Tag: Customer experience

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – SleekFlow, the Hong Kong start-up that provides an omnichannel social commerce platform to companies, has announced that it will now be expanding its business to SEA markets Malaysia and Singapore. This follows its recent funding that has raised a 7-figure MYR in a Pre-A round investment from Gobi Partners China (Gobi), the investment manager of Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund (AEF).

SleekFlow helps companies manage communication channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, as well as Line and Live Chat, among others, through an all-in-one social messaging platform. It helps streamline sales, customer support, and marketing workflows while integrating with over 2000 tools, including e-commerce platforms and payment gateways, to automate the whole customer journey with ease.

According to Henson Tsai, the founder, and CEO of SleekFlow, there are about 8-10 unicorns in Hong Kong but very few selling SaaS products. Tsai said that SleekFlow aims to be a world-renowned Hong Kong SaaS brand which is why it has decided to first expand to Southeast Asia first and “then to the world.”

“SleekFlow is missioned to realize the full potential of social messaging for business all over the world,” said Tsai.

He adds, “First, I would like to express my gratitude towards the Gobi for believing in SleekFlow. Aiming to scale the height in the Southeast Asia Market, we will set up new teams in Malaysia and Singapore, where people rely heavily on WhatsApp.”

According to the platform, it has, within a year helped users across over 20 countries, with annual recurring revenue of 7-digit USD.

Singapore – As the pandemic continues to prolong the lifting of travel restrictions, airlines are doing everything they can to offset the heavy drop in demand, developing various initiatives to engage their customers. With this, Scoot, the low-cost subsidiary of Singapore Airlines, has decided to partner with cross-channel marketing platform Insider, to further enhance the experience on its digital channels.

Insider assists enterprise marketers to connect customer data across channels and systems, predict their future behavior with a built-in AI intent engine, and orchestrate individualized customer experiences at scale. Its platform delivers experiences across channels like web, app, web push, and email, as well as SMS, and ads, among others. 

As part of the partnership, Scoot will be utilizing Insider’s AI-powered platform to create personalized, multi-channel experiences for customers on its website. Using The platform, the airline will be releasing travel requirements at different parts of the customer journey, communicating flexibility options on its website quickly, and addressing the fluidity of global travel regulations with agility. 

Furthermore, Insider’s AI-backed segmentation module will be assisting the airline to serve relevant web push messages to users with a high likelihood of booking a flight.

Scoot’s Chief Commercial Officer Calvin Chan commented that the partnership with Insider has been instrumental in how they support the customers in these challenging times, as Scoot’s motto has always been to re-define the customer experience in the low-cost sector, and a large part of the experience is delivered via digital channels.

“Insider has been a valuable partner in improving our overall site engagement and new customer acquisitions with personalized overlays and engagement features. The ease of use of the platform has also enabled us to be operationally agile and so keep our customers abreast of the latest changes in travel regulations,” said Chan.

Meanwhile, Patrick Steinbrenner, Insider’s managing director for APAC, said, “We’re proud to power digital experiences for one of the world’s best low-cost airlines and are happy to have supported them during this pandemic. For the post-COVID recovery phase, we will be stepping up our partnership even further to deliver personalized journeys for Scoot’s customers across the web, mobile web, mobile apps, and ad channels.”

Scoot has also announced that the visitors to its website will benefit from ‘Smart Recommendations’ based on their previous browsing history for a more relevant user experience. The website’s exit surveys will improve its customer experience constantly.

Customer experience is founded on customer expectations. Marketing leaders must understand the evolving expectations that consumers have of their interactions with brands – this includes customer experience and support that, hopefully, meets their needs but ideally delivers above and beyond these expectations. 

As the pandemic turns endemic, delivering a consistently excellent customer experience is by no means an easy feat. Safety measures to protect our health and well-being have created a next normal for marketers. In fact, brand and marketing decision-makers need to constantly calibrate and innovate how they deliver on their brand’s promise and keep an engaged audience base.

