Tag: Customer experience

Singapore – Unified customer experience management platform Sprinklr has announced launch of Sprinklr AI+, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) feature which aims to facilitate content creation, improved feedback and assistance, and identification of insights and subsequent actions – all while being committed to enterprise-level governance, security, and data privacy.

Sprinklr AI+ allows enterprises to combine unstructured, CX data from 30+ digital channels – including social platforms, messaging platforms, and millions of publicly available news, blog, and review sites – with generative AI to create content, improve feedback and assistance, and more quickly identify insights and subsequent actions. 

Moreover, Sprinklr AI+ incorporates generative AI powered by an integration with the OpenAI enterprise API. This bespoke arrangement includes robust security and privacy terms and demonstrates Sprinklr’s commitment to safeguarding our customer’s data.

The new offering gives brands a unified generative AI capability for social media management, customer service, and marketing that is built with enterprise-level governance, security, and data privacy in the design.

Through the new offering, Sprinklr customers can tap into new features across all four Sprinklr product suites namely its unified omnichannel contact center as a service (CCaaS) ‘Sprinklr Service’, AI-powered research platform ‘Sprinklr Insights’, unified omnichannel platform ‘Sprinklr Marketing’, and social media management offering ‘Sprinklr Social’.

Pavitar Singh, chief technology officer at Sprinklr, said, “We have seen massive demand for generative AI capabilities to improve customer service and employee efficiency. Sprinklr AI+ brings this transformational technology to customer experience at the enterprise level and has the potential to revolutionize the front office for our global customers.”

Singh added, “For us, this is the next evolution of our AI journey to help our customers work better, faster, and more cost effectively, while preserving the level of governance, compliance, and data privacy that the most iconic brands in the world require.”

Singapore – Last 27 April, we saw marketing leaders from the APAC region gathered in one virtual space to discuss how the customer experience has evolved to put a premium on instantaneous and real-time engagement. To kick off MessageBird and MARKETECH APAC’s webinar series, Connecting the CX Dots in 2023, the said first leg of the industry event put the spotlight on conversational marketing.

Messaging apps have transcended their purpose of being a platform for personal connections by evolving to being a significant part of how businesses communicate with their customers. With a multitude of messaging platforms now available, the asynchronous nature of brand-customer communications has put to the table a new set of demands, opportunities, as well as challenges that marketing teams are called to answer to.

This webinar, Conversational Marketing: Connecting the CX Dots in 2023, tackled these pointers with the help of an insightful keynote presentation and a well-represented panel of leaders. 

Merlvin Tan, the team lead for APAC sales at MessageBird, opened the webinar with a presentation on ‘Conversational Commerce – Increasing Customer Engagement & Improving Marketing Campaign Results’. 

Tan laid out the present state of user engagement and highlighted the three key priorities that are a common denominator amongst brands: Generating new business; Driving more conversions; and Building long-lasting relationships. 

Even more so, Tan walked us through the different stages of the conversational journey and how brands can initiate the best strategies for each one. From ‘Awareness’, ‘Consideration’, and ‘Purchase’ to ‘Retention’, Tan shared the ways brands can activate a two-way conversation that is personalised and relevant at each stage.

Meanwhile, the panel discussion was graced by Jia Nina, the country marketing head for Malaysia at BigPay; David Harling, the managing director of MoneySmart Group; ‘Preety’ Maneerat Rattiwarakorn, the partner manager for business messaging at Meta for APAC, and Raenald Renz De Jesus, ShopBack’s head of marketing for the Philippines.

Moderated by Tan himself, we learned how conversational marketing strategies are iterated in brands of different industries. 

Representing fintech companies BigPay and MoneySmart Group, e-commerce platform ShopBack, as well as one leader from Meta, attendees are given a picture of the non-negotiable factors in setting up an effective conversational marketing strategy as well as how these change and are refined when taking into consideration the unique pain points of consumers in different industries. 

