Tag: CRM

Singapore – PRM Marketing Services (PRMMS) has announced that it is transitioning its business to focus on providing services concerning customer and channel partner marketing, including B2B2C, customer relationship management (CRM), partner relationship management (PRM), as well as incentives and rewards, to a more global focus.

Their global strategy will be focused on the markets of Asia-Pacific (APAC), Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA), as well as North America.

PRMMS is led by CEO JB Ray who has been spearheading its CRM and PRM business since 2003. Said transition marks a major milestone for the company in accelerating its loyalty and relationship marketing business independently which has been growing for two decades across APAC markets.

Speaking about the transition, Ray said, “Formation of PRMMS is a strategic move guided by innovation, growth and our ambition to be the disruptor in CRM, PRM and Incentives and Rewards category. We envision the future is about ecosystem led b2b2c solutions and we are not stopping until we help transform and enable the industry to be efficient and effective in managing customers and channel partners.”

As part of the transition, PRMMS has also confirmed several key management updates, namely Carolin Chan as VP for strategy and marketing, while Binesh George has been appointed as chief technology officer. Chan and George have been with the company for 15 years.

Speaking about his appointment, Chan said, “I am excited about PRMMS evolution and impacts we can bring to markets. I will be focusing to further enhance our capabilities, help our global clients expand to APAC and EMEA markets and strengthen our marketing activities, consistent with our business strategies.”

Meanwhile, George commented, “Technology has been our key enabler and I am looking forward to further accelerating the productization and transformation process of our solutions ensuring security, compliance and scalability needs of our clients.”

Ray further added, “The new organisation structure together with our strategic direction will allow us to develop innovative solutions and redefine how CRM, PRM and Incentives and Rewards will operate in the future in ecosystem led environments and bring strategic benefits to clients, partners and customers.”

California, USA – Global software company SugarCRM has recently introduced its new integrated ‘playbook’ functionality which allows support of guided selling and advanced CRM process automation. 

Through the new functionality, the no-code toolset enables business users to easily design, visualise, and automate sales, service and marketing processes. SugarCRM customers can create playbooks and templates for sales plays, sales methodologies, guided selling, service processes, lead nurturing and more.

Said functionality follows the recent acquisition of plug-in solutions AddOptify, a provider of guided selling solutions for SugarCRM customers worldwide. The solutions have aided SugarCRM customers through enabling mid-market companies to translate their customer engagement best practices into playbooks to optimise both the user and the customer experience at every stage of the customer journey.

For the company, the need for sales engagement technologies was accelerated by the pandemic and their use is increasingly becoming a key factor in defining and distinguishing high-functioning customer-centric sales organisations. 

Rich Green, chief technology officer and chief product officer at SugarCRM, said that the new functionality will allow customers to leverage proven playbook capabilities within the Sugar platform to streamline sales processes, improve marketing operations and optimize customer service execution.

“This empowers sales, marketing and customer success teams to boost buyer engagement, drive greater customer trust and satisfaction, improve win rates and increase revenues. It also reflects Sugar’s commitment to offer more no-code/low-code capabilities designed to put change in the hands of non-technical business users,” Green stated.

In the near future, SugarCRM plans to provide additional out-of-the-box playbooks and templates for processes including lead qualification, customer on-boarding, case management, troubleshooting and other human-in-the-loop customer interactions spanning the sales, marketing, and service realms.

Geneva, Switzerland – Banking software company Temenos has announced that Infinity Digital for Salesforce will be made available on their platform, which brings together the worlds of CRM, assisted channels, and digital channels onto a single platform. The solution will be available on Salesforce AppExchange, an enterprise cloud marketplace. 

Infinity Digital for Salesforce offers banks synchronisation between Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and the bank’s core banking systems. It helps banks achieve higher efficiency and streamlining of servicing, onboarding, and origination processes with better personalisation and greater customer experience.

This solution integrates Salesforce Financial Services Cloud with Temenos’ digital banking platform, giving customer-facing teams in banks a holistic view of their customers surfacing both customer engagement and transactional banking data across all channels and transactional systems. 