The silver lining is that this scenario provides a real case for rolling out genuine omnichannel customer delivery and engagement models – something that has, for far too long, been relegated to the back burner for many brands. By setting new goals for customer service standards, relooking operational processes, and investing in technology solutions, strengthening consumer connections is possible even in a time when change abounds and reliability is imperative.

As such, we’ve seen customer experience agents take on multiple and increasingly important roles: from technicians and consultative sellers to today’s need for them to be empathetic community managers.

Not just a touch-feely bonus: The importance of empathy today

A recent McKinsey study reported that businesses that have empathy towards the customer will have a net positive benefit on their bottom line. Among 170 publicly traded companies examined, the top 10 with outstanding empathy ratings outperformed the bottom 10 by two times on the stock market.

Today’s environment has led to general expectations of a certain level of emotional empathy, no matter who we are interacting with. And brands are not spared – digital empathy and human empathy have taken on a new urgency.

How the pandemic transformed the customer experience agent into empathetic community manager

Brands now have to understand audience emotions, their feelings, and thoughts, their pressures, their desired digital and real-world experiences, and even anticipate future reactions. Empathetic brands that are using this period to rethink, reinvent, and leapfrog will most certainly be developing evolved blueprints for the entire pre-, during, and post-transaction customer journey as a result. At the frontlines of the customer journey – the shape-shifting customer experience agent, who must now play multiple roles.

Technology as an ironic accelerator for empathy

Some may think empathy and technology don’t go together. In fact, technology can help customer experience agents manage their hybrid roles and fulfill the need to be empathetic community managers. By combining proactive support with increased automation, brands can provide personalized support engagement at scale, without sacrificing empathy.

By centralizing omnichannel communications with customers, organizations can upgrade and reinvent the role of customer experience agents. For example, with the ability to manage communication over Instagram and other social media channels through industry-leading contact-center-as-a-solution services available in the market today, customer experience agents have the ability to become community management extraordinaires. Empowering agents with 360-degree customer profiles and full conversation histories all in one place will allow them to unlock valuable insights and provide fast and personalized customer support.

How the pandemic transformed the customer experience agent into empathetic community manager

Unlocking the power of social media messaging for customer support is more important than ever as we consider these stats from data from global cloud communications platform, Infobip: 70% of people globally expect to message businesses for customer service questions, and 64% would rather message than call a business.

As agents and representatives help transform customer interactions from being transactional to becoming more involved, these experiences are likely to be highly engaged, emotionally charged, and mission-critical for loyalty and retention. Consumers will also in turn anticipate that agents demonstrate they understand their problems and provide relevant reassurance.

This points to agents needing to be able to put themselves in the customer’s shoes and build quick rapport. This doesn’t just affect formats that provide visual and verbal cues – it also applies to digital channels such as chat, email, and social media, where agents cannot be certain of the tone of the conversation.

AI is maturing and here to help

While human empathy is natural, artificial empathy must be learned based on the data collected within the rules or framework set up by a human. This is where technology like artificial intelligence (AI) can come into play. AI that analyzes incoming messages and highlights factors like sentiment, helps prepare agents to respond accordingly.

Thanks to natural language processing (NLP), we can communicate with chatbots using human speech. NLP is an area of AI that helps chatbots understand the way your customers communicate.In other words, it means enabling machines, like chatbots, to communicate the way humans would. 

How the pandemic transformed the customer experience agent into empathetic community manager

An NLP chatbot is an AI chatbot that uses natural language processing, based on deep learning, to better identify a customer’s intent and therefore provide more valuable support. 

From the customer’s point of view, NLP helps them feel understood. From a brand’s point of view, these chatbots elevate customer support, create helpful dialogue, and capture insights into your customers’ goals and challenges. This lets you build a brand voice while simultaneously providing a customer-centric approach. 

Chatbots provide instant answers. And when boosted by NLP, they’ll quickly understand customer questions to respond faster than humans can. In addition to text, these chatbots can enhance the natural conversation experience by sharing helpful images (product images), videos (how-to videos, product explainers), map locations (store or service center finders), and more. These lightning-quick responses help build customer trust and positively impact customer satisfaction as well as retention rates. 