90+ attendees benefited from our panellists sharing their own challenges when establishing and maintaining a two-way delivery of communication across channels. Ultimately, the panel touched on how AI and the emergence of ChatGPT4 can be operationalised to help in realising a conversation that is personalised and conversion-oriented. 

The webinar on conversational marketing is the inaugural event under the three-part webinar series, Connecting the CX Dots in 2023, hosted in partnership with MessageBird. 

If you missed going to the event, fret not, you can register HERE to obtain your on-demand access. 

Meanwhile, on 25 May 2023, join us on the series’ second leg which will discuss the topic of omnichannel journey mapping. Register to secure your spot HERE. 

The Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC), despite being one of the organisations in Hong Kong with a long history, has its own digital experience roadmap laid out for its customers. As we learn from Chirag Desai, head of IT & digital channels solutions at HKJC, the club–founded in 1884–has moved from doing paper-based betting to more modern solutions such as online services and streamlined apps.

In an interview with MARKETECH APAC for its What’s NEXT Interview series in partnership with customer experience management company Sitecore, Desai notes that their digital changes correspond to the ever-changing preferences and wants of their customers. He also adds that these changes are done at the pace of what they think their customers want over course of time.

When asked about what advice he could give brands in starting their digital experience journey, he advised them to ‘start small, dream big’. For him, what’s important for a business is to pick a business case and start from there. In his own words, “don’t do technology for the sake of technology”.

“Find a very good business case or a problem, and fix that small problem with a small blast radius. Something that customers love [which] your business partners would say ‘you really solved our solution’,” he said.

When asked how cutting edge digital experience technologies aided them, Desai said, “Sitecore, both as an organisation and its products, have helped us to drive consolidation within our CMS footprint across the Club and build new digital experiences for our customers. Those new experiences are built with self service capability for users that drive the ability to update content quickly for the benefit of our customers across our Wagering & Non Wagering products.” 

“The modular architecture of the platform also enables us to flex between on premise and cloud based components based on our very specific requirements. Sitecore will continue to be a key element of our Digital experience in the coming years and we look forward to working with them on this journey,” he added.

He also advises brands to not do all things at the same time, instead pick up a slice of the problem, build a stack of potential solutions and then move from there.

When asked about bigger plans for HKJC’s digital experience for its customers, Desai notes more seamless and optimised personalised experiences for its ever growing audience.

This interview was conducted in partnership with Sitecore. Sitecore is the leading provider of end-to-end digital experience software; its SaaS-enabled and composable platform empowers brands to deliver unforgettable customer interactions.

Singapore – Software-as-a-service (SaaS) company Zendesk has announced that it has integrated OpenAI across its software suite to expand AI-powered customer experiences for businesses.

At the moment, Zendesk has proprietary foundational models, which are customised and trained against decades of Zendesk customer experience (CX) data and industry-specific insights.

The combination of these models, Zendesk‘s industry-leading knowledge management solutions, and OpenAl enables businesses to save even more time by leveraging the power of generative Al to more effectively and efficiently resolve customer service cases. 

Moreover, the company’s software suite already includes many Al-powered CX features right out-of-the-box, such as conversational messaging, bots, knowledge management, advanced analytics, and self-service tools. The addition of OpenAl will provide businesses with a unique solution to enhance their customer experience and scale to levels that were previously unattainable. 

For Cristina Fonseca, head of Al at Zendesk, artificial intelligence can help business teams be more consistent, better understand customers, and derive insights from data.

“We provide the best Al tools that customers can start using in minutes. Our work with cutting-edge partners like OpenAl, helps us leverage the newest technology available to accelerate businesses’ ability to unlock the value of their customer interactions,” Fonseca said.

Singapore – Toku, a cloud communications provider that operates in APAC, will be acquiring the Southeast Asia operations of Activeo, a customer experience (CX) consulting firm with an HQ in France. 

Activeo Singapore currently has an established business footprint in the city-state and supports more than 150 customers with their digital transformation projects, including 19 government agencies and 65 per cent of national healthcare institutions. 

