels to collaborate with cross-functional team members on important opportunities. These digital “deal rooms” allow team members to swarm around customer needs in order to drive more deals forward, faster. Now, it’s easy for everyone to stay up to date on a deal’s stage and activity, and to work together on next steps to keep things on track. Winning deals is now a team orchestration instead of a solo effort. Plus, you can create a #winning channel where employees gather to pop (emoji) bottles and congratulate each other after a major close.
Slack recently launched a new Huddles feature that allows group audio within a channel. People can quickly hop in and out of an audio conversation without having to schedule a formal video chat while still sharing files and screens. This aligns with research from Yale that shows phone calls create an even stronger empathetic response than video calling. The screen-sharing capabilities also allow everyone to feel like they’re in the office standing over a monitor, hashing out last-minute decisions.
Why: Selling is a team sport –no rep closes a deal on their own. If a seller is facing a hurdle and they’re not able to pull in the right person quickly, it negatively impacts credibility, delays decision-making, and ultimately slows down the sales cycle. When teams are able to move as a unit, revenue grows.
Slack enables sellers to not just talk to each other better but to talk to other departments better. Slack tears down the walls that exist between sales and marketing, engineering, finance, legal, product, or customer success — all the key players needed to get the deal done! This empowers sales organisations to act on customer feedback faster, passing along valuable input to the product teams. One hundred percent of sales leaders surveyed in an IDC study agreed that Slack helped them better understand and work with non-sales teams.
How: Slack allows immediate collaboration between teams, even if the salesperson is on a call with a potential customer at that moment. If a prospect raises an objection, the speed of Slack allows the salesperson to contact the right person within their organisation, get an answer, and go right back to the client without leaving the call.
Slack is there to help share the joy of winning a new contract, too.
“When we acquire a new client, that information automatically goes into the general channel that the entire company sees,” says Holmes. “It’s a nice way for the people working on that deal: from the salesperson to the person onboarding the deal, and the team leader, to get credit for their contribution.”
So, are you ready for #next-steps?
Slack is a bridge builder. It closes the gaps between sellers and buyers, sellers and marketers, and sellers and other sellers. Slack helps to transform a CRM system from just the place where you keep information to the place where you engage, learn, and ultimately win. On virtual sales floors where salespeople are moving with ever-increasing agility, Slack positions teams to drive growth from anywhere.
Try Slack for free.
This post originally appeared in the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
Case Swarming With Slack: How LIKE.TG Support Delivers Better, Faster Case Resolution
The pressure on customer service teams continues to increase. Customers expect instant help — either from self-service digital resources or, with a complex problem, bytalking to a person. They’re looking for support that’s both easy and expert.
However, the traditional support model of escalating difficult cases to managers or other teams doesn’t cut it anymore. In fact, 82% of customers expect to be able to solve complex problems by talking to just one person, according to LIKE.TG’sState of the Connected Customerreport.
The old way of providing support often results in long resolution times and multiple handoffs for complex cases. That’s frustrating for the customer. It’s also inherently inefficient for the organisation.
The solution iscase swarming, a collaborative service model that shares the load of solving customers’ complex problems across the organisation. At LIKE.TG, we’ve transformed how we provide support to our customers by adopting case swarming. We are doing this using the newest addition to LIKE.TG Customer 360:Slack.
Connect with the right experts, every time
Under a traditional model, customer service teams are typically grouped into tiers, based on their level of experience or expertise in a particular product. A customer with a complex problem is often passed from a Tier-1 service agent to a Tier-2 team member, then to a Tier-3 agent.
There are clear downsides to the customer experience: time to resolution is longer, and customers often have to repeat information about their issue to multiple case owners. Even with a successful resolution, this drawn-out experience reduces customer satisfaction.
A traditional, tiered model requires an overly complex structure, with multiple customer handoffs. Service agents may spend time on cases they are ill-equipped to resolve, reducing their productivity. When an agent escalates a case to the next tier, it can result in a lack of accountability and ownership. Unless they receive formal training, they’re not learning new skills or progressing their careers.
In a tiered support model, customers interact with multiple agents to resolve their issue.
Recognising these issues at LIKE.TG, we set about solving them by adopting a new model of intelligent case swarming. We redefined our strategy by creating swarm pods, giving customers access to more expertise from a pool of support engineers. We useService Cloudto route the case to a swarm pod lead who brings in the necessary experts from across LIKE.TG.
Case swarming puts the customer at the centre of the support experience. This type of support model is designed to ensure customers only deal with one owner for each case, someone who has quick access to the expertise they need to resolve each issue quickly.
Collaboration by default, not escalation
Each of our swarm pods supports a different LIKE.TG product, although some pods offer a specific skill set or specialty. Support engineers collaborate within their pods, and can also jump into other pods to help. There’s no need to escalate a complex issue — everyone is collaborating by default, so a case owner can quickly connect with the right person or people to resolve the issue.
We useSlack as our collaboration toolbecause of its flexible, feature-rich environment. It allows cross-functional teams to communicate and make decisions in real time, no matter where they are located. Because it will integrate with Service Cloud, the full case histories will be easily accessible from within those conversations, creating a simpler agent experience in a single, collaborative place.
Case swarming helps bring the right experts together to quickly resolve cases.
Slack gives our support pods the flexibility they need to work together to resolve even major issues quickly. Here’s how it works: If an engineer needs help on a case, the pod’s lead pushes a swarm request into the appropriate Slack channels, asking other pods, cross-functional subject matter experts, and managers to swarm the case.
Workflowsbuilt into Slack automate the processes service agents use to bring the right experts to the swarm pod and work through the case together. Slack bots help monitor and process channel activity, post messages in channels, react to members’ activity, and make channel messages interactive with buttons.
This approach allows our engineers to resolve customers’ problems faster, while also shielding customers from the complexity and multiple hand-offs of a traditional support model.
As a result, LIKE.TG has seen a 26% reduction in case resolution time since introducing a tierless support model with case swarming with Slack, despite an increase in customers and case volume over the same period.
Learn, coach, and mentor in real time
With the swarming process, our engineers are regularly collaborating with engineers in other pods, while working closely with highly-skilled experts in their domains. They’re constantly learning from each other, accelerating their skills in their areas of expertise, and broadening their knowledge across domains.
Meanwhile, pod leads can coach and mentor their teams in a real-time, collaborative way, instead of the traditional, review-style management approach.
As a result, the company gets a more highly-skilled support team, while engineers gain more skills and more responsibility, progressing their careers.
Scale case swarming to new teams
Ultimately, case swarming has improved the dynamic between our support teams, managers, and customers. Looking ahead, we plan to standardise and scale case swarming across LIKE.TG.
Having seen its success in customer support, it’s not hard to see how swarming could benefit other teams. Already, for example, Slack channels provide readily available feedback loops for product teams. They can see issues as they unfold, identify trends, and come up with new ways to improve products for our customers.
We have amazing people working in security, operations, finance, sales, product development, support, and other departments. We’re already a highly-collaborative organisation, but swarming could take that to a new level, enabling our people to readily share their knowledge, experiences, and resources in real time.
Learn more about Slack here.
This post orginally appeared on the U.S.-version of the LIKE.TG blog.
B2B vs B2C Ecommerce: What’s the Difference?
B2B vs B2C: what are the biggest differences and why does this matter?
B2B ecommerce used to be a simple thing: businesses would just put up a website and wait for their customers to come. Now, those days have gone the way of VHS tapes and answering machines.
