TechTouch Asia

By Mark Abramowitz, SVP Marketing, Service Cloud at Salesforce This holiday shopping season has been unlike no other as retailers faced new challenges, resulting in reimagined digital campaigns for Black Friday and innovative fulfillment solutions. Despite all the challenges and unknowns the pandemic created, the holiday shopping period has so far been a success, with global digital sales spikes of 30% on Black Friday and 18% on Cyber Monday compared to 2019, according to Cyber Week insights from Salesforce*.  With these major shopping days behind us, some may understandably feel inclined to exhale just a bit, even if the holiday isn’t over. However, retailers should know we’re just now entering the second half of an unprecedented season: the customer service rush. The customer service rush is nothing new. It happens every year during this time, but like the challenges retailers faced selling goods, they now find an equal challenge in helping their customers with questions, ...

- The majority of surveyed employees (84%) in Singapore (against Asia Pacific & Japan [APJ] figures of 81%) feel they are prepared for long-term remote work - The most in-demand technology resources that employees want are productivity equipment or tools, and remote access to internal company resources - Surveyed employees also want employers to provide best practices training for remote working, and virtual learning and development sessions Dell Technologies has released new research revealing the readiness of Singapore employees for long-term remote work. In the inaugural Remote Work Readiness (RWR) Index *, it was found that more than eight in 10 (84%) employees in Singapore (APJ: 81%) feel that they are prepared for long-term remote work but face ongoing productivity challenges. Surveying over 7,000 working professionals** aged 18 years and above from the APJ region, including 1,030 from Singapore, the RWR Index captured data on employees’ readiness for long...

by Grace Chng for EDB More than ever, digital transformation is essential for companies to survive and thrive. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, brick-and-mortar business models are losing relevance as office workers, customers, and consumers, disappear from workplaces and shopfronts, sheltering themselves in the safety of their homes and preferring to interact virtually. To survive, organisations have no choice but to digitally transform their business models to align themselves to the new normal. They need to be agile, flexible and innovative to pick up on unexpected opportunities that will emerge in the post-COVID era. At a roundtable event hosted by enterprise PostgreSQL provider and contributor EDB, CIOs from across the Asia region discussed the pros and cons of using open source databases. Following is a summary of the discussion. For banks, open source software could be the key to digital transformation. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, banks are grappling with a surge in onlin...

WhatsApp is about three things: simplicity, reliability and security, and that extends to its support for businesses. "For simplicity we really want it to be dead simple to use. Many people get WhatsApp , it's actually the first app that they get when they buy a new phone for the first time. And so we want to make sure that no one feels intimidated by technology, when they open it up, they understand how to use everything and so that's why when we build stuff we wanted it to feel natural to people," explained Ajit Varma, Director of Product Management at WhatsApp for business products. Reliability is paramount when a small degradation can affect millions of users who rely on the app for crucial communications and to stay in touch with family and friends, he noted. "We believe that your conversations should be private, and only between...you and the person you're talking to. So it's a very important value for us to be secure as well," he added. ...

SAP has announced the SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking solution. The new cloud-based solution provides organisations with simple, innovative tools to record, approve and monitor the time of their workforce. The intuitive SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking also enhances the employee experience and helps ensure people are paid accurately, on time and in accordance with local regulations. With advanced time and attendance capabilities, SAP SuccessFactors Time Tracking delivers a real-time view into employees’ time entry, providing greater transparency into their pay and better control over their work schedule and overtime. Leaders can strategically track and minimise labour costs for both hourly and salaried employees with embedded insights and dashboards, helping to improve productivity throughout the workforce.  The solution integrates with the SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central and SAP SuccessFactors Employee Central Payroll solutions and on-premise payroll software from SAP ...

by Vinod Chandramouli, Head ASEAN Business, Freshworks Source: Freshworks. Chandramouli. While the effects of the current pandemic will continue to ripple through in the next year or so, business organisations remain to pursue many and different ways to survive these dark times. Most companies resort to stellar customer experience in winning over competition. After all, customers are king. Some companies have even made customer empathy an organisational ask. Customers are changing Consumers have shifted from purchasing from offline to online as a result of the pandemic, allowing experts to predict that this shift will be long lasting. In Singapore, for example, 37% of consumers surveyed are now shopping more online because of the outbreak. According to the data analytics firm Nielsen, winning in omnichannel will be the best strategy. The acceleration of digital transformation in the past months also magnifies the consumer behaviour that has changed in the last few years with th...

Results that delight the client, being able to advance Facebook's platforms, and creativity are all in a day's work for Facebook's Creative Shop. The Facebook business unit collaborates with marketers and agencies to create advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. Angela Bassichetti, Head of Creative Shop for APAC at Facebook, said that Creative Shop was unfazed by the new business challenges its customers encountered this year, basically around how to remain an effective business while connecting with consumers whose behaviour had changed. Some of the case studies she shared included: Meaningful connections   L'Oreal's Virtual Beauty Festival L'Oreal Malaysia had to close its stores. To reach customers, the company organised a 12-hour virtual event on 25 July for Kiehl’s, YSL Beauty, Lancôme, Biotherm, IT Cosmetics, Urban Decay, and Shu Uemura that featured exclusive deals, insider tips, and more. The company invited influencers (including men) to...

As part of its ongoing AED1 billion digital transformation journey, Emirates NBD, a major banking group in the MENAT (Middle East, North Africa and Turkey) region, has been implementing an Enterprise Payment Hub globally. The Enterprise Payment Hub enables new and existing payment innovations to be launched quickly across all Emirates NBD markets and entities. After an initial rollout in Singapore in September 2019, the multi-entity, multicurrency payment platform is now fully operational across most Emirates NBD entities and markets, including for customers across the UAE and India, and for all Emirates Islamic customers. For the first time, Emirates NBD will have a 360-view of customer payments across all group entities and countries. More importantly, it will allow the bank to provide its customers an improved end-to-end tracking visibility on the status of a payment transaction through Global Payment Initiative (gpi) integration. Operational cost and efficiency benefits will a...