According to the Salesforce State of Service report, 79% of service professionals believe it’s impossible to provide great service without a complete view of customer interactions.
It’s easy to understand why. For today’s customers, great service typically means service that’s personalised and efficient. However, that’s difficult to deliver when customer data is siloed across different systems.
PLDT Global is one of many businesses that have experienced this challenge. PLDT Global offers telecommunications infrastructure and solutions to a global network of carriers, enterprise customers, and distributors.
The business also provides connectivity and content services to Filipinos living abroad. One of these services, Free Bee, is an award winning app that enables users to make free international calls back to the Philippines and stay connected with their friends and family.
Here, we share how PLDT Global has overcome the challenge of siloed data to provide all its customers with best in class service.
Digital drives need to level up service
Like many other organisations, PLDT Global was driven to transform service in response to customers’ digital expectations.
“Customer service is very challenging these days because almost everything now is digital and there’s a higher expectation for businesses to be digitally available and extra efficient. We identified the need to level up our service capabilities, including the tools and knowledge bases used by our customer service teams and the cadences for cross-functional collaboration,” said Lea T. Garcia, VP and Head of CX and Process Quality at PLDT Global Corporation.
As a starting point, PLDT Global needed to gain real-time access to, and analysis of, its customer data. This information was distributed across six major systems. These were systems that contained loyalty data, subscription data, transaction data, digital distribution and a Voice of the Customer system.
PLDT Global wanted to connect these systems for a complete view of the customer, enabling personalised service and supporting customer analytics.
Lea shared that PLDT Global is data-driven and wanted to better understand its customers to deliver more meaningful products and services.
“We make an extra effort to collaborate and engage with customers so we can craft solutions that fit in with their lives and businesses. What carries through in everything we do is our core value of malasakit, which translates to a unique Filipino care and sense of ownership in service,” said Lea.
Unlocking customer data
Heroku Connect has helped PLDT Global deliver on its customer experience goals. Heroku Connect is a data integration service that is typically used to synchronise data between Salesforce and custom apps.
In this case, Heroku Connect was used to link multiple systems and establish a consolidated view of each customer.
Appistoki Consulting, a Salesforce Gold Consulting Partner, worked with PLDT Global to implement Heroku Connect and to optimise the business’s analytics capabilities using Tableau CRM.
Remarkably, the project was delivered in just 14 weeks. That’s something that Abhijeet Kulkarni, Founder & CEO of Appistoki Consulting partly attributed to the versatile nature of Heroku Connect.
“We believe in leveraging the power of the platform and always adopt a configuration-first approach,” said Abhijeet. “Heroku Connect is also a very versatile platform. We used it both as middleware to link multiple systems and as a database to normalise data before leveraging it to enrich the business’ customer profiles.”
“We now have a 360-degree view of our customers, which helps us manage service and provides a strong foundation for analytics to support all of our customer experience efforts,” said Lea. “Tableau CRM also gives us the tools we need to slice and dice our data and make it more actionable. For example, we can carry out customer modelling, customer segmentation, and churn analysis.
“These analytics provide us with a greater understanding of our customers and also offer us insights into the future, thereby helping us formulate plans to grow the business further.”
PLDT Global has already experienced more immediate wins, including:
- Eight percent increase in first contact resolution rate
- Reduction in first response speed from an average of 33 minutes to under five minutes
- Five percent increase in CSAT, lifting average to 85%
- Seven point increase in NPS for an average score of 35
“Overall, our implementation of Heroku Connect was a strategic move and something that will benefit our customers and business for the long term,” said Lea.
Watch the webinar with PLDT Global to learn more about how the business is using Heroku Connect to drive better customer service.