How the pandemic transformed the customer experience agent into empathetic community manager
Malaysian Insurance company Gibraltar BSN launched GINA in 2019

Take for example Gibraltar BSN, a Malaysian life insurance company offering life and medical insurance along with saving and investment plans. The insurer had concerns that too many customers in Malaysia had not received important and sensitive documents sent through the post, especially during the pandemic. The company also wanted to optimize its contact center in a way that would allow them to engage customers using modern digital channels but still provide a critical level of empathy during a sensitive time.

By deploying AI-powered NLP chatbots, Gibraltar BSN facilitated the creation of its automated chatbot – GINA. With GINA handling simple customer service inquiries, human agents can help clients with more complex inquiries and offer a more personalized approach. Gibraltar BSN saw a 40% reduction in cost for delivering e-policies after rolling out this transformation.

Harnessing the full potential of the customer experience function

With the right level of support given to customer experience agents, the potential for businesses to exceed consumer expectations in a digital world is limitless. Today, customer experience, service, and support – an oft-neglected function – have the aid of readily available technology to bring another dimension of brand success.

For marketing leaders, working with CX is about quickly adapting to and adopting emerging technologies for their benefit. Be one of the first businesses to leapfrog and handle messaging at scale on social media, connect to new customers, and strengthen relationships with existing ones.

This article is written by Viven Ang, regional manager for APAC at Infobip.

Singapore – In its continuing expansion in Asia for its customer experience (CX) and digital transformation strategies, digital experience management software Sitecore has appointed cloud and IT executive Saurabh Pandit as its newest vice president for Asia.

The appointment of Pandit strengthens Sitecore’s presence in the market and is part of the company’s ambitions to grow aggressively in the wake of the US$1.2b funding secured in January. His new role will include India, Southeast Asia, and the Greater China region.

Prior to his new role, he was formerly regional director for JAPAC at marketing automation provider Resulticks, as well as head of IBM Watson Customer Engagement across the ASEAN region, and has held senior digital marketing alliance roles at Adobe. 

Before moving to Singapore, Pandit held cloud management roles at Adobe and Microsoft in India.

“Sitecore has a plan to provide business with marketing cloud technologies that transform the way they operate, and I am excited to be part of that. My expertise is in technical transformation and change and bringing the benefits of IT and digital to enterprise and mid-market customers,” Pandit said, regarding his appointment.

Pandit will report to Sitecore’s Asia-Pacific and Japan President Mark Troselj. He brings more than twenty years of business and executive management experience.

“Saurabh Pandit has the proven leadership and experience in driving digital transformation and customer experience innovation to support Sitecore’s growth in the Asian region. Companies across the region are looking for counsel and guidance in meeting the challenges of becoming a digital-first organization, and Saurabh delivers that experience,” Troselj commented.

New York, USA – To lead and accelerate the company’s growth in the Asia Pacific region, global conversational AI company LivePerson has recently appointed former Adobe executive Ian Kinsella as the company’s senior vice president for APAC.

Through his newly-found role, Kinsella will oversee LivePerson’s sales and customer success organization in APAC, expanding the company’s go-to-market strategy in the region as well as its team of sales and customer success experts. LivePerson partners with many of the region’s top brands-including mobile operators, insurers, banking and financial services institutions, retailers, and more-to provide AI-powered marketing, sales, and care experiences to their customers.

Prior to joining LivePerson, he led Adobe’s Digital Experience business across APAC, with responsibility for commerce and customer journey management solutions. Kinsella came to Adobe through its acquisition of the e-commerce platform Magento, where he led the APAC business. Previously, he served as vice president at SAP, leading the customer experience & commerce business in APAC and managing a portfolio of sales, service, marketing, and e-commerce solutions.

Kinsella also spent more than a decade as an entrepreneur, bootstrapping start-ups in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. He has lived in the region for over 20 years and currently resides in Sydney, Australia.