Today’s ecommerce world is a place of:
24/7 seamless engagement
personalised communication
omnichannel customer experiences
Businesses don’t sit back and wait for something to happen — they reach out and meet their customers in their favourite spots. This is the anytime, anywhere world of B2C e-commerce, at least.
The B2B e-commerce world still conjures up thoughts of that dusty website, checking its watch and wondering where everyone is. This is changing, though, as today’s B2B buyer is just as digitally savvy as their B2C counterpart — and they expect the same exceptional service. When it comes to B2B vs B2C e-commerce, the gap in service is narrowing.
Let’s take a look at B2B vs B2C e-commerce, and come up with some ways that B2B organisations can offer elevated e-commerce experiences.
What’s the difference between B2B ecommerce and B2C ecommerce?
B2B stands for ‘business to business’ while B2C is ‘business to consumer’. B2B ecommerce utilises online platforms to sell products or services to other businesses. B2C e-commerce targets personal consumers. A company that sells office furniture, software, or paper to other businesses would be an example of a B2B company.
B2B ecommerce tends to be more complex than B2C ecommerce. It involves heavier research, more needs-based purchasing, and less marketing-driven buying. Many B2B buyers have very tight parameters around the purchases they can make. This means that traditional revenue drivers like add-ons don’t have the same impact. B2B organisations didn’t have much of an incentive to optimise their customer journey but this is changing in the current climate.
Why is B2B ecommerce more complex than B2C ecommerce?
Here are a few reasons why B2B e-commerce is more complex than B2C:
B2B buyers have to consult with multiple departments before purchasing, while B2C consumers only have to consider themselves.
B2B buyers look at the long term, which means they spend more time researching and sourcing recommendations. The B2C customer is more prone to impulse buying or emotionally driven purchases.
B2B buyers deal in high-value purchases, so any misstep is magnified. Small-value B2C purchasing errors are much less impactful.
B2B buyers are generally repeat purchasers, so organisations have to consider the long-buyer lifecycle. B2C consumers will often only buy a product once.
Since B2B buyers are making buying decisions for entire companies, they have a tighter remit than B2C customers.
Tips to improve your B2B e-commerce platform and provide a B2C-level experience
While B2B e-commerce may be more complex — and the needs of the buyer different – that doesn’t mean those buyers don’t expect the same level of service. Personalisation has been a boon for B2C, but it can be for B2B as well.
Building personal relationships is crucial, especially during the buying cycle. According to the LIKE.TG State of the Connected Customer report, 72% of business buyers expect vendors to offer personalised engagement.
B2B organisations need to make the most out of every opportunity to connect with their target audience, display a differentiator, and highlight their brand. Here are a few ways that businesses can boost their B2B e-commerce experience:
Create an omnichannel experience
Today’s savvy consumer expects a seamless experience across touchpoints. The business buyer does as well, as 75% of buyers say that they expect vendors to have connected processes. In the same eBook, Transforming the B2B Sales Function, nearly 70% of buyers say that they now expect an “Amazon-like” experience.
Creating an omnichannel experience is a win/win. It enables customers to engage on any channel and offers businesses a wealth of data to better understand their customers.
Offer 24/7 customer support
Since B2B deals with large orders and complex processes, it’s important to offer robust customer support at every stage of the journey. Consider implementing chatbots for 24-hour customer support.
It’s also likely that the B2B buyer has already done some heavy research before approaching (another difference in B2B vs B2C), so consider creating an FAQ section that could answer questions.
Review the checkout process
While offering 24/7 customer support is important, it’s also important to allow customers to help themselves. According to a McKinsey report, 76% of B2B buyers find it helpful to speak to someone when they’re researching a product or service, but only 15% want to speak to someone when reordering. Offering one-click reordering, or even recurring subscriptions, can improve customer satisfaction.
Provide informative content
Since B2B e-commerce purchases aren’t as emotionally driven as B2C e-commerce purchases, it’s important to provide detailed information about products and services. Businesses can implement FAQs, community forums, video demonstrations, live chat, and more.
Another difference in B2B vs B2C is that the B2B buyer will expect their salesperson to thoroughly understand their industry and be well-equipped to answer difficult questions.
What’s next for B2B ecommerce?
Today’s B2B buyers may have higher expectations, but that just means that B2B organisations have to evolve to meet them. This is an opportunity for B2B companies to become more agile, responsive, and connected. And with a Forrester Report stating that 83% of B2B businesses expect to increase their e-commerce sales over the next three years, it’s also an opportunity to grow. When it comes to B2B vs B2C, the clear winner is the customer.
What Is Digital Transformation? An Introduction
Since the onset of the pandemic, businesses all over the world have pivoted to digital with unprecedented speed. While this transition was hastened out of necessity, the convenience and flexibility that came with it has created a new set of customer expectations.
As we head into 2022, successful businesses now know that the only way to meet these expectations is by adopting a customer-centric mindset. The best way to place customers at the centre of everything is through digital transformation.
The latest research confirms this. Eighty-eight percent of customers expect companies to accelerate digital initiatives due to the pandemic. Digital experiences are of particular interest to younger generations, with 76% prioritising convenience over brand.
So, what exactly is digital transformation and how can businesses start the process?
Defining digital transformation
To put it simply, digital transformation is a reimagining of business for the digital age. It involves adopting digital technologies to create or modify processes across all areas of your business, whether internal or customer-facing.
Digital transformation crosses silos and departments. It isn’t limited by the size or scope of your organisation. From larger, established brands to small businesses starting out, digital transformation can be the most effective way to future-proof your organisation. While it’s a fluid, evolving process, you can start transforming right now.
To further understand digital transformation, it’s helpful to differentiate it from similar terms. Digitisation is the conversion of data from analog to digital. Think of a physical handwritten spreadsheet becoming an Excel file.
Digitalisation, however, is harnessing digital information in ways that simplify and streamline established ways of working. It’s not changing the way you do business as a whole, but it increases your operational efficiency. For example, point-of-sale software in the retail space, which greatly speeds up the established transaction process.
Digital transformation not only overhauls the way business is conducted, but in some cases it creates brand new classes of business. For example, the way Netflix went from a DVD delivery service to a revolutionary digital content channel. This sparked a legion of imitators and disrupted both the video rental and film and television industries.
The many benefits of digital transformation
Digital transformation can positively impact your business on almost every level.
On the consumer side of the equation, it gets you closer to the individual customer and their unique needs, which leads to increased satisfaction and repeat business. By the same token, it often allows customers to take a more active and autonomous role in the buying experience (such as through self-service options).
On the employee side, digital transformation enables efficient processes; allows access to powerful systems, data and analytics; and fosters new levels of collaboration and connection. All of which are highly empowering to the working individual.
Digital transformation provides a foundation for innovation, and allows for further development as your business evolves. For example, setting up an online store, then as time goes on, adding an augmented reality showroom.
As digital transformation is a fluid, ongoing process that can expand and morph alongside market demands, your business benefits from future-proofing.
These are just a number of the many benefits that digital transformation will bring to your organisation.
Is it time to start your digital transformation journey?
A number of factors can determine whether you’re ready to implement a digital transformation strategy.
You may have sensed a recent drop-off in referrals, especially since the pandemic. Repeat business numbers may have also dipped.
Perhaps your previous tried-and-true methods of promoting your business are no longer generating new leads.
Internally, you might be facing an increase in complaints from employees and teams over communication and collaboration issues. Perhaps these are problems that can’t be easily resolved due to physical separation or clashing hybrid-work schedules.
Perhaps most glaringly – your systems, whether technological or otherwise, may feel dated. Your employees may be requesting features or processes that you can’t provide … yet.