In addition, Infinity Digital for Salesforce enables banks to serve their customers with tailored offers made possible through relevant, complete, and accurate information at every interaction. Banks can integrate digital and assisted channels with their transactional system and create a unified platform across marketing, sales, servicing, and origination functions to give client-facing teams a complete and actionable view of customer interactions.

Max Chuard, chief executive officer at Temenos, said that they are excited to extend their leadership in digital by combining their open banking platform with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud in a single platform to help banks reinvent the customer and employee omnichannel experience.

“We are aiming to solve one of the most fundamental problems in banking today by connecting the worlds of CRM, transactional footprint and digital interactions. This go-to-market strategy will accelerate our penetration in the digital front office segment. We help banks with complex channel architectures by breaking down silos to reduce complexity and costs, and achieve customer-centric business transformation to provide outstanding customer experiences,” Chuard said.

Meanwhile, Eran Agrios, SVP and GM for financial services at Salesforce, commented, “We’re excited to see Temenos innovate with Salesforce Financial Services Cloud to help banks deepen their relationships with customers through hyper-personalised experiences. With Infinity Digital for Salesforce, customers can connect their core banking systems to their omnichannel experiences, delivering hyper-personalised experiences faster.”

As the usage of third-party data gradually moves out of the picture, this affects the way marketers approach industry disciplines, and this is across the board – from changing the way brands implement audience targeting and retargeting, the demands in order to keep every marketing funnel in optimum shape has greatly transformed.

David Harling, the former CMO and now the managing director of MoneySmart, enlightens us on one particular area – growth marketing. In an interview with Harling, he identifies the weak spots as well as strength areas of a brand’s growth marketing strategies now that the digital environment is about to fully transition to a cookieless and first-party data world.

Customer acquisition vs. customer retention

According to Harling, now that the industry is preparing to adopt first-party data strategies, the cost of customer acquisition will now increase, hence where brands are overly-dependent on gaining new customers, they must now shift the focus to customer retention.

“I think one of the main challenges that most brands are experiencing at the moment, and [something] we’ll find more challenging moving into a cookieless world this year is being too overly dependent on customer acquisition, and [not having] put enough focus into customer ownership, retention, and engagement,” said Harling.

This is true and in a particular study of SEA marketers by AppsFlyer, specifically in the area of fintech, it was found that marketers in the region spent over US$244m in gaining new users.

There is no complex reason as to why lessen the focus on customer acquisition other than continued dependence will make the “ability to grow to cost more.”

“And so clearly with third-party data going away, the targeting abilities and the ability to scale and grow customer acquisition will be more expensive. And so the overall unit economics mix of that in order to try and grow would be more challenging,” said Harling.

Balancing performance-based marketing and brand investment 

One of the challenges as well, Harling cites, in growth marketing presently is striking the balance between focusing on performance-based marketing and brand investment, where as of the present, there’s more focus on the former.

In relation to putting more attention to brands’ customer retention efforts, Harling says that it’s important, therefore, to reevaluate ad budget investment to performance-based marketing and brand investment as brands would need to double down on the latter in order to successfully keep and retain customers.

From an internal view, a qualitative study reflects Harling’s insight. According to a report by  NEON leaders, marketers are actually revealing their fears of losing a generation of strategic marketing leaders, all because of the heavy precedence on output-heavy and metric-based marketing.

“I think another big challenge is how do brands begin to be comfortable again with investing into their brand profile. Clearly, that’s harder to account for or to measure, but in terms of future growth, it’s so important to get the balance between performance-based marketing and brand investments,” shared Harling.

He adds that brands must take action despite brand and customer experience taking much more time and being a lifetime value discipline.  

“Being visible and driving awareness around products and brands is as important, but more challenging and difficult to measure. And again, it becomes more important as you move into a customer retention model,” said Harling.

Much like in a sense of doing the big things well so that the small things can take care of themselves–having a good customer onboarding strategy in place, Harling believes, is key, in order to fully make the focus on customer retention work. And effective customer onboarding can be achieved when marketing and user experience work in concert.

According to a recent 2021 study by Qualtrics, poor customer experiences cost businesses in Singapore US$11b annually, where it was found that 51% of customers in the market have cut spending after a single bad experience with a company.

