Singtel Uses Salesforce to Unlock Insights and Deliver Connected Customer Experiences

As Asia’s leading communications technology group, Singtel has a rich heritage of bringing innovations to market including Singapore’s first 5G standalone network. It’s also committed to helping businesses of all sizes prepare for a smart, hyper-connected future enabled by 5G as well as other emerging technologies. 

Singtel Enterprise Business is transforming with Salesforce to put customers first in this hyperconnected world. It's a world where customers’ needs are complex and fast-changing, making it imperative to have insights and understanding of these needs. 

Singtel also wants to respond and adapt to these needs quickly across all parts of the organisation—from the full customer purchasing cycle through to post-sales support. It also wants to embed these insights into product development and innovation initiatives to make products and services more real, relevant, and customer-centric. 

Through this transformation, Singtel also aims to enhance the experience of employees, empowering them to work and collaborate more efficiently with one trusted platform.

Singtel’s transformation with Salesforce has been fuelled by a drive for greater customer insights. 

“In today’s world, customer insights are critical. We want customers to know we are obsessed with understanding them and will go the extra mile to meet their needs,” said Lim. “We also want customers to feel we are really easy to deal with despite being a large organisation.”

Salesforce provided a solution to all these challenges and a way for the business to collaborate around customer needs. 

“In any large organisation, you have many customer-facing roles and if you can’t work together effectively the customer will see that very quickly,” said Lim.

Singtel Enterprise Business serves a diverse range of customers and it uses different strategies and touchpoints to drive engagement with each audience. Salesforce Customer 360 gives the business the insights it needs to optimise these touchpoints and engage customers in the most effective way possible.

“Salesforce helps us translate customer insights into meaningful initiatives to support our top-line and bottom-line targets. For example, we can easily see customers’ historical purchases, and use that information to derive a strategy for cross-selling or upselling,” said Toh Lee Chiang, Vice President, Business Segment at Singtel.

With Marketing Cloud, Singtel has streamlined the end-to-end process for managing campaigns, from audience segmentation to building and sending communications. It can also manage campaigns and journeys across multiple channels, including email, SMS, and direct mail. 

Singtel can also drive efficient growth, by easily measuring the effectiveness of strategies and campaigns to gain insights into customers’ responses. This helps to inform what can be done to improve engagement.

Sales Cloud provides Singtel’s sales teams with streamlined and consistent processes for account planning and management, so they can focus on the highest value activities. It also makes it easier to track and analyse sales funnel performance. 

In the past, sales insights had to be manually collated from three different systems which impacted productivity. Now, a single dashboard enables the business to measure and review outcomes from campaign demand generation to opportunity generation. These insights help them to make adjustments and re-align initiatives to drive a better outcome. 

“My team is executing their plans well and that’s because Sales Cloud and its account planning capabilities are so powerful. We can easily build account plans to support our strategy and keep everyone disciplined and moving together in the same direction,” said Lee Chiang.

As Singtel partners with customers in a complex, fast-changing and dynamic market, effective collaboration requires insight and agility. Singtel also needs the ability to quickly respond and adapt to changes and mobilise the right expertise. 

Salesforce supports Singtel by providing everyone who interacts with customers - including channel partners - with a more complete picture of customers and their needs. 

MuleSoft integrates Salesforce with other key business systems to enhance this view of the customer and bring in additional insights such as customer purchase history. 

“For the first time, we have a complete and updated profile of each customer from opportunity to spend which allows us to make better and faster business decisions. Imagine achieving this with more than 100,000 customers and the productivity that’s been gained,” said Lee Chiang. 

Dashboards provided by Salesforce as well as Tableau - used separately in the business - contribute to these results by helping employees quickly visualise information.

One of the reasons Singtel chose Salesforce is its preference for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) over on-premise solutions. Chen Hong, CIO, Group Enterprise IT & Business Transformation Office at Singtel, shared that time to market factors into this preference. 

“Choosing SaaS solutions speeds up time to market and with Salesforce we can take advantage of new feature releases three times a year,” said Chen Hong. 

Singtel partnered with Salesforce Professional Services to leverage the team’s platform expertise and maximise the value of the deployment. This included re-engineering Singtel’s processes to adapt to Salesforce best practice garnered from experience with many other customer implementations. It was a complex implementation, but Singtel and the Professional Services team worked collaboratively to overcome each challenge as it came. The close partnership helped speed up time to value and enabled Singtel’s internal team with Salesforce skills and knowledge to manage the deployment on an ongoing basis. 

“We all know transformation journeys are never easy, but we had a great partnership with Salesforce Professional Services and whenever there was an issue we faced it together and found the best way to solve it,” said Chen Hong. 

Singtel has leveraged content from Trailhead to provide remote training on Salesforce and onboard its global teams. The training includes bite-sized learning materials which have made it easy for teams to upskill from anywhere. 

Lim shared that the frictionless experience provided by Salesforce also helped to drive adoption. “Sometimes you implement a system and have to chase people to use it, but Salesforce has been intuitive to learn and we keep hearing about new ways it has enhanced the life and productivity of our people,” said Lim.