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At Salesforce, Nichola Palmer works with customers to bring their stories of innovation and transformation to life. Every month, she highlights three small businesses in Asia that use Salesforce to overcome business challenges.
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to present significant challenges to businesses across Asia. Success in the new normal requires the agility to adapt and thrive in a rapidly changing business and social environment. For these three innovative businesses, that has meant embracing organisation-wide digital transformation.
Here’s how they have digitally transformed to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow.
Since the company’s launch in 2003, Manila-based Oneworld Alliance Logistics has rapidly developed into one of the largest logistics companies in the Philippines. In fact, the company has achieved double digit year-on-year growth for most of its 17-year history. Now, Oneworld Alliance Logistics is embracing digital transformation to continue building on that success.
To do so, the company has replaced paper-based processes with new digital workflows. This involved building and deploying new custom financial systems on Sales Cloud as the company’s new customer relationship management (CRM) software.
The results have been impressive. Oneworld Alliance Logistics has achieved a 50% improvement in the efficiency of its administrative processes. The company has also seen an 85% to 98% improvement in the efficiency of its back-office processes.
Salesforce has also been instrumental in helping the company maintain operations throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. This was particularly challenging with restrictions in the Philippines that forced the company to send half of its workforce home.
“Salesforce has given us the ability to adapt as fast as COVID-19 is changing the business landscape,” says Miko Sumagang, Technical Adviser at Oneworld Alliance Logistics. “Gone are the days when our employees would have to physically walk between departments carrying paper slips. Digitalisation limits physical interactions, which of course is paramount to preventing workplace infections.”
Malaysia-based Myra is more than your average property development company. It is in the business of building happily ever afters.
For Ken Goh, Head of Marketing at Myra, that means creating customer experiences that extend far beyond the pre-sales pitch. “Purchasing a home off the plan is not as tangible as buying an existing home,” he says. “Our customer lifecycle can be up to three years. We want to support our customers through their entire journey with us.”
However, managing complex customer journeys was difficult with the company’s cumbersome paper-based customer management system. Goh knew that digital transformation was the way forward. He secured Sales Cloud for customer segmentation and Pardot for marketing automation.
“With Salesforce, we are now able to act more as a consultant than a standard property developer. We can provide advice and support throughout the entire customer journey, from finance to interior design,” he says. “That has helped to reduce our drop-off rate from 6.7% to 1.45%, while achieving a 65% to 70% reduction in the cost per lead.”
Goh says that the company’s Salesforce deployment has made it possible to continue operations during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even when Malaysia’s Movement Control Order (MCO) meant that the company had to send 300 employees home on short notice.
“Salesforce made that pivot possible,” he explains. “Construction had to be shut down, but most of our other departments were able to jump right back into work and operate at 70% to 80% efficiency throughout the MCO. That translates to about MYR$82 million worth of sales bookings from the middle of March that we might not have been able to close without Salesforce.”
After transforming Vietnam’s furniture industry with a super-store business model, BAYA is now embracing digital transformation to drive the company’s next chapter of innovation.
“We have a lot of competition now and a very aggressive vision for growth,” says Vu Anh Nguyen, General Manager of BAYA. “It’s not enough to compete just on furniture design any more. We need to provide the best customer experience available, and we’re putting the technology in place to achieve that.”
That has included the deployment of Salesforce Customer 360 to integrate data from multiple customer databases. BAYA uses Sales Cloud to increase transparency, speed, and efficiency across the sales pipeline. They deploy Quip to boost customer collaboration in the interior design process. Finally, they use Marketing Cloud to drive lead generation and personalise service journeys.
This organisation-wide approach to digital transformation paid dividends quickly. The team at BAYA secured a major account within two months of their Sales Cloud deployment.
“A client needed to furnish 40 apartments across two floors of an apartment building. She came into a BAYA store in the afternoon and we were able to get the design draft out to her that night,” says Nguyen. “She was impressed with our speed and we closed the deal the next day. Just that single account represents a 3,000% return on our investment in Salesforce.”
This strong commitment to digital transformation has also helped BAYA bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic. The company’s post-pandemic growth rate is stronger than ever. BAYA opened a new store in Bac Ninh in early July, and has plans to open two more new stores in the coming months.
The trail to growth can have lots of twists and turns. The Small Business Growth Kit helps to make the trek easier with tips on how to plan a path forward and prepare a sales pitch. There’s also a list of indicators that can help businesses decide when it’s time to invest in new tech. Download The Small Business Growth Kit here.
For more stories of successful small businesses in Asia, see these posts from our SMB blog series:
