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At Salesforce, Nichola Palmer works with customers to bring their stories of innovation and transformation to life. She highlights three small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the ASEAN region that use Salesforce to overcome business challenges.
Forward-thinking companies across ASEAN are using digital transformation to meet rapidly evolving customer expectations and build deeper customer relationships.
To achieve this, organisations need a single source of truth for customer data. Sales teams also need tools that can track customer conversations and reveal insights required to drive more meaningful value-added conversations with customers.
Here’s how three successful companies use Salesforce to build better customer relationships:
GGI Nippon Life is embracing digital transformation to meet rapidly evolving customer expectations in Myanmar. When the company began local operations in 2013, internet connectivity was patchy across the country and technology uptake was low. That has changed in recent years, and the company is now redefining what it means to be customer-centric.
“We understand that true customer centricity isn’t just about delivering basic insurance services,” says Ang Kian Wee, Division Head, Strategy and Transformation, GGI Nippon Life. “It’s really about understanding the needs of our customers, and how they change through different life stages.”
To understand customer needs, the company needed a way to drive more meaningful conversations between salespeople and customers. So Kian Wee and his team turned to the Salesforce Customer 360 platform.
They began with a Service Cloud implementation to digitise the recruitment process. The human resources team is now able to digitalise several processes relating to creation of job positions, job applications by candidates, and candidate selection.
Next came a Sales Cloud deployment to enable salespeople to build a 360-degree customer view. “We established operating procedures within every process with guidance and instructions,” says Manoranjan Sahoo, Chief Distribution Officer, GGI Nippon Life. “We also pre-set tasks salespeople need to complete at every stage.
“In June we closed about 50 policies with a small pilot team of five to six salespeople. That number doubled in August, and doubled again by December.
“Sales Cloud has also improved operational efficiency. Previously, our salespeople spent two to three hours per day on paperwork. That’s now down to 30 minutes or less.”
Dornier MedTech is a customer-centric global healthcare company that is embracing customer obsession and innovation. The company uses Salesforce to drive this transformation across its ASEAN operations, starting with Singapore and Japan.
“The agility of any company in today’s increasingly disruptive world is a function of the mindset of the team and the speed by which critical data is made available to them,” says Issac Khoo, General Manager at Dornier MedTech. “Salesforce has enabled us to capture and reference the wealth of data points in the customer’s journey with Dornier MedTech”
Prior to adopting Salesforce, processes were largely manual. This created a lack of transparency between teams as data was held in spreadsheets and difficult to share. The company initially deployed Sales Cloud to streamline approvals. Later, it rolled out Sales Cloud to sales teams across ASEAN to provide a 360-degree view of customers.
According to Hiromasa Ito, IT Manager for Dornier MedTech in Japan, Sales Cloud has saved each sales rep there up to two hours a week on reporting. “Our sales reps now have more time to spend with customers and they have quick access to customer and product information through the Salesforce mobile app. It is also easier for them to share information with different teams.”
Dornier MedTech is now also using Service Cloud to provide more efficient and personalised support. Enquiries are automatically routed to the right team and support engineers are notified right away when a customer needs help. In the past, this could take up to four hours.
“A large part of support is knowing your customer and having a platform like Salesforce that can capture all our customer conversations gives us that knowledge," says Martyn Yap, Senior IT Manager, Asia Pacific at Dornier MedTech Singapore. "It’s helping us get closer to our customer and deliver more proactive support."
As a Salesforce implementation partner, Ranosys is helping to support its clients’ digital transformation with expert Salesforce consulting, development, implementation, and support. The company is also driving global growth from its Singapore headquarters, with an internal Salesforce deployment.
Ranosys Technologies CEO Rameshwar Vyas and his team have replaced their legacy customer relationship management (CRM) software with Sales Cloud. They have also built a series of apps on the Customer 360 platform, including recruitment, workforce, and payroll management systems.
“We’ve created a single source of truth,” says Vyas. “We used to generate reports monthly or quarterly, but there’s no need for that with Salesforce. Anyone who wants to check on the pulse of the company can see the data they need at any time.”
The recruitment management system has increased human resources’ efficiency between 30 and 40 per cent. The workforce management system has improved resource allocation, and the payroll management system has increased back-end efficiency.
As the company looks towards the challenges of the future, Vyas is focused on building new capabilities and upskilling employees for jobs of the future.
“We believe developing employees is very important,” he says. “There are currently 37 people in our Practice and Solutions team. And we work with senior strategy consultants whose focus is to prepare us for the next biggest challenge, and to find ways to take our people to the next step.”
To best serve your customers, you must understand what is most meaningful to them. Digital transformation at its core is about connecting your team with the tools they need to identify customer needs. Then they can drive and track more meaningful conversations that add real value to your customers.
The road to growth can have lots of twists and turns. Hear from other small business leaders that have found success and learn from their insights to fuel growth. Watch the SMB success stories playlist here.
For more stories of successful small businesses in Asia, see these posts from our SMB blog series:
