Tag: Customer experience

Washington, USA – Amperity, the enterprise customer data platform (CDP) for consumer brands, today announced Reckitt, the global consumer packaged goods company (CPG), has appointed it to maximise the value of its omnichannel customer data to deliver relevant, personalised customer experiences.

Combining first-party data and third-party data can have an immediate and significant impact on brands looking to truly understand their customers, and deliver highly-relevant experiences throughout the customer lifecycle. Amperity’s integrations with leading platforms like Amazon and Facebook aim to enable companies like Reckitt to reach more users while enriching advertising campaigns through Amperity’s insights on cross-channel behaviour, data sciences scores, and content affinities. 

“Historically, CPGs have had very little access to first-party data making it incredibly difficult to truly know the customer and deliver relevant omnichannel experiences,” said Barry Padgett, CEO at Amperity. “Reckitt understands the need to build their own customer relationships. By embracing a first-party data strategy, Reckitt now has access to accurate customer profiles that will exponentially strengthen their reach.”

Amperity has also announced this month its support for Amazon’s AWS for Advertising & Marketing initiative. The initiative features services and solutions purpose-built for the needs of different players in the industry, whereas Amperity has created a secure, modern data stack that would help brands to maximise the value of their first-party data.

The martech platform has also recently unveiled new key leaders. Megan McDonagh and Billy Loizou were named CMO and area vice president respectively.

Singapore – Digital experiences have become imperative in the past 2 years of a socially-restricted environment, and now that in-person engagement is getting back on its feet, Sitecore, the global leader in digital experience management software, aims to lead the conversation in disrupting digital experience technology that is charging towards a composable future.

After 2 years of the pandemic era, Sitecore Asia hosted their largest, in-person event to discuss and celebrate the now and future of world-class transformative digital experiences that are elevated through the seamless integration of content, experience, and commerce. Conducted in Riviera, Mediterranean Fine Dining by the Bay in Singapore last 22 November, Composable Future Asia hosted a stellar full-house turnout of over 100 top digital leaders from across Asia. 

Sitecore, leading the composable future 

The event kicked off with Dave O’Flanagan, Chief Product Officer of Sitecore, who delivered his keynote session on ‘The future is composable: delivering standout digital experiences across every customer journey’. 

O’Flanagan dove deep into the latest product innovations at Sitecore and sets out Sitecore’s vision for the next 12 months. He shared how Sitecore’s evolving end-to-end composable digital experience platform (DXP) is targeted at giving brands the agility, speed, and flexibility they need to meet the demands across the customer journey at every moment.

Challenges and opportunities of the ever-changing customer expectations

At the heart of the event is a highly anticipated customers’ panel discussion that rounded up several industry thought leaders from top organisations across Asia.

The discussion saw digital and tech heads Chirag Desai, Head of IT Digital & Channels Solutions at The Hong Kong Jockey Club; Dheeraj Taneja, VP for Product Design & User Experience Design at Adani Digital Labs; Geoff Smeaton, Head of Technology for APAC at Wunderman Thompson; and Preetham Nadig, Head of Product & Engineering for Digital & Data Solutions at Zuellig Pharma on how mainstream and B2B consumers see their expectations changing when it comes to digital experiences delivered by brands.

The session addressed the important question of how different industry players have responded to the challenge of accelerated digital demand during the pandemic and now post-pandemic.

For Hong Kong’s sporting and betting firm The Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC), their Head of IT Digital & Channels Solutions Chirag Desai said that beyond the predicament of social restrictions, they are also called on to respond to the growing multi-generational consumer base where each cohort brings a distinct set of expectations and behaviours.

For example, Desai shared, owning a horse draws more interest from the older demographic, so the strategy in question becomes, how is the company able to retain said experience as relevant even to other consumer bases.

“What we found is that, a younger generation of customers…we were losing them, that we were selling a product or an experience, if you will, that was not relevant to them. They were not interested in bits of paper and going to the shop and all this kind of stuff for share of wallet,” said Desai.

Meanwhile, for Asia’s leading pharmaceutical healthcare services provider Zuellig Pharma, as one of the critical healthcare providers during the global health crisis, they were pushed to quickly pivot the entire value chain and have each point digitised in one fell swoop.

