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.
While the COVID-19 pandemic has brought some activities to a standstill over the past few months, many businesses across Asia have moved into high gear to meet the crisis head-on. From the rapid activation of working from home to pivoting to help customers in this new normal, the speed of the response has been impressive.
Here are three fast-growing businesses who have helped set the pace in Asia.
1. Roojai.com
Roojai.com provides drivers in Thailand with simple, affordable, and reliable online insurance. Today, it is the most visited insurance website in the country with roughly one million visitors per month. Supported by their CRM, the business has put customer needs at the heart of its operation and has achieved more than 250% year-over-year growth.
Just before the pandemic, Roojai.com began planning for a 24/7 support model which involved some call centre employees working from home. So when COVID-19 reached Thailand, the business had already planned for the logistics of remote work and quickly mapped out a plan for half of their workforce to work from home. As the impact of the virus spread, the business accelerated that plan and moved everyone out of the office to remote work in less than two days. With Roojai.com’s call centre and claims process managed within their Salesforce CRM and easily accessible from home, all that had to be done then was help employees with their home internet and computer set up. Roojai.com maintained service levels throughout this time with up to 98% of calls picked up within 20 seconds.
Now as they transition to slowly moving teams back into the office they are also adapting their workplace to maintain social distancing. This includes minimising contact with customers by using their video claim service powered by Salesforce and SightCall from the AppExchange, instead of face-to-face service visits. Their longer term plan is to make customer service available 24/7, so the lessons learned from the past few months will be used as the night shift continues to work from home. In addition, Roojai.com managed to identify opportunities for new insurance product lines during the COVID-19 lockdown, and are now able to provide customers with greater peace of mind.
2. Zenyum
Within the last two years, Zenyum has built the fastest growing smile cosmetics brand in Asia with operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Taiwan. Offering dental services and products like invisible braces, Zenyum provides customers with a highly personalised experience to guide them on their smile journey.
During the pandemic, dental clinics have had to close for some time, leaving Zenyum unable to book customers for consultation or treatment. As a result, Zenyum pivoted to focus on client experience at the beginning of their dental smile journey. They initiated early conversations to understand treatment goals and how they could help. While switching to a complete, remote-first culture, Zenyum also created a COVID-19 tag in their CRM, so they could identify customers who needed extra support or a flexible plan. Capturing all this information in Salesforce means no leads were lost and prepares them to help customers move forward in their smile journey once clinics reopen. Meanwhile, the management team was able to monitor efficiency in dashboards and support employees as they worked to maintain their service levels while working from home.
3. BINUS University
BINUS University is one of Indonesia’s largest private universities, serving more than 45,000 students across a growing network of campuses. The university is driven by a commitment to help students achieve their dreams so they can go on to enrich society and help improve quality of life for all Indonesians. In line with this commitment, the university has been using Salesforce to digitise its operations with a focus on enabling student success.
This ongoing digital transformation has supported BINUS University’s incredibly agile response to COVID-19. In mid-March the university had to close its campus due to the pandemic and subsequently asked all of its students from outside Jakarta to go home. With 150 employees already using Salesforce, teams were able to transition to work from home while helping facilitate students’ transportation needs and managing essential communication. Dashboards and analytics in their CRM tracked their key performance indicators (KPI). And where the university was able to identify financial or personal difficulties for students, they have been quick to pause irrelevant communications.
During this period, BINUS University has continued to employ security workers and other staff who are unable to be on campus to work. However, the impact of the virus has left many people unemployed and through a special grant from the government, 1,300 have so far signed up for future programs run by the university.
Salesforce is committed to helping all businesses navigate through this time with agility. So if like these three businesses, you face new challenges in meeting the needs of customers and employees, see how Salesforce Care can help.
For more stories of successful small businesses in Asia, see these posts from our SMB blog series:
- 3 Companies Using Technology To Enable Business Growth in ASEAN
- 3 Examples of Successful Digital Transformation in Asia