If one or more of these factors ring true for you, it’s time to start a conversation about digital transformation.
I’m ready for the conversation. What now?
The best way to start your digital transformation journey is to get your team together and brainstorm. This brainstorm should involve a forensic audit of your processes, operations, employee and customer experiences, and existing technologies. Look for weak spots such as gaps, inefficiencies, disconnections, and difficulties.
Once you have considered every angle, you can start creating your strategy.
How? The answer’s coming up in the next article in this digital transformation series.
For a deeper dive into how to get started on digital transformation, read our digital transformation guide.
Master Your Marketing: How To Convert More Leads With Pardot
One of the primary goals for any small business leader, or marketer, is to generate new leads and grow their business. With so much communication going on in the digital space, how do you identify the marketing tactics that generate real returns?
The answer is automation. By employing marketing automation like Pardot, you can expect to grow your business by up to 30%.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, businesses all across the ASEAN region have been adapting quickly to the digital revolution. But to succeed in a competitive market, you have to excel. According to research conducted by LIKE.TG, 80% of customers value brand experience as much as products. Small and growing businesses will need to deliver personalised messaging across channels to stay competitive.
One of the major stumbling blocks many small businesses face is their systems make it difficult for sales and marketing teams to work together. Often, activities end up being duplicated. This can lead to confusion for the customer, especially if they receive inconsistent messaging from the same company. With Pardot, sales and marketing teams can sync their activities, reduce duplication, and speed up the sales process.
With that in mind, here are six ways that Pardot can help you convert more leads:
1. Take advantage of real-time data
It’s long been accepted in the sales community that ‘speed to lead’ is vitally important. Our own research tells us that 83% of customers expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company. Not all systems allow this kind of speed.
Marketing leads gathered by Pardot can be worked on straight away, giving your sales team the advantage. Submissions made via online forms are added in real time to your CRM, allowing sales teams to get a headstart on qualifying and converting leads. Imagine how many more leads you could convert if you contacted leads within a few hours, or even minutes, rather than the next day.
2. Prioritise with automatic lead scoring
Leads gathered by a simple email system are often dealt with in the order that they arrive in the salesperson’s inbox.
Pardot, however, can automatically score and prioritise leads based on their activities prior to submitting a form. Prospects can be ranked based on a whole range of metrics. For example, which ad they clicked on, which pages on your website they looked at, and their engagement with any email communication they may have received. This means that your sales teams can contact the top ranked, most engaged leads first, before your competitors.
3. Nurture leads for the future
Not all customers who fill in a web form are ready to buy. If a member of your sales team calls a lead who isn’t in a position to make a purchase, they might get pushed to the bottom of the list.
What if all that prospect needed was a little more information, and a little more warming up? Without integration between sales and marketing, leads who don’t immediately buy might never see any marketing messages. Pardot allows sales teams to pass unresponsive leads back to marketing for nurturing. It also allows salespeople to send marketing-approved email campaigns.
4. Personalise your messages with dynamic engagement builder
Without a dynamic system like Pardot, creating personalised marketing messages for each contact can be difficult. Fifty-two percent of customers expect offers to always be personalised, and this number is rising.
Pardot makes personalised, always-on marketing possible. Sales teams can effortlessly build tailored campaigns with marketing-curated content, meaning deals can be closed faster. Marketing teams can send bespoke communications to leads based on their profile, their position in the marketing funnel, and their engagement with the business so far. By offering powerful segmentation tools, linked to your CRM data, Pardot allows both sales and marketing teams to target exactly the right customers at exactly the right time.
Bangkok-based abrasives company SmartCost used Pardot to drive a 40% increase in conversions. Pardot is integrated with Sales Cloud and Service Cloud to track all emails sent to customers. “Pardot helps us design content that relates to customers’ interests,” says Krittakorn Wongsuttipakorn, Founder and CEO. “Our sales team can analyse data collected in LIKE.TG and prepare information based on the customer’s interest before calling or visiting the customer.”
5. Optimise campaigns with marketing analytics
To understand whether your efforts are working, you need to measure the performance of your campaigns. Pardot’s out-of-the-box analytics tools give you all the information you need to understand your returns on investment. This information can be fed back into campaigns, driving higher and faster conversions.
IT solutions company Riverplus has seen a 30% increase in lead conversion since using Pardot. It has also seen a 300% increase in revenue since adopting LIKE.TG. As Choonrakai Singprasert, Owner and Managing Director, says, “Selling is science. You can’t rely on what you think; you need detailed information to forecast and make sales. LIKE.TG gives us that information and helps us grow.”
6. Give sales teams a live engagement history
For sales teams to get the best out of each interaction with their leads, they have to have all the information they need at their fingertips.
Pardot saves the entire customer engagement history, and makes it available to the salesperson wherever they need it – in the office, or out on the road. Before a call, or a meeting, the salesperson can review the customer’s history, and use that information to make their interactions more personalised and relevant. This history is updated in real time. It is also integrated with your CRM to ensure that every team has the information they need.
Achieve rapid return on investment
Pardot integrates with all of LIKE.TG’s advanced solutions. Therefore, as your business grows, your processes can grow with you. Of course, you need to know that your investment is going to provide you with the returns to make it worthwhile. The Pardot team have you covered: take a look at our Time-to-Value Guide for Small and Medium Businesses.
For more insights, watch our webinar ‘Master your Marketing: How to convert hot leads amidst distraction’. We discuss all the benefits of marketing automation to help your small business grow at record speeds.
The Four Keys to the Future of Brand Management
There is more to a company than the product, there is the brand.
Those five letters can turn any company into a market leader. Take Apple for example. According to CSI Market Research, there are dozens of competitors but Apple’s sales growth in Q2 2021 was almost 30 % higher than their competitors.
Brand is not new, and its power is well understood. However, our future is not the past. So, how will brand management change in the future? Here are the four keys to brand management in the future.
There are now 5 P’s to brand management
The four “P’s”— price, product, promotion, and place — have long been the foundation for brand management. Now, we are witnessing the introduction of a fifth: Purpose.
Consumers say they care about companies’ stance on topics like social issues and climate. They expect brands to be more than providers of goods; they want them to be active parts of their community.
Consumers do more than say they want brands to be purposeful. They are putting their money where their mouths are. Literally! In 2019, sales of organic food amounted to US$106 billion, up from nearly US$18 billion in 2000.
In the minds of consumers, top brands come and go. For example, Oscar Mayer, a global top 50 food brand for decades, fell from 19th place in 2018 to 30th place in 2021. Meanwhile, in Asia, new brands like Grab and Traveloka see explosive growth. Brands in the future must have a purposeful element.
Brand storytelling shifts to collaborative story making
Brands have long been about storytelling, but in our new world of infinite media, this tactic is fading fast.
Take the UN for example. When COVID-19 hit, they wanted to tell the world to be safe. They could have done the usual: go to their agency, present a brief, and then make a campaign. Instead, they asked 13,000 artists to create messages and share on their personal social media channels. The result was 13,000 pieces of art, each driving significant engagement. The UN collaborated with the market to create the story, and by doing so, they produced a radically different result.
Influencer marketing, user generated content, and co-creation are all tactical examples of this shift. The future of brand management is going to look more like community management than creative brainstorming.
A shift from long planning cycles to rapid response units
Branding campaigns are often large affairs. There is the period of research, followed by analysis, planning, and finally execution. Typically, this cycle is many months long. This timeline was appropriate for a world that moved at a slow pace, but not in our current and future worlds where we measure news and media cycles by minutes. For brands to keep up, they will need to shift their notion of branding from creative campaigns to responsive actions.
