HGC powers the future of connectivity and communications with Salesforce

HGC Global Communications Limited (HGC) is a leading Hong Kong and international fixed-line operator. HGC, formerly known as Hutchison Global Communications Limited, owns an extensive network and infrastructure in Hong Kong and overseas and provides a range of services. These include telecom infrastructure services to other operators and full-fledged telecom, data centre and broadband services as well as ICT solutions for local, overseas, corporate and mass markets.

HGC is now using the infrastructure it has built up over more than twenty years to power the future of connectivity and communications, essential in this digital era.

After being acquired by a private equity firm in October 2017, the new HGC is approaching this mission with a start-up perspective, and is using Salesforce to put the customer at the centre of every decision. As part of this, it is creating a streamlined digital experience encompassing pricing all the way through to service.

“We want to enhance our connections and communication with our customers in simpler, more fulfilling ways,” said Jacqueline Teo, Chief Digital Officer, HGC Global Communications Limited. “The cornerstone of this is our single view of the customer in Salesforce.”

HGC’s business is large and diverse. As it embraced the opportunity to elevate and reinvent itself, HGC needed a platform that would help it transform its customer facing operations to create a better experience for all its customers. Salesforce offered the breadth of capabilities required and was also strongly aligned with HGC’s own values — including its culture of customer success, focus on trust and giving back to the community. 

“We were absolutely certain we wanted to go down this path with Salesforce and it has become a central point of our digital strategy. It is pushing us to re-think our processes and interactions, and how we can become more customer-centric,” said Teo.

Gaining a better understanding of customers has been a key starting point, and HGC has been very deliberate in identifying and gathering the data necessary to provide customers with what they want. It is making that data more transparent and accessible to the right people through Salesforce, at the right time, so that it informs every customer process and interaction.

Improving the sales process is a priority for HGC across all of its customer segments. It is working with Salesforce and AppExchange partner Enxoo to make its products more accessible and pricing and ordering less complicated. This is particularly important in the Enterprise segment where typically each customer has different needs and uses multiple services.

The solution involves the use of both Sales Cloud and Enxoo’s CPQ platform to connect all quotations, orders and pricing summaries to speed the calculation and approval of pricing. Integration with third-party platforms in the future will expose these same capabilities to partners and customers so that they can access HGC’s product catalogue and pricing, and also order products and services directly.

“We’re not only creating a great buying experience for customers, but optimising the product and pricing on a deal by deal basis,” said Teo.

HGC sees Artificial Intelligence (AI) as essential to further improving the sales process and helping reps win new and repeat business. For this reason, it started using Einstein Analytics in Sales Cloud at the very outset of its Salesforce journey to enable as much intuitive data-driven insight as possible. Einstein is already helping HGC to predict and analyse sales performance.

“Some companies look at AI and Einstein as something they’ll aspire to implement in the future, but to get the most value out of analytics you should start at day one,” said Teo. “The more data you put into it the more powerful it becomes. Even early on Einstein has helped us analyse the sales cycle of our leads and products and see what's working and what we need to change.”

HGC will continue delivering on its digital strategy and redefining what customer success looks like across its businesses. It wants to give customers more options for self-service while making the delivery of products and services seamless.

“For our retail customers especially, creating loyalty is all about the experience. They expect services like WiFi to be as easy as turning on the water tap. Everything that happens before that point is immaterial to them and should be seamless,” said Teo.

Digitising processes and interactions with Salesforce will help HGC meet customers’ expectations, even as they evolve. It is currently implementing Service Cloud to streamline case management for corporate customers and operators, and sees the value in tightly coupling sales and service experiences on one platform.

The next step for HGC is to build out these capabilities further and provide an increasingly digital and personal experience across all customer engagements and events. “We’ve established a great foundation for our digital transformation with Salesforce and look forward to creating more capabilities for our customers,” said Teo.