“Zuellig Pharma operates across the value chain, connecting connect clients and consumers across clinical reach, commercial, distribution, channels, as well as patient care. As we are engaged across the entire spectrum of [the] value chain, it was especially important for us to accelerate every single piece of this ecosystem when the pandemic struck,” shared Preetham Nadig, Zuellig Pharma Digital & Data’s Head of Product & Engineering.

In imparting their perspective, India’s Adani Digital Labs coined an interesting term, the ‘economy of convenience’. Dheeraj Taneja, its VP for Product Design & User Experience Design, said that in line with this, it’s the unpredictability of the consumer that keeps them on their toes.

“Convenience is the key. If a brand is able to provide you [with] the same, your loyalty shifts instantly,” he said.

He continued, “If we talk about the challenges…the challenge I think is the non-predictability of the consumer…if he gets a better deal somewhere, he [moves] instantly.” 

Meanwhile, on the opportunities amidst the pandemic, Taneja said it is simply the innovation of digital itself – the intervention and evolution of digital that spurred in the lives of customers. 

“The opportunity lies in the communication with the customer. Brands must have two-way communication across all touchpoints to have best-in-class consumer experience,” he said. 

How organisations future-proof their business through leveraging modern, cloud-based technologies 

The subject matter experts discussed modern technologies they see emerging that would help strengthen brands’ relevance, and in line with this, the new possibilities companies must not fail to explore to create value in both the short and long term.

In line with its multi-generational imperative, HKJC’s Desai shared it was important that they move to cloud technology to bring in a consumer experience that would cut across all age groups to drive lasting impressions and customer loyalty.

“[We] [started] small. So we build a private cloud; we started building containers,” he said. “We build internally a more flexible platform, composable platform, if you will, that allows us to now start building experiences for a new generation of customers.”

During the pandemic, Zuellig Pharma launched a B2B e-commerce platform for a smarter and more convenient way to buy and sell healthcare products via eZRx. In addition, the organisation launched a super app solution for digital healthcare to enable the timely offering of different vaccination programs through the platform.

Nadig said that the expectation has now become the level of engagement and service as in B2C; which means that B2B players now also demand a B2C-intensive consumer experience.

“That’s been the kind of the key focus area for us at Zuellig Pharma. We really want to double down [on] digital experiences. We are building a digital experience platform in the composable nature of these solutions,” he said.

In today’s fast-changing world, the leaders agree that to deliver exceptional digital-based consumer experiences at this rate, foundational technologies must be adaptable, and thus, composable.

Adani’s Taneja captures this the same, “Another important area [is the] iterative process and [an] iterative process is required to build an ecosystem, which will enable loyalty of the customer. So, if you want to retain the customer, you must keep on iterating, keep on evolving.”

He further added, “I have seen the world is moving from MVP to MDE; minimum viable product to minimum delightful experience. I think as an industry, we all must come together and build delightful experiences.”

In true composable nature, guests were gifted Sitecore-branded LEGO sets which they can build into a modular spacecraft, enabling them with the flexibility to design, develop, and deliver their own dream customer experience. Alongside this bespoke door gift, attendees embraced a social challenge where they share their customised creations on LinkedIn with the hashtag, #SitecoreComposableFutureAsia.

This future-centric event was successfully launched in partnership with Aleph, SmartOSC, and Wunderman Thompson.

Reach out to Sitecore to learn more about how they’re elevating brands and disrupting the market through innovative digital solutions.

This post is created in partnership with Sitecore. 

Sitecore is a global leader of end-to-end digital experience software. Unifying data, content, commerce, and experiences, our SaaS-enabled, composable platform empowers brands like L’Oreal, Microsoft, United Airlines, and PUMA to deliver unforgettable interactions across every touchpoint. Our solution provides the cutting-edge tools brands need to build stronger connections with customers, while creating content efficiencies to stand out as transformation and innovation leaders. Experience more at sitecore.com. 

Vietnam – Technological and Commercial Joint Stock Bank, also known as Techcombank, has announced its multimillion-dollar and multi-year partnership with Adobe. The partnership will be seeing the launch of the first end-to-end customer experience technology platform in Vietnam.

Techcombank will be using Adobe Experience Cloud to deliver hyper-personalised banking experiences in real-time across offline and digital touchpoints. The launch will also mark a significant milestone in Vietnam and Southeast Asia’s banking industry.

Techcombank’s investment in Adobe Experience Cloud, including Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform (CDP), will form part of the integrated technology platform that will help determine the best personalisation format for its customers. This will be done by analyzing customer browsing behaviours and deploying persona-based discovery paths.

“Today’s consumers are banking across multiple online and offline channels, and it is critical that we meet their expectations wherever they choose to engage or transact,” said Jens Lottner, chief executive officer at Techcombank. 

He added, “With Adobe’s successful track record of working with leading financial services organizations around the world for the past decade, we are excited to partner with Adobe on our ongoing five-year transformation strategy, and accelerate our journey of being the leader in the customer-led digitization of the Financial Services Industry (FSI) in Vietnam.”

Simon Dale, managing director of Southeast Asia and Korea at Adobe, also said, “We are thrilled to be part of Techcombank’s journey to enable the digital transformation of Vietnam’s finance and banking industry.”

He further commented, “Using Adobe Experience Cloud, Techcombank will be able to deliver better and faster experiences for customers, advancing its long-term vision to inspire a more robust digital skills economy and workforce reskilling in Vietnam.”

As Vietnam aims to accelerate national digital transformation efforts in the finance and banking industry, Techcombank and Adobe will also be building the digital skills economy by unveiling an inaugural Center of Excellence (CoE) to upskill teams and develop digital talent.

To this, Dale commented, “Our CoE will develop the digital capabilities of teams within Techcombank to leverage the tools within Adobe Experience Cloud. This will simultaneously accelerate the bank’s digital transformation journey and enable the development of industry-leading digital talent within the bank.”

Adobe has also previously made updates to its Adobe Substance 3D suite to help brands be more metaverse-ready.

If you know your customers so well, then why do you keep treating them like strangers? It’s a conundrum APAC marketers, brands, and retailers face every day – and a challenge they are desperate to solve. Let us deep dive into the economics of ‘messy data’, and how to unlock the value of personalised marketing efforts through the art of identity resolution.

In its simplest form, fragmented customer data is muddling marketing efforts to get a clear view of who customers actually are. Common critical marketing mistakes are sending customers promotional emails for products they already own, blasting them with ads for clothing they don’t like, or placing them on hold for 45 minutes as a customer service representative tracks down their details when they want to return something. 

And the impact to the bottom line is a lot higher than you may think – to the tune of AU$16 billion, in some cases. Meanwhile, according to the global Zendesk Customer Experience (CX) Trends Report 2022, nearly 70% of APAC consumers feel as though customer service is an afterthought for businesses. On top of this, 94% say they are willing to spend more with companies who personalise the customer service experience, and 71% reveal they would switch to a competitor after one bad customer service experience. 

Unlocking the value of your data with identity resolution

ID resolution is the process of connecting and matching different data points across multiple devices and channels to form a unified view of a single customer, allowing brands to connect the dots between fragmented data to form a complete picture of an actual person.

The goal of ID resolution is to identify the same individual within and across all data sources that contain customer information. Simple enough. But why, then, is it such a tough nut for brands to crack? Because a truly complete and up-to-date view of the customer must combine an individual’s transactions from multiple sources — point-of-sale, e-commerce, email interactions, loyalty data, mobile app engagement and more. It also has to include historical data as well as new data that are produced every day when customers interact with a brand. The scale and scattered nature of it all has kept effective ID resolution out of reach for most brands.

Consider this incredibly common scenario: your brand just received a new online buyer called Victoria. You send her your welcome series. At the same time, another in-store customer called Vicky hasn’t purchased from you in four months, so you send her discounts persuading her to shop with you again. Here’s the kicker — Victoria and Vicky are the same person.

Creating a new era of customer success

The benefits of getting ID resolution right are the cornerstone to any organisation’s success. With an accurate customer data foundation, all departments across the company have the same access to customer information in real time. This access ensures the customer will have a seamless journey at every touchpoint, whether that’s in-store, online or with customer service. 

Even more, quality ID resolution prepares organisations for a cookie-less future by building a hearty, privacy-compliant, first-party data set, providing a buffer against increasingly strict privacy policies that limit the use of third-party data. With deeper customer relationships, brands can speak to their customers on the individual level, boosting customer loyalty and increasing lifetime value. 

