By Thomas Lai
The pandemic changed almost everything, including what passes for an acceptable, let alone great, interaction with brands, customers, or colleagues.
When in-person meetings and in-store commerce were interrupted, businesses and customers quickly changed their habits and expectations. We discovered how much could be done online. And many of us were surprised to find just how many manual processes — some in place for decades — could suddenly be automated, refined and accelerated, and then refined and accelerated again.
Now, whether ordering heavy equipment or light roast coffee, we can complete more of our transactions than ever before online, even on mobile devices. We can get automatic notifications about shipments, lunch orders, and doctor appointments. Behind the scenes, a web of applications, APIs, and databases do the work we need done, quickly and effectively.
We’re gathering in groups again, and shopping in stores, but the sea change in technology and expectations for customer engagement has already occurred. Fast, efficient, convenient — these are the minimum requirements for just about every type of customer engagement.
Customers now expect a great experience with every interaction, whether online or in-person.
What makes a great customer experience? An experience is great if it precisely meets the needs of a customer at any moment. To meet those needs, the company delivering the experience has to understand what the customer’s needs are, and how they can be met. Those needs might vary from moment to moment, from location and location, and from one stage to another of the customer’s journey through the purchase process.
Understanding the customer requires data. And meeting the customer’s needs requires data.
Chances are, this data is coming from a variety of sources. And it needs to be delivered, analyzed, transformed, and acted on quickly and efficiently.
Connectivity makes these data operations possible.
The Importance of Connectivity and Data for Business Success
Asia Pacific CEOs understand the importance of connectivity and data for business success. In its 2023 APJ CEO Sentiment Survey, research firm IDC found that:
- Using technology to compete with digital products, services, and experiences, APJ CEOs aim to increase their digital share of revenue from 21% in 2022 to 41% by 2028.
- 42% of APJ CEOs say that as-a-service business model helping customers achieve better personal and/or business outcome is a priority for their executive and board (B2C and B2B).
And in its report, “IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Digital Business Strategies 2023 Predictions – Asia/Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) Implications,” IDC predicts that:
- By 2028, enterprises that collect, analyze, and contextualize customer data in a trustworthy way will successfully build creative business and pricing models that double customer lifetime value.
Of course, collecting, analyzing, and contextualizing customer data requires connections — fast, reliable connections that deliver data “in a trustworthy way.”
How Boomi Helps Companies Build the Connections They Need for Delivering Great Customer Experiences
Boomi makes building these connections fast and easy. And we’ve been doing this for years.
- We helped Hong Kong conglomerate Dah Chong Hong Group (DCH) accelerate their integration work by 70%.
By building these connections, Boomi customers can transform the customer experiences they deliver.
- We helped investment fund HESTA reach its 860,000 customers online during the pandemic, saving $1 million in cost optimizations increasing their speed of service 10X. As a result, brand loyalty increased and business grew.
- We helped Scoot Airlines, the low-cost arm of Singapore Airlines, connect all their systems to deliver better customer experiences.
Jason Chin, VP of IT at Scoot, appreciates the way Boomi builds the connections the airline needs to better serve its customers. “With the various features the platform provides, we will be able to connect our entire organization to create a single source for our data, with the knowledge that this information is up-to-date and accurate,” he says. “We will then be able to better understand our business and customers, and deliver the products and services that passengers want – before, during and after their flights.”
The Boomi Platform and Its Advantages for Connectivity
Here’s a quick overview of Boomi’s strengths as a platform for building and managing the connections your business depends on:
- Hundreds of ready-to-use connectors, so connecting to popular business applications and technologies is quick and easy
- Low-code development environment accelerates development
- AI-powered suggestions draw on anonymized data from over 200 million integrations to take the guesswork out of development
- Recipes available on discover.boomi.com for getting started quickly with popular business use cases
- Process libraries and parent/child processes to promote reusability
- Support for Citizen Developers, making it easy to put integration work as close as possible to business operations across the organization
- Enterprise-grade security so that data is always safe and processes always compliant
In upcoming blog posts, I’ll be writing about the ways Boomi customers in the Asia Pacific region are using the Boomi platform to meet customers’ rising expectations and to transform their businesses for speed and innovation.
If you’d like to get a sense of the breadth of creativity and technical prowess of our customers in this region, read about our 2022 APJ Boomi Blue Awards.