The pandemic has propelled Filipinos to form new online shopping habits, and they now rely heavily on social media, apps and mobile devices to evaluate brands and make purchases. To capture mind share and preference, retailers, fintechs, business-to-business companies and every organization growing revenue via e-commerce need to humanize engagement and customer experience (CX) throughout the entire consumer buying journey and connect meaningfully with consumers.
It was an opportune time a CX forum was held recently where I was the moderator for a panel and speakers consisting of prime movers in the CX space. One of the speakers was Ms. Fay Angelica Supremo, country manager of Insider Philippines, who said that “given the speed of change in consumer behavior, the need to be highly engaged with your customers has never been greater.” She highlighted that one way to capture the attention of your online audience is by leveraging gamification. Insider, a software-as-a-service firm that provides customer data experience platform, enables gamification through online coupons and Wheel of Fortune. This humanizes the user experience, improves engagement levels and encourages users to take specific actions. Ms. Janette Abad Santos, first vice president of Robinsons Bank (RBank), on the other hand, said that “online presence is a must-have and in various platforms; and yet, we observed the importance of being truly connected with the customers to involve both the virtual presence and the physical presence.” She shared using email marketing, with the assistance of Insider’s solution, as one of the key engagement techniques that helped RBank connect with its customers. As an example, RBank’s Free Shakey’s Pizza Promo for cardholders aimed to increase credit card usage to targeted customers. This promotional email marketing material has had the highest email open-rate and click-through-rate, which helped the bank increase the credit card usage of its customer. The third speaker was Ms. Jia de Guzman, brand acquisition manager under LazMall Fashion of Lazada Group. She shared how LazMall, touted as Southeast Asia’s Largest Mall, is using online campaigns as one of the best ways to expose a seller’s online store, gain more traffic, reach more people, and ultimately, boost sales. An example she cited was how LazMall employs brand mega offers, which is a daily campaign dedicated to LazMall sellers to drive traffic to their participating products and their best deals.
The last speaker was Winsley Bangit, chief customer officer of GCash, who spoke about the fintech company’s customer-driven digital transformation journey. An example he gave was GCash’s QR-on-Demand, where any small business or proprietor can generate a QR code in the GCash app to be used by their customers to pay. Because of this, even small businesses, such as tricycle operators and drivers, fishermen, farmers and public market vendors, can use QR code without the hassles of technology development. It was extremely helpful during the pandemic, as physical cash exchanges were difficult due to social distancing protocols.
During the panel discussion, I asked all the speakers: How has digitalization of customer touchpoints evolved from the onset of the pandemic to where we are now? Are you seeing a personalization of customer experiences across digital customer touchpoints? All panelists agreed that during the pandemic, their organizations enabled the digitization of customer touchpoints in an accelerated way, in order to adapt to the new normal way of interacting with customers. But alongside this is the need to personalize the digital experience of customers. On the part of Insider, it leverages the power of artificial intelligence and smart personalization for individualized experiences for its users to gain substantial uplift in online sales, cart recovery, ad returns, customer reviews and repeat purchases. It offers plenty of personalized templates and solutions such as:
– Progress bar, which shows the user’s purchase progress to achieving a goal, say free shipping
– Smart recommender, which is an AI (artificial intelligence)-powered recommendation system to show personalized, contextual and relevant content to customers.
– Survey templates, which allow you to actively collect feedback about browsing and buying experience to make customers feel valued and improve the brand experience.
– Capture user intent to exit and nudge them to provide email for future communication.
GCash, on the other hand, enables personalization through personalized messages and promotions, and customized dashboards for its users. It puts heavy focus on data analytics to map out their users’ customer profiles which gives insights on the type of products customers would benefit from the most and which advertising they should see. Examples of customer profiles include Online Shoppers – knowing who uses GCash to shop (e.g. Shopee, Lazada); and Foodies — knowing who transacts and tops up with food delivery apps.
Indeed, technology is advancing and enabling customer experience across all digital touchpoints. What’s more amazing is that developments in technology are democratizing this capability across all users.
The author is the founder and chief executive officer of Hungry Workhorse, a digital and culture transformation consulting firm. He is a fellow at the US-based Institute for Digital Transformation. He teaches strategic management in the MBA Program of De La Salle University. The author may be emailed at rey.lugtu@hungryworkhorse.com.