ID resolution improves marketing performance and ROI too. Smart segmentation allows brands to create highly targeted campaigns for specific customer segments, cutting down on redundancies. This gives brands the ability to react in real-time and effectively allocate budgets, cutting down on expenses. 

First-class ID resolution software should be powered by machine learning (ML). With ML, match rates and accuracy improve over time even when unique identifiers are incomplete, inconsistent or unavailable. At the same time, ML-based ID resolution uses probabilistic data linking, allowing human-like logic to catch inconsistencies that more rigid matching schemas couldn’t process. 

It’s also key for your ID resolution software to be transparent, providing a clear idea of the process. This builds trust and confidence versus ‘black-box’ processes that don’t show how an answer came about. ID resolution software should also provide a stable customer ID and allow for enterprise scalability – handling and resolving massive amounts of customer identities quickly and cost-effectively, regardless of the size of customer data volume.

Even more, the best solutions are flexible, allowing for simple updates and management and not ‘one size fits all’ to ensure they meet your unique business needs. Above all, expertise should be at its core, providing you with an implementation and support team with deep experience and know-how.

The right ID resolution platform enables brands and organisations to take control of their customer data, systematically improve customer relationships, foster brand loyalty and win.

3 reasons true ID resolution is solid gold for your brand:

A great ID resolution strategy takes ‘dirty data’ and turns it into value — forget about ‘garbage in, garbage out’. With true ID resolution, it’s ‘garbage in, gold out’. 

  1. Most marketing activation channels charge by volume, so having bad ID resolution wastes money in the form of duplicate marketing.
  1. Exceedingly simple ID resolution makes it impossible to accurately understand who the most valuable customers are, leading to bad customer experiences, incorrect analytics and inaccurate personalisation.
  1. The marketing technology landscape is cluttered with SaaS offerings that overly specialise in a subsection of data. Adopt a strategy that can handle all your data, otherwise, it will just reinforce silos and not truly solve the problem.

Find out more by downloading Amperity’s Identity Resolution: Connecting the Dots and Understanding Your Customer guide here.

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This article is written by Billy Loizou, area vice president of Amperity.

The insight is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series under What’s NEXT 2023. What’s NEXT 2023 is a multi-platform industry initiative which features marketing and industry leaders in APAC sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year.

If you are a marketing leader and have insights that you’d like to share on upcoming trends and practices in marketing, please reach out to [email protected] for an opportunity to be part of the series. 

Singapore – Philippine electric company Meralco has tapped system software company Talend as part of the company’s customer-centric digital transformation. Meralco will leverage Talend’s Data Fabric in order to deliver healthy data and enable advanced analytics through its new data platform.

The electric company’s data-driven strategy plans to improve its data insights and drive innovation across the organisation to further level up customer experience and operations.

To help the company navigate the rapidly changing market conditions, Meralco embarked on its digital transformation journey in 2020 with a solid data driven strategy to power customer centricity through data. It implemented the Meralco Data Platform (MDP) to improve customer experience, service delivery, and operational efficiency. 

Through the MDP, Meralco is revolutionising its data collection, processing, and utilisation, to serve as the unified business intelligence and analytics platform that leverages its data to extract information and insights.

The MDP is a significant milestone in Meralco’s data driven strategy as this is consistent with the strategic directions of Meralco President and CEO Atty. Ray C. Espinosa, which is to elevate the utilisation of data and technology to advance the company’s goals of delivering value to the business and providing excellent customer service.

Meralco also uses Talend to broaden data access and offer a self-service platform for business users to consume quality data. With Talend, Meralco has innovated and modernised its data infrastructure, supporting a new data lake, data warehouses, data science workbenches, and the rationalisation of a business intelligence platform.

Rocky D. Bacani, first vice president and head of information, communication, technology and transformation at Meralco, said, “By unlocking the value of information to insights and harnessing the connected intelligence across Meralco, we bring to light where and how we can drive exceptional service to our customers, streamline our internal operations and create new opportunities for innovation – fully recognizing the power of data as an enabler of business growth.”