“I’m thrilled to join LivePerson at this critical moment. Now that APAC consumers use mobile devices as their primary tool to connect with brands, we see a massive opportunity to help more of the region’s top brands offer and scale AI-powered conversations on their preferred channels, from WeChat to LINE, WhatsApp, and in-app messaging,” said Kinsella, regarding his appointment.

Meanwhile, Rob LoCascio, founder and CEO of LivePerson, commented, “With billions of mobile users, the Asia-Pacific region offers incredible opportunities for LivePerson. Bringing Ian on board catalyzes our APAC operation to partner with even more of the region’s signature brands to deliver our global vision for conversational AI’s transformation of commerce and care. I’m excited to welcome him to our executive team.”

Singapore – yellow.ai, a global conversation customer experience (CX) automation platform, has announced that is rolling out its newest AI-powered voice virtual assistant features across markets in Southeast Asia, a direct response to adding more channels to their existing text automation channels such as those in-site and in third-party messaging apps.

The human-like voice AI bots can understand sentiments, intent and past behavior, and also modify pitch, tone, excitement, and more, to suit customer sentiment and intent on channels like Telephony, Google Assistant and Alexa. The company’s bots can natively converse naturally in more than 100 languages across text and voice, such as Bahasa Malay, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, Mandarin, English, Tamil, and more.

According to the company, with the growing demand for hyper-automation and on-demand resolution by customers in Singapore, adding voice AI capabilities to yellow.ai’s rich customer experience automation platform is a natural evolution to realizing a vision of total CX automation.

This is supported by a statement from Raghu Ravinutala, CEO and co-founder at yellow.ai, who explained that conversational interfaces are changing how we relate to brands and voice is playing a key role in enabling smarter brand-to-consumer interactions. 

“Today, growth and success in every business are highly indexed to creating personalized and differentiated customer experiences. At yellow.ai, we are dedicated to enabling human-like, engaging conversations with our conversational CX platform, which is the ultimate balance between human + AI capabilities,” Ravintula stated.

Yellow.ai’s launch of these features follows after recent findings by Gartner, in which they predict that by 2025, 40% of all inbound voice communications to call centers will use voice bots. As a company who has worked with over 109 brands in the region, yellow.ai offers enterprise-grade chat and voice bots, weaving in the best of AI and human intelligence to deliver highly differentiated elevated customer experience at a fraction of the current operational cost.

“With us, enterprises can successfully automate customer experience while elevating the quality of customer interactions. Now we are actively expanding our strategic partnerships and offices around the world, with Singapore as a key market, in Southeast Asia. We are delighted to extend our repertoire in the region with ‘conversational voice AI’, the future of CX,” Ravintula concluded.

Sydney, Australia – Multinational tax services company H&R Block in Australia has appointed InMoment, the experience improvement (XI) software and solutions company, to be its customer experience improvement partner. 

H&R Block deems to be the leading tax services company in the country, providing advisory on income tax returns, tax preparation, and refunds. 

The partnership aims to expand H&R Block’s current Voice of the Customer (VoC) program, with the goal of understanding exactly what customers want and expect. The new program will include listening posts across critical moments in the customer journey. By gathering solicited and unsolicited feedback, as well as using text analytics data from InMoment and its XI technology, H&R Block will unlock richer customer insights, to employ more innovative ways to deliver an improved digital experience for customers. 

According to H&R Block, they are committed to differentiating themselves by deep-diving into each customer’s experience along the process of preparing taxes. It plans to push industry boundaries and proactively meet customer’s needs in an evolving, digital-first world.

H&R Block’s Managing Director Brodie Dixon said, “Our primary goal is to provide the very best customer experience possible on every visit. Whether you visit one of our stores or engage in our digital services, we believe a strategic differentiator is our focus on continual experience improvement.”