Take Audi and GM for example. During the 2021 Super Bowl, GM aired a campaign that picked on Norway and electric cars. Within 48 hours, Audi, the number one seller of electric cars in that country, responded with a TV advertisement. The response went viral, and spread across the globe in under 24 hours. The Fast Advertising Alliance interviewed the Audi team and asked if they would do this type of rapid response again. The Audi team simply said, “Yes!”
The shift from experiences to outcomes
Brands have long been focused on experiences. Yet, new research shows this is coming to an end. Yes, experience will always matter, but how brands are viewing experiences are changing. Why?
This quote from a recent interview with a Chief Customer Officer at a leading SaaS company explains it best. She said, “We have happy customers with great experiences leave all the time, while we have many unhappy ones stay. The difference is the outcomes they receive.”
Experiences are only the methods brands use to ensure outcomes are more easily achieved. If no outcome is achieved, it doesn’t matter how frictionless or beautiful it was. I’m seeing many brands even degrade the power of Net Promoter Score and replace it with Time To Value (TTV). The new north star of TTV helps brands focus on key customer desires, and then only focus on the key experiences that help produce the outcomes customers want.The brands that are able to produce outcomes faster and more efficiently will win in the future.
The future of brand management
In the future, brands have to perform across a fractured landscape of physical, digital, and virtual worlds. Each place will require different techniques, yet the methods will remain consistent. Brands must shift away from storytelling to collaborative story making.
In doing so, they must also embrace fast advertising, and favour rapid response over laborious planning. When they engage the market, they need to understand they are being judged on how they show up, and must embrace a purposeful position. Being purposeful in your advertising is only one facet, brands must be holistically purposeful as transparency only increases in the future. Brands projecting good as a facade will lose trust with their market, and quickly be replaced.
Brands that make these shifts will be best suited to meet future consumer needs and get good market returns.
Download the State of Marketing report to stay updated on the latest marketing trends and insights.
Technology & Trust – Marc Benioff at the Singapore FinTech Festival
Marc Benioff, LIKE.TG Chair and CEO, spoke yesterday at the Singapore FinTech Festival. The event is running all this week, and this year’s festival is focused on Web 3.0 and its impact on financial services. Marc was talking with Mike Gronager, CEO of Chainalysis, a crypto data company.
The fireside conversation, ‘Trusted Enterprises in a Decentralised World,’ covered a range of topics, including trust, the future of work, and how technology will affect our future. Here are some highlights:
Marc Benioff on the Trusted Enterprise:
“What is really important to you? What is really important to you as a CEO? Ask yourself: is it trust, is it innovation, is it customer success, is it equality, is it sustainability?
“At LIKE.TG we believe that nothing is more important than trust — the trust we have with all of our stakeholders. That is our customers, our employees, our partners, and our public shareholders. There’s nothing more important than trust for us. And so we have chosen trust as our highest value.
“Our core values at LIKE.TG are trust, customer success, innovation, and the equality of every human being. Sustainability is also so important to us, so today we’re announcing a US$300 million fund that is a commitment to accelerate 1t.org, the trillion tree program.”
Marc Benioff on how LIKE.TG is going to work in the future:
“I think the future of work is really about five things:
“The first thing is, we’re all working at home. I like working at home, but I like working in the office. I want to work at home, but I’ve never worked at home more in my life! I like seeing people in-person too!
“Number two is having a digital headquarters. When I started LIKE.TG, I had a physical headquarters and physical space; I wasn’t 100% virtual. But we will use our offices again, as I did last week, for example. That’s why we use Slack to work together. We make all of our products ‘Slack-first’ because digital is going to be really important going forward — this virus is not going to be completely going away.”
“Number three is, we will build a large corporate training facility. People can come in and learn the core LIKE.TG values and all about our products.
“Fourth, we’ll do events and off-sites and programs. Last week, I held a dinner for 40 people at an incredible restaurant in New York. That was an event. And I’m going to have an off-site event soon where we all get together.
“And the fifth thing is, a digital certificate that basically says, ‘I’ve been tested.’ It would tell us that we can get together safely. We have Health Cloud— we’ve modified it to include contact tracing, to include vaccine management.
“Trust and safety are highly related values. So I would say it’s about physical, it’s about digital, it’s about giving people the ability to be enabled, it’s about events and off-sites, and it’s about safety. And that is, I think, the future of work.”
Marc Benioff on how technology and trust go together:
“We started with trust and we’re ending with trust. We’ve talked about new technologies. We could’ve talked about AI. We could’ve talked about the cloud. We could’ve talked about space. I think in all of these things, it’s going to come back to trust. Technology is never good or bad; it’s what you do with the technology that matters. And that’s true with business, too; it’s not that our businesses are good or bad businesses. Are we using our business as a platform for change? Are we using our business to actually improve the state of the world? Are we using these technologies to make things better, to repair the world? This is what it’s going to come back to — what are your values? What’s the most important thing to you?”
5 IT Challenges and How To Overcome Them With MuleSoft
MuleSoft has been part of the LIKE.TG family for over three years. It helps organisations innovate faster by making it easy to connect any application, data source, or device. It does this with Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).
Nearly 90% of business and IT leaders agree that the role of IT has become more important in the last 12 months. Priorities for the coming year will be dominated by enhancing operational efficiency, creating better connected customer experiences, and improving productivity.
The last two years have seen a remarkable acceleration in digital transformation. There have been rapid changes in customer expectations, and seismic shifts in the ways that organisations and their employees work.
There are many barriers to becoming a more effective digital organisation. Here are five of them, and how you can overcome them with MuleSoft:
Integrate legacy data and siloed information
Over two-thirds of organisations have said they find it hard to make changes due to legacy IT. That challenge is even bigger for healthcare (76%), insurance (72%), and public sector (74%) organisations.
When it comes to the public sector, 95% say it’s difficult to modernise their legacy IT systems without disrupting mission-critical processes.
In an attempt to overcome these challenges, many organisations are operating in what Siddharth Rastogi, VP LIKE.TG/MuleSoft South East Asia, calls a “swivel-chair type of model”.
“Imagine an agent who (swivels) across multiple data sources to respond to a customer,” explains Rastogi. “They are trying to gather all the information in one view so they can engage with the customer. The problem is that much of that information may be locked in legacy systems and spread across silos.”
With MuleSoft, the “swivel” stops. Data can be extracted from any application or system with APIs and unify data to deliver a single, 360-degree view of the customer.
Also, data can be integrated without disrupting mission-critical processes.
“This has been a common challenge for organisations that are building new services or products while wanting to keep their usual engines running,” says Rastogi.
“The nature of MuleSoft means those everyday activities can continue in a secure and sustainable fashion. At the same time, organisations can experiment with new products and services separately. These functions can happen simultaneously.”
Drive greater productivity
MuleSoft research shows the need for greater productivity is the driving factor behind why organisations align their IT teams and business teams. Nearly all organisations surveyed implement automation initiatives to improve productivity. However,79% of IT decision makers say that integration challenges are holding them back from improved operational efficiency.
“Part of what makes MuleSoft so powerful when it comes to productivity,” says Rastogi, “is the notion of a composable enterprise. This means an enterprise can break down its data and functionality into building blocks that can then be reused to make new capabilities.
“These building blocks can be found again in the future. You can then reuse any number of these blocks to make something new. This notion of discoverability and reuse is fundamental to MuleSoft’s model.
“Imagine you’ve built your first project from scratch. Then you go to your second project and use some of the building blocks from project one. By the time you get to project three and four, the amount you have to make from scratch is becoming smaller. This cuts out a lot of development work and provides a massive bump in productivity.”