Meanwhile, JJ Tan, regional director for Asia at Talend, commented, “The energy sector demonstrates that it is one of the most strategic industries for global economic recovery in this post-pandemic period. Meralco, with Talend, is treating data as an asset and working to extract as much value from it as possible. We’re delighted to support Meralco in its effort to deliver healthy data across the organisation. By embracing the power and capabilities of a modern data platform, Meralco is well placed to meet the rapidly evolving needs of the markets and customers.”

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia – Communications service provider Maxis has delved into the metaverse as part of their ‘Rangkaian Kita Rangkaian Malaysia’ campaign which aims to serve every Malaysian in every possible way. Maxis aims to explore the future of living, working, playing and learning in the metaverse.

Through the platform, Maxis provides a glimpse into the possibilities of what the future may look like from multiple perspectives – from essential services, customer engagement, enterprise solutions showcase, gaming, attracting talent, immersive education and building an ecosystem of partnerships with multi-industry verticals.

As part of the metaverse launch, Maxis has unveiled Malaysia’s first Virtual Telco Store in Metaverse, Maxis Centre Decentraland, a connected retail experience on the metaverse to benefit customers with specific offerings. 

Users will be able to shop for Maxis’ products and services using the latest 3D technology, view and get ideas on how they can transform their homes with Maxis’ home devices powered by Maxis Fibre, and even purchase collectible NFTs through collaboration with Malaysian artists. 

Patrick Er, chief sales and service officer at Maxis, said, “The metaverse mirrors our brand purpose and our What’s Possible core value as it expands minds to the possibilities of what we can do in the digital future to continue serving our customers in the best possible way. This is just the beginning of an exciting digital journey and we look forward to more to come on this platform, so keep watching this space.”

There has been no shortage of brands and agencies regionally and globally tapping into the metaverse for other engagement, including HSBC, Wunderman Thompson, Salim Group, Millennium Hotels, Standard Chartered, Charles & Keith, Samsung, and Spotify.

Manila, Philippines – Conversational AI platform Haptik has partnered with MDI NOVARE, the Philippine-based information, and communications technology solutions provider, aimed at facilitating the widespread use and value of AI chatbots for businesses in the Philippines.

The partnership will benefit Haptik by having a strong local partner to improve and solve customer experience (CX) challenges in the Philippines market. Through this, Haptik and MDI NOVARE will jointly transform customer experience across sales, customer support, and co-marketing, as well as sales enablement, and training with AI-powered virtual assistants.

With MDI NOVARE’s vast regional presence and industry experience in the Philippines, the partnership will also strive to help businesses automate customer support, boost lead generation, generate revenue, and at the same time deliver uninterrupted and delightful CX across every channel using Haptik’s cutting-edge AI/ML NLP technology.

Anila Rao, Haptik’s vice president and business head for APAC, shared that with the launch of their conversational partner program a few quarters back, their focus in APAC countries has been mainly to look for strategic partners who can add value and help elevate customer experiences for their clients through Haptik’s AI chatbots and enterprise CX platform.

“Thanks to MDI NOVARE’s presence, scale, and strong reputation of over 30 years in the Philippines region, it did not take us long to decide, collaborate and jolt this strategic agreement together. With Haptik’s industry-leading virtual assistants and chatbots built using the best NLP architecture, we feel it’s a great win not only for MDI NOVARE and Haptik but also for businesses in the Philippines,” said Rao.

Meanwhile, Allan So, MDI NOVARE’s chief commercial officer, commented, “We are happy to team up with Haptik to bring AI solutions to more businesses in the Philippines. Growing our footprint in AI with best-in-class partners like Haptik is part of our mission to be the National Champion in Technology as we bring the power of AI chatbots to deliver next-level Customer Experience.”

Sydney, Australia – Experience improvement solutions company InMoment and customer journey SaaS platform inQuba have teamed up to offer a journey-first approach to customer experience (CX) improvement to greatly reduce churn, increase adoption, and lower costs.

The combined offering gives companies a one-stop solution for customer-centric organisations to integrate their customer experience (CX) and customer journey (CJ) management programs to greatly reduce churn, increase adoption and lower costs.

In addition, the InMoment and inQuba partnership enables CX practitioners to understand why customers stall or quit a transaction across channels, and provides personalised, contextual interventions that move customers forward toward their goal.