Meanwhile, David Blakers, the managing director of InMoment APAC, commented, “This partnership is special to me on a personal level as I trained as an H&R Block tax consultant for my first proper job. We are so excited to partner with this iconic brand and see the industry as a whole turn toward being more customer-focused.”

Singapore – As customer experience (CX) company Astute Solutions and digital marketing company Socialbakers recently announced a merger of their business entities, both companies have announced the brand launch of Emplifi, which will be catering to a middle ground of services centered on CX strategies for digital marketing purposes.

Emplifi will give organizations the tools they need to connect social media marketing, customer care, and social commerce to address critical customer experience gaps. Its entry into the CX scene comes with a whole list of existing clients from both Astute Solutions and Socialbakers such as McDonalds, Delta Air Lines and Ford Motor Company. 

According to both companies, Emplifi was born out of the need to better connect brands and their customers. With constant shifts in consumer behaviors and rising customer expectations across channels, brands need a unified approach to customer experience management. Consumers now prefer instant convenience and speed as evidenced by a surge in interest in social shopping, social care, and digital self-service. 

Mark Zablan, CEO at Emplifi explains that the brand reflects the company’s mission to help their customers better empathize with their customers and amplify their brand experiences – wherever they might be.

“Customer expectations are shifting fast and brands need to be able to respond quickly with powerful, empathetic experiences. As customers turn to more social and digital means to connect, communicate and transact, Emplifi is well positioned to help brands succeed today and scale for new channels tomorrow,” Zablan said.

The brand launch comes in timing as the social commerce industry in particular has exploded, as social media orders in Singapore, Thailand, Philippines and Vietnam more than doubled in the first half of 2020. According to data from Bain & Co, social commerce accounted for 44% (US$47.96b) of Southeast Asia’s US$109b e-commerce revenue last year. 

Meanwhile social media videos have emerged as a key channel for product discovery. Almost 8 in 10 Southeast Asians watch videos on social media while 66% have created or interacted with videos on these platforms. This has led to a rise in live-stream shopping in the region. According to iKala, the share of retailers who used live-selling techniques increased nearly 13% to 67% between the first and second quarter of 2020. 

Lastly, brands have taken notice and are doubling their social media ad spend. In Q1 2021, marketers spent 60% more on Facebook and Instagram advertising globally as compared to the same period last year. The growth in ad spend has led to an increase in ad costs. In Southeast Asia, ad costs grew by as much as 66% year-on-year.

Retailers across the globe were already facing challenges engaging with the increasingly digital consumer when the global pandemic hit. The sweeping lockdowns and movement restrictions only made the problem worse. Analysts predict that more than 100,000 stores will shut down by 2025 in the United States alone and retailers across the globe are experiencing disruption in the way they’ve connected and engaged with consumers in the past. 

The only way to thrive in this environment is to take a connected retail approach through omnichannel engagement. Retailers can no longer remain purely online or offline players and need to stay in step with customers across multiple touchpoints. This also means brands need to rethink their engagement and communication strategies to acquire, engage, and retain customers in this context. In the process, they must ensure that every touchpoint delivers a consistent, convenient, and continuous experience to the customer.

According to IDC, an omnichannel experience can improve the customer’s lifetime value (LTV) by 30% and customer retention by 90%. These experiences are vital to recognize user behavior across multiple channels. They also magnify user actions to grow ‘micro-conversions’, the ‘wow’ moments that nudge shoppers towards a purchase, such as following a brand on social media or adding an item to the cart or wishlist. At the same time, connected experiences can highlight critical user moments to lower drop-offs.

For example, if you were in a physical store and couldn’t find the staff to help you with questions about an item, eventually you might put it back on the shelf and leave. The same can happen online if brands are not present for these moments. Finally, connected experiences allow for relevant, personalized communications across channels and a boost to LTV through loyalty programs.

A connected experience is more than just having multiple channels of communication. Gartner defines a connected experience as one during which customers can shop without any channel limitations. Customers can choose their preferred channels for purchase; how they’d like to pay; and how they’d like to obtain the items. 

How can retailers create this kind of unified experience and transform brick and mortar customers into digital ones? 