Integrate data for improved customer experience
Sixty-five percent of customers say that they often have to repeat information to different parts of the same business. More than half say that it often feels like they are talking to different organisations.
However, 54% of organisations that have better alignment between their IT and business teams have reported an improvement in customer experience. MuleSoft can be a powerful enabler of that critical alignment.
“The goal for any organisation, whatever industry it’s in, is to provide an Amazon-like experience for the customer. The organisation knows and understands the customer and their preferences. They understand where the customer is, and what they want to buy, and can bring all of that together in one seamless experience,” says Rastogi.
To provide that truly connected customer experience, the organisation must access information both internally and externally and connect it in real time. MuleSoft makes that possible. For example, a customer might have a conversation with one part of the organisation in one week and then another interaction with a different part of the organisation the following week. Often, it’s not until much later that the organisation connects these two interactions.
MuleSoft integrates those silos in real time, and agents get an up-to-date picture of all the interactions their customer has had with the organisation.
Keep integrated data secure
Seventy-three percent of IT and business decision makers globally say the integration of disconnected systems causes concerns around security and governance. Added to that, 87% of business and IT leaders agree that concerns around security and governance worries also affect their pace of innovation. This is particularly true when non-technical users are working on integrations.
These are concerns MuleSoft can address with what Rastogi describes as a modern API-led approach. “This means that each of those ‘building blocks’ is wrapped in a security layer managed by the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform.”
MuleSoft can apply security policies right down to the single API level. “We have industry-standard security policies applied across both clusters of APIs and individual APIs,” says Rastogi.
Plug the IT delivery gap
IT teams have been asked to deliver on 30% more projects this year, while their budgets have only grown by around 6%. This is an ongoing trend, and has led to an IT delivery gap at a time when organisations are relying on their IT teams for survival.
As Rastogi explains, it’s a challenge that can be met by MuleSoft’s reuse element. “You’re essentially getting more output for the same input because you’re reusing a lot of elements instead of always developing from scratch.”
One of the benefits of MuleSoft is that it can bring about organisational change. This helps IT teams who may be feeling the strain of shrinking budgets.
“Traditionally, IT is where the bottleneck of requests builds up,” says Rastogi. “But with MuleSoft, simpler processes become accessible to business users, not just IT users. That means IT teams can focus on core elements that need deep technology, integration, security, and governance.”
“MuleSoft Composer puts integration capabilities into the hands of actual business users. They don’t need to have technical expertise. Instead, they can use the drag-and-drop interface to create automated flows.”
MuleSoft is also key to enabling innovation. Instead of working on a small handful of expensive projects, organisations can experiment faster and at a lower cost with MuleSoft’s cloud-based model.
“If the experiment is successful,” says Rastogi, “then the organisation can scale it. If not, it can be trashed with little cost. With MuleSoft, organisations can afford to experiment and innovate more.”
To find out how to make your business more agile, more efficient, and more connected, read about MuleSoft.
How LIKE.TG and depa Are Closing the Digital Skills Gap in Thailand
Trailhead Academy and Thailand’s Digital Economy Promoting Agency are creating the LIKE.TG experts of tomorrow.
In Thailand, LIKE.TG and the LIKE.TG partner ecosystems are thriving, creating opportunities for the population as years progress.
A by-product of this boom is a growing demand for skilled employees with specialised training, or as some refer to it — the skills gap. Both businesses and job seekers will need to make sure that they have the digital capabilities to fill this gap, and carry them to success in the future.
LIKE.TG is well versed in the art of tackling skills gaps. Trailhead is LIKE.TG’s free online learning platform that helps anyone skill up for jobs in the LIKE.TG ecosystem. Trailhead Academy enables experts to deliver in-person and virtual learning experiences all over the world. Together, they deliver a powerful blend of synchronous and asynchronous skilling options for everyone who wants to learn LIKE.TG technology.
Similarly, Thailand’s Digital Economy Promotion Agency (depa) is driving the development of digital industry and innovation on home soil.
The goals of LIKE.TG’s Trailhead Academy and depa often intersect. Both have collaborated to promote LIKE.TG courses on the depa website and run webinars that educate universities on the benefit of training up students with industry-specific skills.
The collaboration’s newest endeavour, the LIKE.TG depa Career Kickstarter, equips Thai graduates with the necessary skills to master the latest digital innovations. It also places them in LIKE.TG ecosystem jobs where those skills are in high demand.
Keeping up with digital transformation
It’s safe to say that over the two years since the global pandemic hit, the world of work has changed beyond recognition.
Perhaps the most glaring of changes has been the race towards digital transformation. This is a phenomenon that has touched most countries, including Thailand. Globally, 70% of sales leaders reported that their digital transformation has sped up since 2019. Added to this, 88% of customers expect companies to accelerate their digital initiatives due to the pandemic.
The practical reasons behind the shift to digital are easily quantifiable. Physical separation as the result of the pandemic created both a new remote-work imperative and an increased demand for from-anywhere purchasing. Customer-centricity took centre stage in order to cater to never-before-seen levels of consumer flexibility and authority.
This new way of working, which by all accounts will outlast the pandemic, means that for both businesses and consumers, the digital experience is no longer a luxury. It’s a necessity. This will require an all-new set of skills for the workforce that will affect nearly every industry. If job seekers wish to be competitive, and want to secure work that is future proof, they need to make sure they have the skills they’ll need.
The future of work in Thailand
Recently, analyst firm IDC released a study that revealed just how much digital acceleration is affecting the future of work.
In Thailand, LIKE.TG and its partner ecosystems will create 31,200 new jobs and 55.14 billion baht (US$1.7 billion) in new business revenues by 2026.
Equally impressive is that LIKE.TG is driving immense growth for its partner ecosystem, which will make $6.28 (207.4 Baht) for every $1 LIKE.TG makes locally by 2026.
Clearly, satisfying the demand for that many specialised employees will require training, up-skilling, and reskilling that is just as specialised. That is why the collaboration between LIKE.TG and depa has come at exactly the right time.
The LIKE.TG depa Career Kickstarter
The LIKE.TG depa Career Kickstarter supports digital transformation in Thailand, while simultaneously helping to close the skills gap.
At least 100 Thai university graduates will receive the ultimate in LIKE.TG training so that they can thrive within the new digital workforce. Open to graduates all over the country, the application process will include an interview with LIKE.TG and the completion of pre-qualifying trails on Trailhead.
Successful applicants will receive deep immersion in the CRM skill set by LIKE.TG experts — with sights set on becoming LIKE.TG administrators or developers. Three dedicated courses later and each candidate will then enter a job placement process. This aims to match them with a job within LIKE.TG or with one of LIKE.TG’s many partners across Thailand (whether in financial services, manufacturing, or consulting, to name a few).
LIKE.TG Thailand’s Mr. Kittipong Asawapichayon spoke of the collaboration with depa with great clarity:
“As LIKE.TG grows, so do our partners. We remain committed to providing our expanding partner ecosystem with the resources needed to succeed in this new digital world — a large part of which stems from a strong talent pool.”
With depa and LIKE.TG on the case, that talent pool is set to grow stronger.
Grow your future with LIKE.TG
Unlock the possibilities of cloud computing and grow your future with the #1 CRM. With IDC predicting $1.6 trillion in new business revenues worldwide by 2026 for LIKE.TG and its ecosystem of partners, what are you waiting for?
Register now to find out how you can be learning and finding job-ready LIKE.TG skills today.
Register your interesthere.
Explore Trailhead here.