“With this journey toolkit, customers can also track individual journeys by overlaying context, understanding segments, anticipating an action with visual analytics and machine learning (ML) all in an effort to stay agile and adaptable, optimise the experience, and remain relevant to the consumer,” both companies said in a press statement.

Wendy Greenham, senior director of global partnerships at InMoment, said, “Today, customer experience insights are not enough. What moves the needle is the ability to drive action and a tangible return on investment. inQuba, like InMoment, goes beyond insights to drive business outcomes for their clients. This partnership will help our joint customers improve acquisition and retention as well as enable reduced cost of service.”

Meanwhile, Michael Renzon, CEO of inQuba, commented, “InMoment XI combined with inQuba Journey Management takes experience improvement to an unprecedented level for CX teams, delivering the holy grail of insights to action to commercial outcome. CX leaders are demanding more – the ability to clearly identify experience themes, zoom into the underlying journeys, understand granular customer and segment detail, and change customer behaviour and commercial outcomes in real time. Together we deliver just that.”

Hanoi, Vietnam – Local bank VPBank in Vietnam has signed a partnership agreement with iGTB, the fintech platform of Intellect Design Arena, to enhance its corporate and SME customer’s experience, as well as operational efficiency.

The partnership is aimed to bring the bank closer to the goal of being the most customer-friendly bank through technology in 2022 with iGTB’s products and services for its corporate, commercial and SME clients.

According to VPBank’s CEO Nguyen Duc Vinh, they will continue to improve customer experience and expand the business ecosystem through a new and efficient digital technology, which will transform its cash management. He also added that they are set to significantly increase the competitive edge for the bank and retain their leadership position as a preferred bank of choice for both SME and for corporate customers.

“VPBank has always been a pioneer in selecting the most up-to-date technology to power accelerated digital transformation. Strengthening our IT Infrastructure to enable and automate digital strategy is our key to improving productivity by 20-30% in order that we stay ahead of the competition. This is why harnessing disruptive digital IT initiatives is currently a major priority for us,” Duc Vinh said.

Meanwhile, Manish Maakan, CEO at iGTB, commented that the partnership powered by iGTB’s global expertise in transaction banking technology will help VPBank achieve its goal of becoming the most customer-friendly technology-driven bank and the most valuable bank in Vietnam.

“I am proud that this latest VPBank deal transformation deepens Intellect’s portfolio to a dominant position in Vietnam. Our investments into iGTB Cash Cloud and iColumbus.ai platforms are the keys to a faster go-to-market, so that our client portfolios across APAC, Middle East, Europe and Americas can realise early returns on their technology investments,” Maakan said.

He added, “Our simultaneous market-depth strategy is a result of years of investment into local Vietnamese regulations & payment systems, backed by iGTB’s local relationship managers and delivery teams out of Hanoi, and our longstanding partnership with Vietnamese FPT Information Services.”

This transformative cash management platform aims to delivers a seamless customer experience with a completely digital integrated transaction banking suite of iGTB’s cash management, trade finance, payments, account services, collections and liquidity ,management powered by its front-end contextual banking experience (CBX) platform.

Sydney, Australia — Alida, a Total Experience Management (TXM) software company, has announced the upcoming launch of its new data centre in Sydney in winter this year. 

The new Sydney data centre, which will cater Australian and New Zealand customers, enables an increase in data performance and speed in these regions. It also promises to aid global organisations operating or looking to expand within the Oceanic region. Having locally available data will enhance the data collection process and efficiently meet clients’ regional compliance requirements. 

Riaz Raihan, president of products and engineering at Alida, believes that customer centricity lives at the heart of Alida’s business priorities and is the driving force behind this exciting new data centre.

“We made the decision to launch this service expansion after carefully listening to our customers and taking action on their desired data needs. We look forward to offering our customers in Australia and New Zealand a local CX solution that yields high performing and reliable data collection services,” said Raihan. 

Meanwhile, Steven Medeiros, SVP and general manager at Alida APAC, shared that Alida’s expansion in Australia will enable their clients to build better engaged and online communities for ongoing customer feedback.

“Working together with our local partners, we are in a great position to help organisations across Asia Pacific to improve their customer experience, accelerate innovation, increase revenue, and mitigate decision risk,” said Medeiros.