In today’s competitive market space, delivering great experiences for customers — from awareness all the way to post-purchase engagement — is crucial to getting ahead of the competition. In building and scaling up startups, understanding ways to continuously improve products and services in order to deliver constant customer delight is not really straightforward. With broader market conditions of inflation and its implications on fundraising, startups have to strike a balance between managing business and operational priorities and product/service innovation.
Based on a number of recent studies, the need for constant alignment of customer insights into product improvement and internal stakeholder efficiency is a key component to staying ahead of the pack and sustaining business growth.
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As such, SAP and e27 organised a webinar to unearth insights from startup founders and customer experience experts on their strategies when it comes to extending runways to drive growth in current economic environments.
The panellists included Harish Agarwal, Head of Customer Experience Strategy for Qualtrics in Southeast Asia; Siddharth Upadhyaya, Lead for Product Discovery & Supply Chain at Versafleet; and Ashley Uy, Product Manager at Plentina, moderated by Selma Ayuanshari from e27. These thought leaders shared their insights about managing the digital offerings of an enterprise to be more effective and customer-centric.
Experts shared their experiences
In this webinar, speakers shared their experiences as insiders and founders, as well as thoughts on the current technology landscape and its challenges. The panel explored insights on how to improve enterprise digital offerings, including best practices and techniques on how to accelerate growth, scale without funding through product efficiency and using SaaS in supporting fast scaling experimentation while leveraging open source technologies.
Other topics that were covered included finding ways to choose which product and product marketing to prioritise, learning how to leverage data that can help you personalise your digital offering to your key customers, finding a path to profitability, and transforming your company into a sustainable growth-stage startup.
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Harish Agarwal, Head of Customer Experience Strategy for Qualtrics in Southeast Asia, a co-panellist for the webinar, provided rich insight as a customer experience practitioner. Harish has scaled customer experience programmes and enabled businesses to derive more value at leading organisations across the region. He discussed how incorporating feedback from customers can help meet the objective of building great products and services. The value lies in bringing both structured and unstructured feedback and signals from millions of data points and making sense of it through big data analytics, enabling you to identify delight points and pain points across the customer journey, and then using technology to address those points by acting with empathy at speed and scale.
When asked about his insights on the challenges for startups, Harish mentioned finding product-market fit as the main objective, especially in determining key differentiation and establishing value proposition in a competitive market. Also, continuously improving your value proposition to stay ahead of customer expectations. This is where the importance of understanding consumers and their needs better comes in.
Delivering products with a much more holistic understanding of the customers’ experience enables your business to become more effective and drive faster growth with confidence and precision. This can be done on the product side, go-to-market side, and for any channel that you are using to fulfil the customer journey — through digital, physical, or hybrid channels — by understanding the experience delivered to consumers as a core asset. There are often visibility challenges on customer feedback when building startups, and this may result in broken delivery experiences.
Discovering gaps in customer experience
Every type of organisation stands to benefit from improved experiences, and Qualtrics works across all levels of business, academia, and government to help them find and keep customers, cultivate loyalty, and optimise go-to-market strategies through great experiences. This includes acquisition and onboarding journeys, customer service, loyalty programmes, and the broader value chains.
Delivering a good customer experience is crucial to driving brand equity. Consumers across industries have a lot of choices, and staying ahead of competitors entails a constant connection and understanding of consumer needs. Beyond being cost-competitive, maintaining great customer experiences is key.
The panellists also explained that startup investors can also leverage the customer experience visibility of potential investees as well as startups in their existing portfolios. Whereas traditional research is often used to identify the best investments as part of the due diligence process, research done by Qualtrics can offer agility in terms of providing deep insight into the product-market fit of a startup, as well as gaining a better understanding of the green space in the market.
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It can be an opportunity to perform portfolio monitoring beyond financial outcomes and ensure continuous improvement in customer experiences for their portfolio companies.
The continued growth of Qualtrics is proof of the value organisations are finding in driving business outcomes through better experiences. Qualtrics has increasingly scaled its operations across the Asia Pacific and Japan in response to increasing demand from customers looking to deliver incredible customer experiences.
Over the last year, Qualtrics has made its technologies available through local AWS Cloud Infrastructures in Singapore and Japan, ensuring all local organisations can benefit from its technology. In partnership with SAP and the Singapore Economic Development Board, Qualtrics also recently launched a centre of excellence focused on developing customer experience capabilities and communities in the region to help drive local and global innovation and growth.
To listen to the webinar, visit: https://e27co.e27.co/bnQYLH
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This article is produced by the e27 team, sponsored by SAP
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