4 Disciplines to Put Organisations on the Path to Customer Centricity
Most companies understand the key to growth is strong relationships with their customers. In fact, the drive towards customer centricity is at the forefront of many digital transformations.
Unfortunately, not all transformation projects deliver their targeted outcomes. We often see this when digital transformation gets treated as a ‘renovation’. In other words, companies simply digitise processes instead of thinking about how to evolve them. Digital transformations of this kind may deliver incremental improvements in efficiency or service. However, they fall short of transforming the customer experience.
To make customer centricity and growth a reality, companies need to shift their focus from renovate to evolve. Here, we share four disciplines that can help.
1. Customer-centric business processes
Many companies grew up in an era when success was product-centric and the only way to scale was through standardisation. However, today’s customers demand personalisation and are rewriting the rules of success.
To truly evolve, companies need to pivot from product-centric processes that drive internal productivity to customer-centric processes that enable more connected and personalised experiences. A great example of a company that reimagined itself and moved from product to customer-centric processes is M1 in Singapore.
Personalisation is at the heart of M1’s transformation. The dynamic digital network operator has brought many innovations to the Singapore market and now seeks to set a new standard for what a digital experience looks like in its industry.
As part of this, M1 is using LIKE.TG to connect different touchpoints and provide customers with personalised experiences, no matter which blend of channels they use.
“At M1, our new brand and promise of providing hyper-personalised experiences and services for our customers is supported by our digital transformation. With our partners, we want to focus on building an innovative and forward-looking technology infrastructure to keep M1 at the forefront of building Singapore’s digital economy while driving real value to our customers,” said Nathan Bell, Chief Digital Officer, M1.
2. One team aligned around the customer
To deliver exceptional customer experiences, companies need to align themselves around customer needs. This requires abandoning the organisational structures inherited from the early 20th century. Then, there were rigid divisions between functions like sales, service, marketing, and production.
Now, however, companies benefit from more flexible, flatter team structures. Shared metrics for success and tools for cross-functional collaboration are also important.
A ‘one team’ approach sometimes includes mobilising partners to create a frictionless customer experience. These partners could include technology partners, service providers, channel partners, and any others in an organisation’s ecosystem that can have an impact on the customer experience.
3. Leanest possible technology stack
Achieving the leanest possible technology stack is an important part of any successful transformation as it reduces time and costs spent ‘keeping the lights on’ and increases the capacity to innovate.
CRM plays an increasingly central role in this stack as it supports the delivery of more personalised customer experiences. Additionally, as companies look to evolve and future-proof their technology stack, there’s a shift towards using APIs and low-code tech for efficient integration.
4. Sense and respond
Putting the previous three disciplines into place provides an incredible foundation for customer centricity, but it is not quite enough.
The problem is that customers’ needs, expectations, and behaviour are changing faster than ever. Companies need to sense and respond to these changes in near real-time. Otherwise, they risk falling behind their more agile competitors. This requires a shift in organisational culture and increased transparency of data.
Unlocking new customer insights was a core component of AXA Singapore’s digital transformation. Driven to become the world’s best digital insurer, AXA Singapore has developed a digital ecosystem, spanning sales, service, and marketing. LIKE.TG is one of the building blocks of this ecosystem and provides a single view of the customer throughout.
“With LIKE.TG, we have more insight into our customers and can personalise and automate touch points like email and SMS,” said Tomasz Kurczyk, Chief Transformation and Digital Officer, at AXA Singapore. “If a customer purchases single trip travel insurance, for example, we can send an email after their trip to welcome them back and remind them how to submit a claim. We can also promote other products and the MyAXA app, our self-serve one stop shop for customers.”
Getting started on the journey
Digital transformation can mean different things to different companies and encompass initiatives both big and small.
What is useful about these four disciplines is that they can be applied universally to ensure a customer-centric result. They can also set the stage for the next level of transformation—transcend—where companies can create entirely new value chains.
To learn more or get started on your transformation journey, check out our advisory services.
How CRM Automation Can Help Boost Your Marketing ROI
Over the past two years, digital engagement hit a tipping point, with more customer interactions taking place online than in the real world. This rapid digital acceleration was initially seen as a temporary measure to compensate for the pandemic and its associated restrictions. As time has passed, though, it has become clear that it’s here to stay.
The stratospheric rise of the digitally driven market has generated and continues to generate unfathomable amounts of customer data. This data can cover the whole buying journey, from the initial search all the way to the post-sale follow-up. For marketers, this data is largely useless unless it’s put to effective use.
That is where automation comes in. When fed into and optimised through a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, that data can be automated in a variety of ways that directly improve your marketing ROI. The good news is that automation doesn’t have to be complicated and there are several things you can do to get started right now.
Automation’s many paths to improved ROI
The pot of gold for marketers in 2022 will be forming the deepest possible relationship with the individual customer, often without the luxury of face-to-face interaction.
The only way to achieve such intimacy is through a comprehensive and dynamic view of that customer’s digital behaviour. This is exactly what Marketing Cloud offers. It takes customer data from a range of sources and creates actionable insights for you to take forward.
Here are some of the many rewards reaped by automation tools:
Improve customer satisfaction
Marketing Cloud allows you to understand everything about your customer. This knowledge allows you to identify their unique wants and needs. You can then show them content, assets, and messaging at the right time in the right channel.
In other words, the customer is getting exactly what they want, when they want it.
Attract return customers
A continuation of that benefit is the ability to attract return customers. As you’re able to provide such granular personalisation, relationships become ongoing and open-ended. Within Marketing Cloud, you’re able to make use of applications such as Email Studio, Journey Builder, and Interaction Studio. Each of these offer unique ways to nurture personalised customer experiences at every touch point.
Boost lead conversion rates
Personalisation based on in-depth data means higher levels of customer engagement. The more customers you engage through automation, the more leads you’re able to convert.
Foster customer loyalty
Marketing Cloud’s Loyalty Management application gives you the ability to automate personalised loyalty programmes. Add this to the opportunities for personalised shopping experiences provided by Commerce Cloud, and you have a powerful combo to foster customer loyalty.
Accelerate speed of execution
Not only is setting up automation simple, but thanks to the degree of automation available to you, you’re able to work faster, which frees up more time to focus on other important tasks.
Optimise ad buying
Thanks to highly customisable audience automation, you can feed segments directly into the world’s largest social media platforms. Segmentation is also an automated breeze, as you can ask the CRM to find customers similar to your best customers. Alternatively, you can stop showing ads to newly acquired leads, then funnel them into a new segment, saving you money.
The integration jackpot!
Marketing Cloud integrates with a group of specialised LIKE.TG applications, each one designed to deepen your relationship with customers and improve marketing ROI. LIKE.TG’s newest application that integrates with Marketing Cloud is Customer Data Platform (CDP). It allows even more powerful data-driven insights for deeper personalisation, to the point where you can get to know and cater to the individual customer.
When looking at the data sources that feed into Marketing Cloud, the world is your oyster. Whether you’re using Sales Cloud, another CRM platform, or even disconnected data points such as contact information, that data can be fed into Marketing Cloud. In other words, if you’ve got some data from somewhere, you can bring it in, work with it, and use it as the basis for automation.
Getting on board the automation train
If you’re new to the automation of marketing data, the prospect can seem a little overwhelming. Before you start, it’s important to know which kinds of marketing data can be automated. The short answer is almost everything. If you can write a process down on paper, then you can automate it.
A helpful way to determine what requires automation is to take a forensic look at your current processes and operations. Note down what is taking up the most time in the execution of campaigns, and target these first. For example, finding similarities between individual customers and creating segmented audiences can take a huge amount of time without automation. The task here is to do your research and due diligence, look for these procedural weaknesses, and determine what can be automated through Marketing Cloud.