Before retailers start implementing a connected customer journey, they need to have a clear blueprint of how to implement it and assess preparedness. A one-size-fits-all approach could fail. A connected experience strategy can be divided into three stages: crawl, walk, and run. 

Crawl: The most basic stage where foundation building happens. This is where brands and retailers understand the things that work best for customers such as typical user events and the triggers for them. The key objective in this stage is to initiate communication with customers. An example of this in practice could be sending a personal message to thank someone for following you on social media and sharing a link to your website. 

Walk: With the triggers identified and messaging refined, the next stage is to connect the dots across channels. Steps in this stage are creating separate messages for acquisitions, retention, and engagement across each channel; knowing what action you want the customer to take and selecting the trigger for it (e.g., a push notification); and developing an alternate plan in case the customer proceeds in a different direction. 

Run: This is when retailers begin to focus on long-term relationships. You should now be in a place to better leverage data to trigger personalized campaigns. If you are seeing strong engagement, now is also the time to introduce a loyalty program and collect feedback post-purchase. Examples of these activities could be focused campaigns for special occasions; unique offers and incentives based on past purchases; or offering promotions that can be redeemed at nearby stores.

Once you know how to build a connected customer journey and the stage you are in, the next step is execution using engagement workflows. It’s crucial to have workflows mapped across the customer journey, i.e., from micro-conversions (link clicks/page visits) to macro conversions (purchase). 

Retailers need to carry out a series of activities to engage customers throughout their journey, from the time they register on an app or website to the time they add items to a wishlist or complete a purchase. However, the journey doesn’t end here. The process must be repeated for each new or existing user, every time they become active on your app or website. 

Best practices for creating engagement workflows include analyzing micro, ‘intent-rich’ moments to create connected journeys; segmenting by tags, events, and actions; creating workflows by deploying user event and activity conditions, and setting touchpoints using the most suitable channels for each customer segment and the point they are at in their purchasing journey. 

With some insight into how to create workflows for the different stages that customers might be in, it’s time to implement. Before retailers begin, they should keep the following in mind for the best chance of success:

Set KPIs and goals based on workflow rationale: No two customers are alike. If one is in the onboarding stage, another is in the retention stage, so each workflow will need to be measured by different key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, your goal for onboarding customers could be to increase first-purchase transactions. On the other hand, your goal in the engagement phase could be to nudge customers to purchase again. The goal for the customer advocacy workflow could be to collect more feedback from customers. Focused KPIs for each of these goals will allow for better planning.

Delegate to team members: Although the marketing workflows automate processes, some functions should be delegated to team members to improve the campaign’s outcome. For example, different team members can monitor different campaigns and deliver actionable insights on how to meet goals. When team members know exactly what they need to focus on, there is less confusion and more clarity about how to achieve the desired outcomes of the campaign.

Revise workflows with a similar rationale: Remember to review campaigns periodically – weekly, monthly, and quarterly- to measure performance. Customer needs may change during the process of implementing the workflow and you can revise your workflows to integrate any new insights that you gain that could improve the outcome of your campaigns. You can also do an A/B test to know if a campaign performs well before implementing the workflow completely. However, ensure that the revised workflow does not disrupt the customer experience in any way. As is the goal with all customer interactions, it should be hassle-free and frictionless. 

The digital era has placed even more emphasis on the customer experience. Gone are the days of customer service with a smile. Today, retail customers want clear communication and control of their shopping experience. For retail brands, this means that there is more pressure than ever before to deliver crisp, rewarding, and connected experiences. Taking a comprehensive approach to your digital outreach strategy and investing in the tools that streamline this process will ensure your success in the near term and beyond.

This article was written by Saurabh Madan, general Manager for SEA and ANZ at MoEngage.

MoEngage is an insights-led engagement platform built for marketers and product owners looking to bolster their customer engagement. With AI-powered automation and optimization, MoEngage enables brands to analyze audience behavior and engage consumers at every point of the purchasing journey.