#GROWTH Summit Singapore: Ushers New Chapter in Customer Engagement

It was Ni Hao, Namaste, and Selamat Pagi, Singapore as we kickstarted the latest chapter of the #GROWTH Summits for 2022.

Held at the Shangri-La Singapore on June 02, there was plenty of excitement to go around as an overwhelming 330+ growth marketers, CRM managers, and product experts, among others gathered to talk about what’s new, what’s big, and what’s bold in customer engagement in 2022.

So, let’s dive right into the highlights of the event.

At MoEngage, we believe that deeper insights into customer behavior, affinity, needs, and even apprehensions are vital for brands to deliver an engaging customer experience. And so, Insights-led Customer Engagement was the pivotal focus area at the conference, around which conversations flowed during the fireside chats and panel discussions.

Future-Proofing Customer Engagement Strategy

Would customer experience in 2030 be very different from what it was in 1930? Well, the answer is both yes and no, because the customer’s need to be heard and understood would remain the same but what would need to change is the servicing of it. Anjali Kalia, AVP – Digital Marketing at IHH Healthcare in her session on future-proofing customer engagement strategy emphasized the need to adopt technology enablers, such an AI-based app or assistant that delivers a hyper-personalized customer experience by foreseeing customer needs. For organizations and individuals to be future-ready, this would also mean building a culture of learning, listening, and slowly building capabilities.

Keynote Session

As the keynote speaker, Roshni Mahtani Cheung, founder and CEO of theAsianParent and TickledMedia, said that meaningful customer engagement will come with collecting and analysing the right type of user information. A big part of such meaningful engagement also involves figuring out if your “business purpose resonates with the customer”. “Meaningful growth is all about building a purposeful business which is socially responsible. Figure out the higher purpose of your business and how it adds social value in the larger context,” she said. The era of growth at any cost was no longer acceptable, she emphasised.

This was followed by a session on Decoding the current market trends in Web 3.0 presented by Shaun Heng of Spartan Labs. “The Web3 space moves very fast and there’s something new to be learned everyday from the people you interact with in the space,” said Heng.

Panel Discussions

Get Personal!

Topic: The Personalization Problem: Segmentation, Context, and Timing

Speakers: 

• Diane Low, Head of Growth Marketing, Nas Academy
• Ravi Shankar, Chief Marketing Officer, Carsome Group
• Bibaswan Banerjee, Head, Demand Gen. & Growth, PropertyGuru
• Anmol Arora, Regional Director – SEA & ANZ , MoEngage [Moderator]

This discussion started on the premise that personalisation was the answer to higher customer engagement and retention, but the struggle was in avoiding the pitfalls of it. To keep personalisation from feeling like encroachment, Banerjee said that one of the ways was to get the timing of the communication right. “[It is] very important to understand the decision-making stage of the customer, and personalize the communication accordingly.” Centring the business around trust, transparency, and choice was important, added Shankar. “Understanding the customer and the user behavior is very important in scaling up.”

Segmentation of the customer needs to be followed up with an effective communication strategy. Low said that curated content and industry perspectives are only shared with the relevant user buckets. “We believe in giving value upfront, starting with understanding what the customer wants and needs,” said Low.

(Tech) Stacking the Right Way Up

Topic:  Building the right tech stack for delivering a winning customer experience

Speakers:

• Sophie Jokelson, Co-founder & CMO, Cove
• Vasu Venkataraman, Head of Platform Growth, NTUC Fairprice
• Rajesh Sangati, SVP of Product, 99 Group
• Arijeet Rana, Associate Director – Sales, SEA & ANZ, MoEngage [Moderator]

This session focused on the importance of leveraging technology to build a seamless digital customer experience. The need of the hour is to reimagine and deliver a unique customer experience by building the right tech stack. 

Analysing insights across a customer’s journey is essential to delivering a smooth customer experience. Enabling a modern-day tech-stack is essential to this growth process.

The right tech stack with the capability to meet the demands of an evolving customer engagement strategy will help in rapid and successful scaling up of growth. 

We’ve dissected the need for better martech stacks for organizations across verticals in our recently released The State of ILE Report where we surveyed over 2000+ marketers to understand their pulse around customer engagement.

Then we had Telekom Malaysia (TM)’s Khairold Safri Ibrahim telling us how a multi-channel approach was key to acquiring new users and cementing TM’s position as a leading player in the space. “To achieve our goal to build a single view of customer across online and offline and grow revenue and stickiness, we chose MoEngage as it works as an multichannel CRM tool, offers a solution for CDP, and supports real-time communications & analytics,” Ibrahim said.

Banking on Digital

Topic: Digital innovation in banking and finance: Turning the tide in your favor

Speakers:

• Anna Green, Head of SMB, Asia Pacific and Japan, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• David Harling, Managing Director, MoneySmart
• Julio Bermúdez, VP, APAC and LATAM, Amplitude
• Saurabh Madan, VP – SEA, ANZ & Japan, MoEngage [Moderator]

What do you do when people prefer getting their tooth pulled out to visiting the nearest bank branch? You go digital! Green pointed out an interesting statistic while explaining the potential for digital banking. “Market research shows folks rated going to dentist over going to the bank (physically). That just speaks about the reduced tolerance towards the physical transaction process, and the scope for digital banking.” 

This session explored the need for BFSI brands to stay ahead of the competition by adopting large-scale digitisation of services, especially in the post-COVID world. “Covid has fast-tracked digital transformation in banking. It was the perfect storm forcing customers to come online and transact,” said Harling. 

Further, this digitisation could well pave the way towards a more inclusive and future-ready financial landscape in the region, such as the use of cryptocurrencies. “There are applications of cryptocurrencies which are important, especially blockchain. It provides ways to utilize blockchain to automate and remove inefficiency in the capital market.”

People Power

Topic: Founders Panel: Building the right team to enable growth at different stages of scale

Speakers:

• Julian Tan, Founder & CEO, FastJobs
• Joel Leong, Co-founder, ShopBack
• Race Wong, Co-founder & CPO, Ohmyhome
• Agnes Lie, Co-founder, Stealth Startup
• Patrick Tang, Associate Director – Inside Sales, MoEngage [Moderator]

Building the right team from scratch and empowering them at every level is vital for successful realisation of your vision and mission statements. The post-COVID world has definitely rewritten the rules of employee engagement, with hybrid work culture slowly becoming the norm. Keeping up productivity in such an environment is a challenge. On the other hand, it is important to protect a highly-productive team from an early burnout.

The session took a deep dive into why employers need to look at progressive methods and metrics rather than conventional ones when building a future-proof and dynamic team in today’s fast-paced economy.

Parting Note

At MoEngage, we believe a customer-centric insights-led approach is the key to building a highly engaging and satisfying customer experience across segments and brands. We endeavour to deliver various actionable insights on how to better engage with your customers and build a lifetime of customer value through various events in the future.

Broaden your network and deepen your understanding of insights-led customer engagement through peer-to-peer learning by becoming a part of our ever-growing community of growth marketers, product owners, entrepreneurs, and other experts.