Singapore Global Network uses Salesforce to deepen relationships overseas.

Singapore Global Network (SGN) is a division of the country’s Economic Development Board, founded with the aim to broaden and deepen Singapore’s overseas networks. SGN’s mission centres on building relationships with family, friends, and fans of Singapore living all around the world with a goal to eventually deepen their ties with Singapore, through connections with the right people, opportunities, and resources.

“As a small island with few natural resources, Singapore’s success and economic competitiveness depends heavily on relationships. This includes relationships with overseas Singaporeans who we call family as well as those who have spent time in Singapore or are fans of how we do things,” said Jasmin Lau, Executive Director of Singapore Global Network.

Salesforce allows SGN to connect with these people in a way that’s both scalable and meaningful. It has also helped the organisation to mature quickly and provide responsive support to its network during COVID-19.

The SGN team comprises 50 employees, some of whom are based around the world in major cities like New York, London, and Shanghai. Coming together, they needed a unified technology platform that would support their ambition to build a global network of millions of people. Lau said the ability to personalise communication was a key requirement because “when you speak to everyone, you speak to no one”.

“Our entire focus is on relationships and networking and many may think that involves a lot of people talking to others over the phone or on email. However, we want to connect with millions around the world and you can’t do that with just 50 people,” said Lau. “We chose Salesforce Customer 360 to support us in building our global network as it allows us to codify our relationships and deliver personalised experiences.”

SGN set a target to go live on Salesforce in just six months and engaged Salesforce Professional Services to help make this happen. Together, they mapped out a three-phase journey to plan, deploy, and adopt Salesforce. This last phase was especially important to SGN; as a new organisation, it wanted to make sure that everyone in the team was on the same page and empowered to leverage the data and new digital capabilities that Salesforce provided.

Jasmine Ng, Senior Manager of Singapore Global Network’s Product Development Team, helped to lead the implementation and worked with Salesforce Professional Services to design new business processes from an end-user point of view. They also conducted workshops and training to help with learning and adoption of Salesforce. SGN used Trailhead as well and set up Trailmixes to enable self-paced learning and help the team to build new capabilities in digitisation and data.

“Transformation is not just about technology, but requires a change in culture and new ways of working and thinking,” said Ng. “Salesforce helped us embed this change and set us up for success.”

The organisation is now using Sales Cloud to capture a 360-degree view of all leads and contacts, including details such as what cities they are from and whether they’re a student or working professional. This information helps SGN to better understand its community and make decisions like where to run events. Using Service Cloud to manage incoming enquiries and Marketing Cloud to better engage with its community both one-on-one and at scale, SGN is fast realising the power of its Customer 360 capability to meet customers’ needs in a fast, scalable way.

While these capabilities have been designed to meet the long-term needs of SGN, they were rolled out just in time to help the organisation support its community during COVID-19. During the early stages of the pandemic, SGN had a 30% increase in emails from Singaporeans overseas with questions about returning and how to abide by quarantine measures.

Given the fluid changes during the crisis, many needed quick answers to confirm travel bookings, so SGN had a schedule in place to respond to each query in 12 hours or less. The organisation managed more than 1,000 cases during this time while also providing news and information to more than 80,000 people. This information was sent out through SGN’s daily email update and made available via a chatbot set up specifically to share COVID-19 related information.

“We had many people worried about their loved ones, and needing to know how to get home and what to do once they landed,” said Lau. “We weren’t expecting all of this and so it took some time for us to go and work out the answers. Thankfully the adaptability of Salesforce helped us pivot from what we thought we’d be doing at that time to provide support for those in need.”

SGN’s fast and compassionate response to COVID-19 has created an unintended but welcome benefit of increasing awareness of the organisation and helping it to create new connections. Now, SGN can focus on deepening those relationships and growing its global community. It also plans to continue its transformation by furthering its use of Advertising Studio and Social Studio to find and engage with new friends and fans.

“We’ve established many new relationships these past few months and hope that these will last for many years to come,” said Lau.