Speed is one of our core values. Salesforce has helped us build one of the fastest growing consumer brands in Asia.
Julian ArtopéCEO, Zenyum
Zenyum has become one of the fastest growing consumer brands in Southeast Asia. But that’s only the beginning for this ambitious company that’s aiming to make cosmetic dentistry accessible for more than 600 million people.
Zenyum wants to make Asia smile more. The smile cosmetics company plans to achieve that with invisible braces, and a range of dental services and products , like teeth whitening, retainers and designer toothpaste. But that’s only the beginning as the company continues to rapidly build a presence throughout Asia.
After launching in Singapore in 2018, Zenyum has grown quickly across the region. The company now also operates in Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Indonesia, with plans to expand into Taiwan.
“We see a large opportunity here in Asia to be the kings in our category of Smile Cosmetics,” says Julian Artopé, CEO of Zenyum. “Southeast Asia has the fastest rising middle class in the world. Our customers are millennials, usually between 25 and 40 years old. Many of them are in their first or second job and they have available disposable income for the first time in their lives. They want to invest it in themselves and build their personal brand.”
Connecting with tech-savvy millennials is at the heart of the company’s innovative distribution model that combines the convenience of the digital environment with the brand-building power of deep customer personalisation.
“The biggest brands of all time are built in a digital environment,” explains Artopé, “ and many pair excellent products with digital distribution. But we want to make every customer journey highly personalised.
“We are targeting a huge market of 600 million people, but in the end, we still want to call every customer to guide them through their smile journey. To get there, we need to employ some of the smartest lead scoring mechanisms to make sure that we can qualify our customers accordingly.”
That’s a challenge the company struggled with in its early days. Their original CRM was not up to the job, and Artopé says the company quickly outgrew it as they expanded rapidly across Southeast Asia.
“We needed better reporting options that would allow us to track our cohorts and slice and dice the data across the six markets that we are operating in. We also wanted to smoothen the engagement journey with our customers and make it easier for our salespeople to connect with them in a personal way.”
This, explains Artopé, was simply not possible with the company’s limited legacy system that was failing to enable the levels of customer engagement and personalisation the Zenyum team were trying to achieve.
“We had a very binary system. There was one or zero - you were either in the funnel or you were kicked out of it. We did not have smart ways to engage with our customers yet as our system could only give us a basic overview of the total funnel size. We didn’t have the necessary data to give smart guidance on past and live performance to our salespeople.
“At the same time, we forced our customers into our channels instead of enabling them to communicate with us however they would like to.”
The data gathered through Salesforce helps us check in on every customer as they progress through their Zenyum journey, from the initial pre-assessment to the completion of their treatment
Muhammad ShafeeqHead of Customer Success (Singapore & Malaysia), Zenyum
Artopé and his team turned to Salesforce for the solution.
"Salesforce helps us optimise the customer journey into a seamless experience across all touchpoints," says Fahmi Hussaini, Product Manager and Salesforce Administrator at Zenyum.
The company previously deployed Sales Cloud, Service Cloud and Pardot to create a sophisticated personalisation pipeline that delivers deep data insights.
“Sales Cloud enables us to analyse the data per country within the markets we are operating in without having to employ data scientists, because our teams are now empowered to do so themselves,” adds Artopé.
Service Cloud is also helping to deliver the personalised customer journeys that Artopé believes are vital to the company’s success. The Customer Success team moves seamlessly between Sales and Service Cloud with every customer interaction, which provides them a complete 360-view of each customer interaction and ultimately a faster, smoother engagement with the customer.
“Each customer receives highly personalised communication from their private Customer Success and Customer Care Executives, who can now lead them through their entire smile journey. The data gathered through Salesforce helps us check in on every customer as they progress through their Zenyum journey, from the initial pre-assessment to the completion of their treatment.” says Muhammad Shafeeq, Head of Customer Success (Singapore & Malaysia) at Zenyum.
“We want to make these journeys highly personalised and Salesforce is enabling that for us. We are now building our internal processes on the platform and it’s really becoming the backbone to our business.”
Community Cloud is also being used to connect dentists and manufacturing facilities in Malaysia and Thailand with Zenyum. This will bring all external partners onto a single platform that will also serve as a communication platform for partner clinics.
“We anticipate this will reduce turnaround times for our partners by 40 to 50 per cent,” says Anupama Hoon, VP Product at Zenyum. “Dentists will be able to communicate with the Zenyum team on a single platform which will facilitate faster communication between the Zenyum team and the dentists, reducing errors and increasing overall customer inflow.”
The Community Cloud platform will power a business intelligence tool dentists can use to access anonymous performance data. This will enable them to benchmark their practice against other best-practice clinics.
“Dentists will be able to access data metrics around the factors that help clinics perform better,” explains Hoon. “This will help dentists to see a clear picture of the optimal clinic outlook.”
Plans are also in place to give customers an interactive tracking view so they can monitor the status of the treatment, order timeline and payment processing.
The result so far is an impressive eight-fold improvement in the company’s lead activation rate. This is an important step in Artopé’s goal to build Zenyum into one of Asia’s largest consumer brands within five years. And Salesforce will continue to play a lead role in managing that growth.
“Speed is one of our core values. Salesforce has helped us build one of the fastest growing consumer brands in Asia,” he says. “The systems and processes we now have in place can scale to drive future growth.”
Artopé’s advice for other business leaders is to not reinvent the wheel when it comes to digital transformation and customer personalisation.
“Don’t over complicate your tech stack,” he says. “It’s amazing what you can get off the shelf nowadays, which you can then personalise towards your own needs.
“Great customer engagement drives a personal journey for every single customer and hopefully makes them trust and eventually love a brand through good communication design. Salesforce enables this for Zenyum. Salesforce makes Zenyum smile more.”