Founder and CEO of Toku, Thomas Laboulle, said, “In today’s macroeconomic climate, global technology companies based mostly in the US or Europe have adopted a cautious outlook, scaling down investments in APAC to prioritise markets closer to their homes.”

He continued, “But the region’s digital economy continues to grow, and there is a tremendous opportunity for APAC-first companies like Toku to fill this gap and boldly advance and accelerate our regional growth as others retreat.” 

For the past 12 months, Activeo Singapore has been working with Toku as an independent partner to deliver successful CX transformation projects to many customers in Singapore. Toku commented that the acquisition is a natural next step for both parties to realise the full synergies of their partnership. 

As a technology provider, Toku builds digital solutions to power the backbone of modern customer experience. Toku said that Activeo Singapore complements its offerings with strategic consulting expertise and large-scale enterprise project delivery. 

To maintain its excellence and quality in architecting solutions globally, Activeo Singapore will continue operating as an autonomous business unit under the Toku banner. Jonathan Mondon, managing director of Activeo Singapore, will assume a new role as head of consulting at Toku. Armed with more than fifteen years of multinational leadership experience, Mondon has led Activeo Singapore’s regional business for close to a decade, spearheading its Contact Centre and Customer Experience focus.

Commenting on the acquisition, Mondon said, “Activeo Singapore will continue to be tech-agnostic and deliver the best fit-for-purpose solutions that solves our customers’ pain points. In addition, Activeo Singapore customers will be able to add Toku’s proprietary technology and connectivity solutions to their arsenal, further supercharging their CX strategies.” 

These solutions include Toku’s embeddable products, which enable businesses to embed communication channels within their app or platform using programmable APIs or SDKs, as well as Toku’s carrier-grade connectivity to provide their regional customers with better coverage and call quality. 

According to Toku, as a critical pillar of its regional expansion strategy, the acquisition will see it set up more local offices across the Asia Pacific such as a physical presence in Malaysia. Moreover to this, the company will be further enhancing its channel programme to empower more partners to deliver ‘customer success stories’. 

“By combining forces, we will unlock bigger opportunities and better meet the needs of our customers in Singapore and Asia Pacific,” added Thomas. “This is a win-win acquisition that will strengthen our position as a leading CX solutions provider and enable us to deliver greater scale and efficiency to our customers across the region.” 

Australia – LEVO, a digital transformation and strategic design agency under the Clemenger Group, has announced the unveiling of a new advisory practice centred on digital transformation, customer experience (CX), and technology.

The new advisory practice will be led by Kevin Miller, who has joined as practice director of advisory and consulting, and Pankaj Prasad, who has joined the team as client solutions director. Both join from Capgemini and bring a wealth of experience in consulting, strategy, CX, design and delivering enterprise technology solutions.

LEVO’s new advisory practice will leverage its existing expertise in strategy, product design, technology, and change management.

Cale Maxwell, CEO at LEVO, explained that this new advisory practice offers clients a transformative solution to stay ahead in an ever-changing business landscape.

“Every organisation is in the business of experience. This is a significant step forward in helping Australian and New Zealand-based organisations achieve their goals and remain relevant in a highly competitive market,” Maxwell said.

LEVO’s advisory practice will concentrate on forging long-term partnerships with clients centred on technology, CX and transformation strategies, enabling them to stay ahead of the curve. 

The agency has a track record delivering enterprise digital experience and transformation projects across a range of clients including Bendigo Bank, Rams Home Loans, Interflora, Officeworks, Australian Red Cross and JELD-WEN. 

Singapore – We live in an always-on era and digital tech is at the forefront of this phenomenon. From commerce to payments, healthcare, education, food, logistics and travel, digital tech is at the centre of making this transformation real. 

Buyer journeys have grown to become fluid, where consumers have control of their actions and expect brands to facilitate that control – consumers’ preferred channel, location, and time. 

This makes the path-to-purchase, needless to say, no longer homogenous, but something that’s personal to the consumer — therefore immensely unpredictable. Consumers simply ‘go’ where they feel like going, but as marketers, it is our job to make sense of the pathway.