“And so whatever user journeys or platform experience, or product experience you’re providing, you know, marketing and user experience need to work tighter. Once you have a good discipline to get customer onboarding, you’re making the efficiency of your customer acquisition costs stronger because you won’t need to recruit customers somewhere else,” said Harling.

Driving CRM and loyalty initiatives

Within growth marketing, Harling also shares his insights on the top strategies in successfully building CRM and loyalty initiatives. And he swears by the power of the basics –  understanding your customer better.

“Investing into good customer profiling and looking at the exchange of value that you provide to your customers in order to make them comfortable to provide you with certain things,” said Harling.

Certainly all the pivot in marketing disciplines will take place in accordance with the shift to a cookieless digital environment, and Harling believes that investment in tech such as customer data platforms (CDP) will be one of the best approaches as it puts more emphasis on first-party data as a strategy.

“CDP underpins that first-party strategy and drives good sort of contextual engagement, which again, allows brands to become more dependent or I guess grow their customer base and clearly grow their business based on retaining customers,” said Harling.

“The customer experience and customer relationship discipline – I think if you get that right, you have a good ability to profile your customers and get to know them, and I think your engagements in your CRM become more contextualized and more meaningful to get an outcome,” he added.

In addition, Harling also advises that moving forward, there will be much stronger need for the integration of marketing and product teams. While a lot of companies have jumped into the said unification, many are still not doing it right such as having disconnected KPIs and lack of common goals.

“There’s a lot of brands that say, hey, my product team is so integrated with my marketing team. And actually, if you look at it, it’s nonsense, right? And so this [needs] proper integration [and] accountability, and having common goals. I mean, you’d find a lot of these teams don’t have a joined-up or shared KPIs [and] they’re very separate in the way that they’re accountable,” Harling says.

Harling concludes that among targeted marketing strategies that brands can focus on at this period, it is starting to define their first-party data strategy that would prove to lay a strong foundation.

“And so I think any advice I could give any marketer moving into [2022] is really [to] get their heads around first-party data as a strategic driver, and really understand the relationship between good media activation of that data and also good customer onboarding,” Harling said.

He continues, “And then [figuring out] how do you use that data [to] profile your customers, and really begin to prioritize retention-based marketing, to grow your business. And I can assure any brand that takes that strategic direction, although it’s not easy, and requires a bit of time, you’ll find that you’ll grow your business based on good customer engagement.”

“Good loyalty in terms of customers coming back and driving repeat behaviors and repeat purchases – it will be less dependent on the cost of acquisition model, which I think a lot of brands are still strategically dependent on,” adds Harling.

This article is written based on an interview with David Harling, managing director of financial comparison platform MoneySmart.

The article is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series What’s NEXT. This features marketing leaders sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year. The series aims to equip marketers with actionable insights to future-ready their marketing strategies.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share with regards to the upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to have your thought-leadership published on the platform.

Singapore – Following the company’s recently-concluded event Refresh 2021, software company Freshworks has announced the launch of Freshstack, a customer relationship management (CRM) suite built for the unique needs of startups that unifies customer support, sales, and marketing teams. 

The product bundle helps startups personalize marketing to generate pipeline and deliver effortless omnichannel service for faster growth, at an affordable price point that’s easy to deploy and manage.

Said suite combines three Freshworks’ products: Freshdesk, Freshsales and Freshmarketer.

Freshdesk is an omnichannel customer support solution with a new unified inbox and collaboration functionality across support, sales and marketing teams, to help businesses resolve issues faster. Meanwhile, Freshsales is a unified sales intelligence solution with context-driven forecasting and pipeline management. Lastly, Freshmarketer is marketing automation software that enables AI-driven lead generation, email personalization and send optimization.

Speaking about the suite launch, Girish Mathrubootham, CEO and founder of Freshworks, said, “Startup founders should ensure that their developers are focused on building their core technology, not babysitting their CRM stack. From day one, Freshworks has built products that democratize access to modern, easy-to-use software. Freshstack builds on that commitment by helping the titans of tomorrow get going faster today.”

The combination of Freshworks applications helps give startups what they need to instantly get up and running with a CRM platform that attracts new customers, builds lasting relationships with existing users and scales as their customer base grows. Companies can get going with up to US$3,000 in credits for Freshstack, as part of the Freshworks Startup Program.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Multimedia broadcasting Astro has tapped customer relationship management (CRM) company Evergent, to activate monetization for its newest streaming service sooka, launched last June this year.

