Telekom Malaysia makes customer experience a number one priority

Telekom Malaysia Berhad (TM) is the country’s leading telecommunications service provider, providing a comprehensive range of services and solutions for consumers and businesses. These include fixed telephony and broadband, mobility, content and wifi services that keep people connected. Through its enterprise and public sector arm, TM ONE, they are able to provide end-to-end digital business solutions ranging from data centre, cloud computing, smart services, managed security and big data to help power and accelerate Malaysia’s digital economy and realise the aspiration of a Digital Nation.

With a vision to “make life and business easier, for a better Malaysia”, TM is in the midst of a transformation to become a more digitally-driven and customer-centric organisation. The customer experience is a number one priority and TM is empowering its workforce to make it seamless.

TM ONE is on this journey with Salesforce and has made incredible progress by optimising processes and increasing visibility into customer needs. With over 11,000 enterprise customers just in Malaysia right now, that’s a huge patch to cover.

“When we embarked on this journey four years ago, we had a significant number of manual processes and it took longer to do things. We also lacked an understanding and visibility of customer challenges and priorities,” said Wan Ahmad Kamal, EVP, Customer Advocacy & Strategic Engagements, TM ONE.

“We have evolved significantly, and Salesforce has become paramount to increasing customer intimacy and improving the experience customers receive from us as a solution provider. With Salesforce used to automate the processes that were previously done manually, we are able to divert our focus to what matters most, our valued customers,” said Mr. Wan.

One of the challenges faced by TM ONE is that sales reps were spending too much time on internal manual processes and not enough time in front of the customer. They were missing out on opportunities and customer engagement was low.

With Sales Cloud, TM ONE was able to digitise and streamline processes like reporting and forecasting, and get sales reps back on the road. Using the Salesforce Mobile App and Chatter, reps can work from anywhere, at anytime and collaborate with colleagues. They can also capture information to better understand customers’ priorities and pain points, and meet more of their needs through cross-selling and upselling which improves wallet share.

“When I joined TM ONE, our sales reps were spending about 80% of their time in the office and only 20% of their time out on the road where they should be. Salesforce has completely reversed that and we are able to direct our focal point on improving customer engagement,” said Mr Wan.

The increased mobility offered by Sales Cloud has helped drive its adoption and reps now use it daily to track opportunities. This has increased the visibility of sales activity and allowed management to get a much more accurate view of pipeline. The management team can also identify when opportunities are stalled, and roll up their sleeves to help reps move them along the sales cycle.

“As a leader, a single platform which provides customer information is paramount and Salesforce is the most important tool I have. I look at the app when I wake up to strategise for the day, to derive insights when I’m in the office, and for a recap before I go to bed," said Mr Wan who also uses the tool in meetings to show key customers exactly how the business is running.

As part of its automation initiative, TM ONE has extended its Salesforce usage from Sales Cloud to Pardot which is now being used to streamline lead generation by the marketing team and ensure only quality leads are passed on to the sales team. Combined with the benefits of Sales Cloud, this has helped TM ONE achieve a 3x increase in sales pipeline. By focusing on qualified leads only, the company has also increased conversion from around 20% to nearly 40%.

With more granular insight into sales and a 360 degree view of customers, the company is now able to better manage its growth and concentrate on opportunities in cloud, security and analytics.

"These are the three areas our customers are focused on and, if you ask them why, it is because they are the building blocks for digital transformation," said Mr Wan. "Salesforce will help us drive our expansion in these domains to support our customers’ own transformation journeys.”

To truly make life easier for customers, TM ONE is using Service Cloud as well. It has replaced ten different support numbers with an integrated service desk which offers customers personalised service and faster response times.

“Service has become seamless and our customers are much, much happier. Our NPS has increased and we’ve reduced the rate of churn,” said Mr Wan.

The TM ONE team are so enthused with the rapid progress their team is making, they’ve opened the TM ONE Experience Centre (TM ONE EC), located at their main office in Damansara, where they showcase industry focused solutions and services to customers. The TM ONE EC is an immersive customer engagement centre to inspire collaborative and innovative spirit. Visitors come in daily and are impressed with the innovation being demonstrated by the TM ONE team.

Advisory services and program architects from the Salesforce Success Cloud team have helped to support the rollout and adoption of Salesforce across TM ONE and recently worked with the company on a new roadmap to accelerate its transformation. It is building an analytics engine using Salesforce Einstein analytics and Tableau which will give it even deeper insights into its customers to inform decisions and maximise engagement and cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

“Having a partner like Salesforce who can help us innovate is very important, and the results we’ve achieved so far wouldn’t be possible without the technology and insights it provides,” said Mr Wan.