Enter ‘Connecting the CX Dots in 2023’, a webinar series through a partnership of MARKETECH APAC and omnichannel communications platform MessageBird. In this three-part dialogue, we aim to discuss the inevitable challenges that come with the convenience of digital to orchestrate a customer experience that consistently delivers customer delight.

As an industry connector for the marketing community in APAC, MARKETECH APAC is staying true to its mission of enriching marketers in the region with the tools and resources essential to succeed in the business of marketing. Customer experience has tremendously shape-shifted with the continuously emerging innovations in the landscape, and with this, we aren’t wasting a sec to discuss what is now and happening. 

“Connecting the CX Dots in 2023 Webinar Series will be addressing three of the most important areas in customer experience and focus on the unique challenges and opportunities for marketers in Southeast Asia. We encourage the marketing community to make the most of this opportunity, by actively participating on the community platform,” said Danielle Ong, head of sales for East and Southeast Asia at MessageBird.

In April, we are going to kick off the series with a discussion on conversational marketing. When we think of such, chatbots are the first thing that comes to mind, but with this dedicated webinar, we are going to expound the conversation and bring a holistic view of the marketing strategy that is putting a premium on real-time two-way interaction between brands and consumers. 

Come the month of May, we’ll be shifting the spotlight to the overarching discussion on omnichannel journey mapping. Modern and contemporary CX is multifaceted and such dynamic breeds an equal multitude of operational points that is yearning to be optimised and addressed. Through this, we can check our current roadmaps against what has worked and hasn’t been working for others.

Ultimately, in June, we are going to culminate the series by mounting a discussion on the classic communication channel, that is email. We are going to see for ourselves how programmable emails have changed the game. On the receiving end of such tech, how can we ultimately adapt to and leverage its features to make consumers pay attention to us through their inboxes? In this conversation, we seek to provide answers.

Commented Joven Barceñas, CEO and founder of MARKETECH APAC, “We are thrilled to be collaborating with MessageBird on this one-of-a-kind opportunity to bring together CX leaders from Asia as speakers for our three-part webinar series. By providing a platform for learning from industry experts, we hope to address the need for marketers to deliver a seamless and personalised customer experience. Join us for one of our upcoming webinars and be a part of the conversation that is shaping the future of customer experience.”

Up to date, here are the confirmed speakers from the region that will be gracing the virtual stage to lead the webinar series on CX:

  • Gino Riola, Chief Marketing & Communications Officer, Allianz PNB Life
  • Jia Nina, Country Marketing Head, Malaysia, BigPay 
  • Ravi Shankar, Chief Marketing Officer, CARSOME
  • Bea Atienza, Impactful Brand Experience Lead, Colgate-Palmolive
  • Nancy Almasco, Marketing Director, FlowerStore.ph
  • Waikuan Wong, Head of Airlines Global Marketing, Malaysia Airlines
  • Merlvin Tan, Team Lead – APAC Sales, MessageBird
  • ‘Preety’ Maneerat Rattiwarakorn, Partner Manager, Business Messaging, APAC, Meta
  • Neha Bhasin, Director of Brand Communications, ZALORA Group

Do not miss out on Connecting the CX Dots in 2023. Take note of the following dates of each webinar to secure your spot in all three:

Click the links to head over to the official event landing pages and register. Sign up now to bring yourselves up to spread with the trailblazing pivots in CX.

Singapore – Cloud communications provider Vonage has announced an artificial intelligence (AI) acceleration suite to aid in the development of applications that deliver smarter solutions to drive business productivity and better experiences and engagements.

The new AI suite allows businesses and developers to deploy omnichannel customer journeys that use the power of AI and customer data to incorporate intelligence and automation into their customer experience applications.

For Vonage, the need for new and intelligent applications is accelerating as organisations look to enhance digital engagement for every stakeholder–which includes the customer, agent, and employee–to address each unique use case. They have also noted the rise of a new community of non-developers or so-called ‘citizen developers’, who are looking to create applications with real-time communications and seamless digital experiences.