Through the partnership, Astro will use Evergent’s customer management and monetization tools to support registration and subscription management for sooka. Offering both free ad-supported content and subscription services, sooka unites live international sports programming with popular Malaysian dramas and entertainment programs.

For Euan Smith, chief executive officer of TV and group chief operations officer at Astro, the company’s mission is to provide Malaysians with entertaining and informative content, reaching as many customers as possible through the most popular platforms and devices.

“Through our partnership with Evergent, we are now able to offer multiple pricing options for our new sooka streaming platform while also retaining the ability to unlock new business opportunities as we scale the service. As a result, our customers can choose the pricing model and payment methods that best match their needs, allowing Malaysians to enjoy premium content and live sports anytime, anywhere,” Smith said.

Meanwhile, Vijay Sajja, founder and CEO of Evergent, notes that Astro’s new flexible monetization options, powered by Evergent’s technology, will now make premium content more accessible to millions of Malaysians.

“Through Evergent’s global partnerships, we are able to work together with the most innovative media and entertainment companies in each country or region. Astro is the market leader for Malaysian entertainment and a leader in Southeast Asia, and we are proud to help them further grow their business through the launch of sooka,” Sajja stated.

Sydney, Australia – Australian business leaders are stating their dissatisfaction with their current customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, new research by global software company SugarCRM shows.

According to the report, 49% of Australian sales professionals believe their CRM systems are costing them revenue, suggesting that sales leaders are struggling to ensure teams are spending enough time with customers and can access the data required to build and maintain these vital relationships.

Furthermore, the report shows that 52% of sales professionals in Australia believe that their CRM systems are unfit for purpose, while customer churn is costing mid-market companies an average of US$5.5M each per year. 

For Craig Charlton, CEO of SugarCRM, the recent data reflects the greater change in customer behavior, and businesses around the world are facing a customer relationship crisis.

“Sales teams are bogged down with administration and stuck with an inaccurate picture of the customer with little advance notice or insight into customer churn. These findings are a wake-up call for companies relying on the market-leading incumbents in CRM with software that is tuned to steady-state and known customer behaviors,” Charlton said.

The research also found that 53% of sales leaders are fatigued and frustrated with the CRM admin burden placed on their sales teams, which is taking them away from customer-facing activities. Indeed, sales reps are only spending 54% of their time selling. Furthermore, over half of sales reps in Australia (52%) reported their customer churn increased in the last 12 months, with 52% of respondents having trouble predicting when customers would churn. 

Lastly, upon reflection, almost half (48%) of those sales professionals reported not knowing why customers churned, while 50% of Australian sales leaders admit that they cannot access customer data across marketing, sales, and service systems, leaving customer-facing team members without a clear picture of their customers.

“The gap in customer data, the millions of dollars lost to churn, and the lack of insight, prevents sales and business leaders from acquiring the intelligence they need to make both vital strategic and tactical decisions. Companies that close the data gaps and improve the accuracy and completeness of their customer data, stand to improve retention, increase revenue, and gain more predictable business outcomes,” SugarCRM said in a press statement.

Singapore – Businesses in Singapore have shown a greater interest in improving their customer experience (CX) through various strategies, despite 2020 being a disruptive year for far-reach transformation, new report from customer relationship management Zendesk shows.

According to the Zendesk Customer Experience (CX) Trends Report 2021, Singapore businesses have witnessed a 22% increase in average weekly support requests, and nearly half of customers or49%, in Singapore say that experience is more important to them now compared to a year ago. Meanwhile, 77% of local companies – the second highest in the APAC region – say their organization prioritizes CX more than they did a year ago.

“We’ve seen companies in APAC embrace digitalization at an incredible speed this year in response to the dramatic shifts in the operating landscape they’ve had to navigate. Customer experience has never been more important, and we think this accelerated adoption of technology is likely to continue in 2021,” said Wendy Johnstone, chief operating officer for APAC at Zendesk.

The study’s recent statistics support data from IT service management firm Gartner that 91% of organizations said that CX was one of the primary goals of their digital business transformation efforts.