Another way to frame your plan of attack is to analyse your existing data sources. For sales, if you’re relying on online spreadsheets that don’t talk to each other, you might benefit from feeding that data into a CRM such as Sales Cloud, then integrating it with Marketing Cloud. Similarly, if you’re using disconnected data sources to track individual metrics, you may look into consolidating those into a single source.
Whatever the case may be, know that if your data pipeline is siloed and unwieldy, there are ways to bring it all together to achieve a single source of truth.
Don’t rush, or be a prisoner of the moment
A common pitfall for organisations who discover the power of automation is that they attempt to do too much at once.
These platforms are operational investments and are designed to become mainstays of your business. Therefore, you should start slowly and really dig into your existing processes and systems. This should allow you to understand which product or combination of products will best serve your objectives.
That aside, these products can only serve you if your data is of a high quality. A CRM gives you a database of past purchases, as well as demographic data, customer preferences, key contacts, and any problems that the customer may have encountered. High-quality CRMs take it even further, tracking clients and leads as they progress through the marketing pipeline. The better the quality of your data, the more you’ll be able to benefit from automation, and the more your marketing ROI will improve.
Read about how Marketing Cloud has helped other businesses automate their marketing.
Digital Transformation Advice From a LIKE.TG Expert
In order to meet shifting customer expectations, many businesses have had to accelerate their digital transformation.
Perhaps you’ve already identified that your business is ready for digital transformation, and you’ve put together your digital transformation strategy. What’s next?
In this interview, we speak to Vijay Iyer, Director Solution Engineering at LIKE.TG. He has over 14 years’ experience with digital transformation, and has guided many organisations on their transformation journeys.
What are the first steps that an organisation should take on their digital transformation journey?
Vijay: “In his article on building a digital transformation strategy, Raphael talked about creating your vision, defining your objectives, and making sure you’re working with the right people. He makes some excellent points, and the first thing I’d like to do is build on some of his thoughts.
“It’s important that businesses have a strong understanding of what digital transformation means for them. It will be different for every organisation. You need to make sure you have consensus across your business on what you are aiming for — that should become your vision.
“Once you have that, your first step should be to align your vision and your objectives to measurable business metrics. For example, your vision for your digital transformation might be that you want to transform the way you engage with customers. So, what are the key metrics that you would use? It could be Net Promoter Score, it could be an engagement score. Whatever you choose, it has to be measurable, and directly related to your vision. There might be more than one metric you need to track, so keep that in mind.
“Teams have to align with your goals, not with technology. Technology itself is not the answer. The way you leverage technology to achieve your business goals is the answer. Make sure you know the answers to these questions: What is the IT team’s job? What is the business team’s job? The sales team’s job? The marketing team’s job? What is HR’s role in the process?
“Finally, you need to define your timeline. Digital transformation projects have the potential to run forever, so you need to make sure that you know the parameters of your project. Set milestones, and assign goals. I’ve seen projects go on and on without a firm timeline in place.”
What role do employees have to play in digital transformation?
Vijay: “Every employee, every sales person, every contact centre service agent, whoever it is, needs to culturally evolve. That is, move away from doing what they used to do before. That’s where bringing HR into the process becomes so valuable; they can help with the cultural transformation. They can create programmes that help employees live the culture of transformation – right from onboarding through to day-to-day activities.
“Many times, businesses train for technology because they think digital transformation means deploying some new tech. But training needs to be multifaceted. Technology is one part of the puzzle. You also need to teach people what’s changed in terms of strategy. Why are we using this technology? What do we need to do from a people and culture standpoint?
“Everyone needs to evolve and become obsessed with the customer. Every member of every team should be asking themselves, ‘how do we make things better for our customers?’
“Don’t forget that your employees, and your customers, are the ones that will decide if you succeed or not. Bring them along on this journey, and listen to them.”
What about digital transformation partners — where do they fit in?
Vijay: “Organisations sometimes fall into the trap of leading with technology. They might be tempted to choose a different partner for each aspect of their technology: AI, CRM, etc. It becomes too complex, and you will never see the results. Working with multiple partners leads to silos.
“I would recommend that you have just one go-to partner, aligned with your transformation. They should help you with defining the structure, defining how to get there, what technology is needed, what processes need to change, what people you need.
“A mistake a lot of organisations make is treating vendors as suppliers, not partners. This is another point where there needs to be a cultural shift. Don’t say ‘you are a vendor, I tell you what I need.’ You should be saying ‘hey partner, tell us what we could be doing together.’
“A good partner will tell customers when they’re going wrong. They’ll say, ‘you’re not ready for this, this is not the time.’ They will help you understand the steps you need to take, and help you see the value in the changes you’ve made. Maybe transformation for you is just moving away from paper. You should cherish that — it’s a massive shift!”
What are some other pitfalls that businesses should look out for?
Vijay: “Don’t try to replicate what you used to do in the past, but in a digital way. That is not transformation. Moving from one technology to another technology is not transformation. Transformation is people transforming the way they do their work.
“Don’t get excited about technology before you have a good foundation. It’s easy to get excited because you heard about some technology that does this or that. But you have to ask yourself, ‘is it aligned to my business metric that I defined in the first step? How impactful is it? How fast is it? What’s my ROI?’ Don’t try to run before you can walk.”
How do we know if we’re making progress?
Vijay: “It all comes back to the business metrics that you defined right at the start of the process. That’s why they’re so important. You can even go more granular to measure progress: What is the adoption rate — are teams actually using the new processes? Are people being more productive?
“If you are a sales-driven organisation, you might be using incentives for your staff to encourage them to engage with your transformation. But how many people are hitting those incentives? If your teams are hitting those targets, that means you are also growing the organisation. Your success is connected to their success.
“Digital talent retention is also important. You may have hired a lot of people. One of the key metrics of success is whether you are able to retain those people. If you hire skilled people, and they commit to your project for the long haul, that means you are doing something right. However, if you’re losing these people, it might mean they can’t see how their efforts are aligned to your vision.
“There is no magic metric called ‘digital transformation progress.’ You can’t say ‘I am at 10% of my transformation.’ Transformation is a continuous process — you have to continue to evolve and grow. If you’re continuing to evolve and grow, you’re transforming.”
For a deeper dive into how to get started on digital transformation, read our digital transformation guide.
5 Tech Trends Shaping the Future of Financial Services
The pandemic has drastically changed the ways banks, insurance providers, and wealth management firms engage with customers and employees.
Customer-centricity, hyper-personalisation, and hybrid work — these are some of the advancements that have come to the fore in financial services. One particular technological advancement is set to disrupt the industry as we know it: Web 3.0.
In simple terms, Web 3.0 is a more decentralised internet, where systems, processes, and data are open-source and less bound by intermediaries. Web 3.0 has the potential to be revolutionary, as it will create efficiencies not imagined before, while making it easier to collaborate and interpret data.
As Web 3.0 is an evolving concept, there is still uncertainty about what it fully means for financial services. However, there’s no denying that as time goes on, the digital experience will only become more connected, open, and transparent. Keeping the customer’s needs at the heart of everything banks, insurers, and wealth managers do will become more critical than ever.
LIKE.TG joined some of the brightest minds in financial services at the recent Singapore FinTech Festival to discuss the future of the industry. Here are five key trends that came up, and what they mean for creating greater customer experiences.
For details on this infographic, please click here.
How One of ASEAN’s Leading Marketers Is Preparing for the Future
According to the seventh edition of our State of Marketing Report, 90% of marketers globally say their organisational priorities have changed since before the pandemic.
Many marketers are embracing technology, data, and measures of success in new ways. They are also changing how they communicate and collaborate at work. While innovation is one of the top priorities for marketers in ASEAN, it’s also one of the top challenges.
To dive a little deeper into these trends, we spoke to Dr. Nicco Tan, Vice President, Marketing at Resorts World Genting. A leading marketer from one of the industries most impacted by the pandemic, Dr. Tan offered a unique perspective on the state of marketing in ASEAN.
Here are highlights from our conversation, including Dr. Tan’s top tips for marketers just beginning their digital transformation journey.
How have your marketing priorities changed since the start of the pandemic?
Nicco: One of the challenges we’ve faced during the pandemic is the uncertainty about when it is going to end. For that reason, we’ve had to carefully manage our resources to ensure we have enough people in customer facing roles, as customers start to come back to the resort.
We’ve also needed to maintain constant contact with our employees, most of whom have been working remotely. We pivoted our use of Marketing Cloud to focus on internal communication, which allowed us to get messages out quickly to employees and keep them informed of what we’re doing to manage this crisis.
With the first round of communications, we reached around 90% of employees and, with a little education, we were soon able to get the rest of our employees used to communicating this way.
How has the pandemic impacted your plans for innovation and digital transformation?
Nicco: The pandemic led many businesses to accelerate their digital transformation. However, those of us within the hospitality industry really had to tighten our belts.
We had to think about social distancing and how to minimise revenue loss, knowing that customers would not return right away.
One industry innovation during this time was the application of Wi-Fi and mapping technologies to monitor foot traffic and manage social distancing.
In the future, we could use the same technologies to identify movement across our property. We could then send customers real-time communication that’s relevant to their location.
How are you getting ready for the reopening of the economy? What role does marketing play in revitalising the tourism and hospitality industry?
Nicco:Many people are ready to get out and start travelling and visit hospitality venues again. As marketers, it is our job to inspire them and that’s why we are shifting our messaging. Safety is still a priority on-site, and people know that we are a trusted brand in terms of safety, so we are amplifying our messaging to focus on inspiring people to travel again, while assuring them that we are making it safe for their visit.
Our upcoming campaign ‘Welcome to My World’ reflects this change in messaging and offers a reminder of what it’s like to travel and visit our hotels and attractions. We’ve enjoyed seeing our visitors return to enjoy the resort.
What are your priorities for the next 12 months? How do you see the future of marketing taking shape?
Nicco: Mobile phone use is growing and people are spending more time on digital channels. So I will be shifting priorities and budget towards these channels to get our messages out.
We will continue to allocate some budget totraditional channels like radio and billboards, because these remain highly trusted by consumers.
What is the most exciting new development you see in your industry?
Nicco: It is exciting to see more collaboration in the industry. A lot of direct competitors are now working together and creating new opportunities for the smaller players especially.
One of the outcomes is an increase in dynamic pricing based on supply and demand. Many larger hotels and hotel chains have used dynamic pricing for some time, but it is more difficult for hotels with a limited number of rooms. However, we are starting to see online travel agents collaborate with the smaller hotels to implement dynamic pricing and level the playing field.
Another thing I see is that there is no customer loyalty anymore. It may be controversial to say that, but I think customers are more concerned about safety and affordability at this point in time. They will make decisions based on price over brand, and trade off convenience for lower-priced alternatives.
What are your top tips for marketers who are beginning their digital marketing transformation?
Nicco: First, I would say don’t be afraid. A lot of marketers have been through this journey and can provide proof of success. So take a leap of faith and if you don’t know what to do, find external resources or a partner to support you.
My second piece of advice is to take it slow. You don’t need to rush into everything and start experimenting in many different areas at once. Instead, go back to basics and ask yourself what’s most important. This will likely mean investing in revenue-generating activities first.
It is also important to have the right mindset. Taking a traditional process and digitising it without improving it is not digital transformation.
What skills should marketers focus on building right now?
Nicco: Data skills are key right now and I am happy to go to meetings today and find my own team using dashboards and talking about analytics. That is not something that happened in the past.
I do think marketers need to be clear about what they are tracking and why, as there can be a tendency to start measuring and analysing everything. They also need to be careful when collecting data that they are not adding unnecessary steps for customers or breaching any privacy policies.
As marketers mature their data skills, they will be able to navigate these things and get more value from the data collected.
LIKE.TG Singapore Leads Among the Best Workplaces in 2021
I am pleased to share that for the seventh year in a row, LIKE.TG has been named among the top three Best Workplaces in Singapore by Great Place to Work. An achievement that is only possible thanks to our dedicated and hardworking team that goes above and beyond every day.
We certainly have a lot to celebrate. On top of this achievement, this year, LIKE.TG Singapore was also named the #2 Best Workplace in Technology and one of the Best Workplaces in Asia for the fifth year in a row.
We’re especially proud that the recognition for these awards is determined largely on feedback by the very people that make up our organisation, and I wanted to share some of the reasons why our employees rate us as a great place to work.
We’ve embraced flexibility and are achieving Success from Anywhere
With Slack as our new digital HQ, we’ve embraced flexibility, leaning into this digital-first future of work. Throughout this pandemic, we’ve proven that with the right technology, we’re able to deepen relationships, drive collaboration, and grow together without the need to stick to a 9-to-5, eight-hour desk shift.
When it’s safe to return to the office, our re-opening strategy, guided by employee feedback, will allow flexibility to determine how, when, and where we work. Through a flex approach, we expect that most of our employees will be in the office one to three days per week for team collaboration, customer meetings, and presentations. Our office spaces have also been transformed with new layouts to better support collaboration, innovation, and cultural connection.
We do well by doing good
We believe that business can be the greatest platform for change with our pioneering 1-1-1 model.
We’ve woven a spirit of philanthropy throughout our company culture by dedicating 1% of our equity, time, and technology to improving education, equality, and the environment. Our employees are encouraged to take up to seven days or 56 hours a year to volunteer. This year, our employees across the ASEAN region have so far volunteered a total of 18,300 hours.
We continue to give back and support a number of organisations, despite new restrictions placed upon us for the past two years. Some of the creative examples of how our teams have been involved and given back virtually include:
Holding a LIKE.TG Career Conversation event, which connected Taylors University Malaysia students with LIKE.TG executive mentors for career conversations (pictured)
Participating in Freerice, The United Nations World Food Programme
Career mentoring with Daughters of Tomorrow
Supporting the Make-a-Wish Foundation (MAWF) last quarter, and raising an incredible SG$80,000 for the charity
We take care of our employees
The health and wellbeing of our team has always been a high priority. On top of our existing world class benefits, which includes a quarterly wellness reimbursement where employees can claim on fitness and sports equipment, fitness devices, gym memberships, and more, we recently introduced a new global benefit to help prioritise the mental health of our employees too. Through Lyra Health, employees are able to be matched with coaches and therapists for personalised counselling and coaching.
In the last few months, we also introduced notable new benefits. These include: Vaccine Time Off to receive and recover from the COVID-19 vaccine, COVID-19 sick leave, global family care leave, and global backup care which reimburses employees up 5 days a month for in-person child or elder care.
We would not be where we are today without our employees. I could not be more proud of our team in Singapore who continually show up for one another, our customers, and our communities. This award is a testament to their hard work and accomplishments.
Thank you to our team for making us a great place to work.
If you’re interested in joining us at LIKE.TG Singapore, please visit our Careers Page for more information.