Vonage’s suite solutions can be used together, flexibly in different combinations, or individually according to application needs. In addition, developers extend use cases and build specialised applications on top of other solutions with open access to Vonage communications APIs for voice, video, SMS and messaging.

Savinay Berry, EVP for product and engineering at Vonage, said that to meet evolving customer needs – and demand – for better ways to connect across channels of choice, enterprises today are looking for solutions that speed and simplify the development of intelligent, AI-powered customer experience applications.

“Vonage AI Acceleration Suite enables businesses to create better outcomes and enhance productivity with AI processing and programmable solutions that are essential for developers and non-developers alike to meet this growing demand for simpler and faster methods of application development to create a better overall customer journey,” Berry said.

Singapore – Global enterprise software company Sprinklr has announced a total of 120 new customer service and 25 new AI innovations for its multiple product suites to improve omnichannel customer experience (CX).

Sprinklr Service is a comprehensive, AI-powered contact centre as a service (CCaaS) platform that enables agents to serve customers across digital, social and voice channels seamlessly, delivering quick resolution of customer queries at lower cost of operations.

Some of the things the new features can do include predictive intelligence that analyses customer data, AI-powered quality management, complete commerce solutions for WhatsApp, amongst others.

Sprinklr’s digital-first approach, backed by a complete CCaaS offering and unified platform gives customers the confidence to make significant changes to their customer care infrastructure.

Pavitar Singh, chief technology officer at Sprinklr, said, “For more than a year, we have been working with leading organisations around the world to disrupt the traditional enterprise CCaaS market and deliver new service strategies for digital-first enterprises.”

He added, “With the ability to engage across 30+ channels, we empower customer service teams to seamlessly work across digital, social, and voice channels. Support from AI-self service tools helps brands deliver faster resolution of customer queries at reduced cost.”

Singapore – Global computer software company Adobe has announced a slew of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models to improve customer experience (CX) delivery for businesses, ranging from content personalisation and editing, to marketing copy generation and conversational experiences.

The new AI models will be part of Adobe Sensei’s collection of enterprise applications which enables customers to work and collaborate in new ways. Adobe Sensei is the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) arm for its Adobe Experience Platform.

A major AI model being announced is ‘Adobe Firefly’, a generative service which is trained on Adobe Stock images, openly licensed content and public domain content where copyright has expired, and will focus on images and text effects and is designed to generate content safe for commercial use.

“With Adobe Firefly, producing limitless variations of content and making changes, again and again — all on brand — will be quick and simple. In the future, marketers will be able to also train Adobe Firefly on the brand’s own collateral, generating content that reflects the brand’s style and design language,” the company said in a press statement.

David Wadhwani, president of digital media business at Adobe, said, “Generative AI is the next evolution of AI-driven creativity and productivity, transforming the conversation between creator and computer into something more natural, intuitive and powerful. With Firefly, Adobe will bring generative AI-powered ‘creative ingredients’ directly into customers’ workflows, increasing productivity and creative expression for all creators from high-end creative professionals to the long tail of the creator economy.”

Meanwhile, Adobe’s Sensei GenAI will enable brands to instantly generate and modify text-based experiences across any customer touchpoint and leverage different large language models (LLMs), including ChatGPT through the Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and FLAN-T5. The selection will align with the unique needs of each business, stemming from brand guidelines, product vocabulary and customer insights.

Some of the business uses for Sensei GenAI include marketing copy generation, dynamic automated chat, creation of rich audience segments which provide precision for personalisation campaigns, and caption generation.

Amit Ahuja, senior vice president for digital experience business at Adobe, commented, “Adobe has a long history of unlocking AI as a co-pilot for marketers, and we have a vision for generative AI that covers the full lifecycle of customer experience management, with the enterprise-grade security and data governance that our customers expect.”

He added, “Business growth is driven by customer experiences, and generative AI is a transformative, foundational technology that will impact every aspect of how brands connect with their customers.”