“Organizations need to ensure they have the right strategies, processes, and technology in place to empower customer support teams and drive business success,” Johnstone added.

Additional findings among Singaporeans include half of customers preferring to use embedded messaging when they engage with businesses, such as on websites or mobile apps, while one out of five managers (21%) and one out of four (27%) of agents state that they don’t have the right analytics tools to measure success for remote teams and work with it. 

In addition, 81% of Singaporeans are willing to spend more with a company that offers a good customer experience, which is the highest in the region. The report also shows that 83% of Singaporeans will take their business elsewhere following bad experiences.

“Facing continued volatility, service, and support, organizations must find ways to keep up with their customers. Customer experience leaders cited the ability to quickly adapt to the evolving needs of customers as their biggest challenge in 2020 and the highest priority going forward,” said Zendesk. 

Toronto, Canada – Customer experience (CX) management and customer insights platform Alida has recently announced a new slew of products and services, developed with direct feedback from their customers.

Alida’s initial product release for their Winter 2021 release is the Alida Video, which helps brands harness video to amplify their customers’ voices. Through Alida Video, brands can easily capture customer-recorded video feedback, uncover authentic, deep insights, and inform stakeholders and decision makers at the speed of business, all in a unified platform.

Meanwhile, enhancements to existing features include improvement to the platform’s deep insight feature Alida Sparq and broad feedback feature Alida Surveys.

With the improvements on the Alida CXM & Insights Platform, users can expect the following:

  • Hub Newsletter Redesign for brands to better engage their Alida Sparq insight community members and stakeholders with more visual and content-rich newsletters
  • Quotas for administrators to control the number of responses to a survey or a set of questions
  • Mobile Survey Image Enhancements to improve the respondent experience
  • Recodes & Rollups as an Early Access Program (EAP) for users to create new custom variables based on a dataset and analyze data from a different view

Included in the CXM & Insights Platform are also updates on Alida Touchpoint, including NPS® via Quick Polls, that enable organizations to keep a pulse check on brand perception. Brands can now place activities in mobile applications to engage customers with on-brand micro-surveys designed to collect contextual feedback.

“In today’s global climate, video has become an integral mode of communication to engage and connect with people. It is imperative that brands use it to humanize their customers’ emotions and glean accurate context, to put insights into action and build a great customer experience,” said Riaz Raihan, president of products and engineering at Alida. 

He added, “We are thrilled to provide our clients with the added value of video to deeply understand and analyze their customers by hearing and seeing them talk directly.”

Alida has also launched its FS Industry solution, specifically catered for the benefit of financial services clients. It has enhanced its CXM framework, with features such as ‘Case Management’ for case creation on the platform for customer follow up, ‘Data Lake’ for accumulating various organizational data sources in one platform, ‘Crosstab Analysis’ for checking survey data by various categories like demographic, and ‘Configurable Dashboards for Alida Surveys’ for creating a dashboard for Alida Surveys.

Alida, formerly known as Vision Critical, and headquartered in Toronto, Canada; has recently expanded its presence in the Asia Pacific. 

Singapore – Pan-Asian retailer Dairy Farm Group is leveraging its digital transformation strategies by adding API platform Mulesoft, CRM company Salesforce and data software company Tableau to its digital strategy platform.

An initial step undertaken by the retailer is launching its digital rewards club called “yuu”, wherein partner brands and coalition partners are integrated into the yuu platform to allow customers access and redeem points all within a platform.

“With MuleSoft, we are able to connect different systems from multiple brands using an API-led approach to roll out new services in a reduced timeframe. With an omnichannel customer experience across all our brands, we can better manage each customer’s journey and their preferred communication channels with Salesforce Marketing Cloud,” Crystal Chan, IT director for Dairy Farm Group said.

Aside from the digital rewards launch, Daily Farm Group’s current digital transformation strategies focus on the aspect of improving project delivery speed. The retailer will utilize API technology to further improve point of sale (PoS) and e-commerce systems that will create synergy between its online and offline channels. Furthermore, the APIs can be also used to provide new customer experience strategies such as providing curated content, news, and promotions.

The yuu rewards club rolls out to key markets Hong Kong and Macau, where the retailer holds about over 10 household brands in more than 2,000 stores.