Asian 'Trailblazers' take to CRM with success

With Industry 4.0 established across Asia, small to medium businesses (SMBs) must turn to customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, to ensure they are at the forefront of a crowded marketplace and to win the digital minds of technology-driven customers. 

For those SMBs still unsure about using CRM tools, with artificial intelligence (AI) to stay a head of the pack, it is worth looking at some examples of established businesses that have taken up CRM solutions with proven success. These 4 businesses share their CRM experience:

1) EATIGO

Take South East Asia-based restaurant reservation platform, Eatigo, which launched in six countries in the space of five years. During Eatigo's early days, the busy sales department used free CRM tools to manage the sales pipeline, however these basic platforms were simplistic and lacking in the capabilities required.

Siddhanta Kothari, CFO and one of the co-founders of Eatigo, says leads were forgotten or not fully capitalised on and they couldn't see the sales cycle or monitor the workload.

"Coming from corporate backgrounds in the telco industry, the four founders understood the importance of effective sales management," says Kothari. "We agreed that Salesforce is the gold standard." Following their partnership with TripAdvisor, Kothari and the Eatigo management team decided they could wait no longer and deployed Sales Cloud simultaneously in Singapore and Thailand.

According to Kothari, Salesforce's Sales Cloud (CRM) meant Eatigo could better manage its sales staff and the sales pipeline to ensure full efficiency, while also increasing lead fulfilment and centralising sales processes across all its territories.

"With Sales Cloud, we can now see how many leads are getting burnt out and are able to appropriately reallocate those leads," he says. "It also allows us to better manage our relationships with our large global clients like Marriott Hotels that are very important to us."

Using Salesforce allowed Eatigo to move from a reactive response to a proactive approach across is entire business. This takes the reservation platform towards its goal of becoming a leading regional and global presence. 

2) ROOJAI.COM

Another example, one of Thailand's most innovative leaders in insurance is Nicholas Faquet. As the first to bring online car insurance to Southeast Asia with DirectAsia.com in 2009, Faquet has subsequently upended the industry again with his newest venture, Roojai.com.

Launching in 2016, it already has over 30,000 policy holders, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, as far as Faquet is concerned. "The population is digitally savvy, but ecommerce is just starting to take off here," he said. "Which is why Thailand is the right place for us to catch the wave that we believe is coming over the next ten years."

To catch that wave, and hit the numbers that Roojai.com wants, Faquet has turned to Salesforce to manage everything. Initially the business was sitting on a traditional insurance platform, only using Salesforce for the CRM, but that wasn't paying dividends when the company is the most visited insurance website in Thailand, with over 1 million-page views per month.

By deploying all insurance processes and customer service onto Salesforce, the company has been able to streamline its organization-wide processes on to the single platform.

As Patrick Le Roux, the CIO of Roojai.com said, "Everything we do now is within the Salesforce ecosystem. Integration with all apps is so much easier, and we are able to build amazing customer experiences. We believe that this is really putting us at the forefront of the evolving customer purchase process in Thailand."

To read more about the success that Roojai.com has enjoyed thanks to the Salesforce deployment, click here. 

3) GO-JEK

When GO-JEK was looking to grow its GO-FOOD service business, it turned to Salesforce to help it do mighty things, despite its small beginnings. The Indonesian start-up launched in 2010 as a concierge phone service with a single call centre in Jakarta that aimed to help residents beat the city's notorious traffic jams.

Today, GO-JEK operates in 50 cities across Indonesia. Expanding substantially from its transport, courier and shopping service roots, it is now the number-one online service booking app in Indonesia, with GO-FOOD managed on Salesforce's CRM platform.

According to Nova Kurniawan, VP of ERP and Platforms Implementation at GO-JEK, prior to implementing Salesforce, the GO-FOOD sales team onboarded merchants manually and managed their data via spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets.

As thousands of merchants rushed to register via the GO-FOOD website, this created a complicated workflow that required the sales team to manually replicate account data across a number of back-end systems.

In addition, the manual spreadsheets simply could not accommodate the enormous volume of data the GO-FOOD team was dealing with, says Kurniawan.

Kurniawan and the GO-FOOD Team turned to Sales Cloud for the solution to their problems, because it was a simple way to improve processes.

"Being cloud based, we didn't need to invest in new infrastructure and hardware. It's easy to implement and ready to use," he says. "Sales Cloud provides the speed and agility my team requires to support the company's exponential growth."

However, growth wasn't the only reason Asia-based SMBs turned to Salesforce, having a strong connection to customers and internal teams as proved to be another metric for success.

4) ZOOMOOV

Singapore-based ZOOMOOV was founded to help children develop social and emotional skills, while at the same time having a lot of fun. It's seen as a trailblazer, thanks to its imaginative and rapidly growing retail outlets, which include an indoor adventure park, farm-themed sandpit, playground, and child's version of the escape room phenomenon – a maze.

ZOOMOOV's first retail outlets opened in 2014, focused around animal-themed electronic rides available in large shopping malls. To fuel its rapid expansion, ZOOMOOV is tapping into Salesforce and analytics to maximise new opportunities and inform business strategy. "Salesforce helps us understand our customers and anticipate their demands. We can then innovate fast to give them what they want — even before they know they want it." Miguel Pereira, CEO at ZOOMOOV, says.

At the centre of ZOOMOOV's customer loyalty program is Salesforce Sales Cloud, which captures customer details that are essential for personalizing offers and providing relevant communications. This personalized approach to marketing is critical for customer satisfaction and retention of members.

This data is also used to glean insights about customer behaviour. ZOOMOOV keeps a close eye on how outlets are performing, and this is especially important when it has a less hands-on role, such as when undertaking a joint venture, or franchising overseas. For the strength of the brand, it's critical that ZOOMOOV can maintain a real-time understanding of how these ventures are performing.

This data-focused approach has allowed ZOOMOOV to expand from one location to over 58 outlets across four countries and assisted ZOOMOOV to intelligently design new experiences that would resonate with children. Pereira says that the precise use of data to engage deeply with customers has been critical for ZOOMOOV in increasing its membership base from 35,000 to 250,000 in two years."All of the information I need to make decisions and manage our operations is centralized in Salesforce and available in real time on any device," Pereira says. "We work in such a fast environment, and need that efficiency and immediate access to data."

Become a CRM trailblazer, get a free trial of Salesforce now. Read here for more stories on customers who have had success with Salesforce #1 CRM.

This article is part of a wider series, read our earlier stories on Industry 4.0 reshaping customer expectations for small businesses in Asia, How AI Helps SMBs Meet Customer's Digital Expectations or Salesforce tailors the right CRM for SMBs.