How Does Chatbots Help the Logistic Industry Acquire New Customers?

“Keep your Sales Pipeline full by Prospecting continuously. Always have more people to see than you have time to see them.” Quote by Brian Tracy, Author & motivational speaker with over 80 books.

A Chatbot is not only a bot that acts as the first line of defence on your communication channels. They are THE perfect ambassadors in promoting your company’s new products and offering. A natural “Lead Generator”.

In fact, engaging Chatbot services does not have to be limited to the preliminaries of answering customers FAQ, so much more can be done with a platform such as this.

Studies have proven, the journey is half won when potential customers seek help at your doorstep. As compared to scouting for entirely new customers through means of market place activities. Which may take time to be proven in terms of effectiveness of the marketing strategy.

Here are some ways on how Chatbots are able to help convert inquiries into sales!

1. Build Your Customers Trust

Customers expect 24-hour service for an instant response. Researchers have stated by 2025, AI is at the forefront of 95% customer interactions whereby live telephone and online conversations will be seamlessly connected. Therefore CHATBOT & LIVE CHAT FOR CUSTOMER SUPPORT is the first step.

As business owners, customer service managers, more so for IT managers in the Logistics industry, the involvement of this technology is especially critical to your business. The Chatbot is able to provide accurate information and is able to respond within the 24 hours clock, seven (7) days a week giving assurance to your customers.

Of course the backend Tracking process is enabled by Accordia Desk. Another great Ticketing tool for the management.

After all, building customers’ trust by ensuring accurate information is provided for in-regards to their parcel, journeying on the “Last Mile Delivery ” is extremely important in ensuring their loyalty to use your services on their next delivery.

2. You Have A Captured Audience

With the trust built by that single successful delivery, it then leads to the next step of sharing information or educating your customers. With personalization your patients will be able to experience the full service down to the very last detail of their history of checking in, or even what questions they inquired the last time.

Subconsciously your customers are experiencing brand recall exercises. Each and every time as they reach out to the Chatbot and receive a response, a Marketing opportunity arises.

In-directly or directly through a Chatbot, you have a captured THE audience at your fingertips! These chats are able to help to upsell, cross-sell, and it can increase reach by disbursing information about your hospital and the current services covering the 4P’s (product, price, place, promotion). What more can a Marketing or Sales Manager ask for?

3. Link-Up the “Last Mile” with an actual agent via LIVE CHAT – Close The Deal!

With a captured audience, you can then convert these inquiries into potential sales leads that ultimately grow your revenue. The next step is how can you Close The Deal?

When the fish has bitten the bait, that is the right time to link the customer to a Live agent through Live chat. A follow-up to a marketing campaign planned before. This can be done by offering instant response to the queries or promotions on a more personalized note.

Simply put, the best solution marries the best of both worlds. Where your team can utilize Accordia’s conversational bot, linking seamlessly to live chat. Whereby your agents can then upsell at a higher price point or cross-selling with your other services or products.

Opportunity in penetrating new accounts right at your fingertips. Chat is the gateway for new customer acquisition and business expansion opportunities with larger accounts and with existing clients.

Should you like to find out more on the versatility of Chatbots, Live Chat and WhatsApp Bot, click on this LINK and our experts will be more than glad to walk you through.

A Beginners Guide to Chatbot for Healthcare Services

” Eliza, the first chatterbot ever coded, was then invented in 1966 by Joseph Weizenbaum. ”

Amazing when one comes to think about the timeline, from the first ever chatbot created and three (3) years’ later, Malaysia achieved her “Merdeka” in the year 1963. Giving a healthy dose of perspective of the amazing ways how technologies have evolved thus far. Fast forward today in Malaysia, Chatbots’ presence can be felt, however the growth in adopting the technology in leading industries is still very much at its infancy.

Hospitals, healthcare management industries and pharmaceuticals in Malaysia should be the forefront industry to pioneer this technology. Seeing as how up to 73% of healthcare administration tasks reported by Insider Intelligence can be automated by implementation of Chatbot technology, the Human Resource department will be the first to rejoice! More ways to grow, and optimize the talents of fellow employees.

Read on below: A beginners guide to implementing Chatbot for your Healthcare Services.
Let’s Start with the Basics

By now, your customer service team (especially the veteran ones’) will be able to anticipate what are the few types of questions the patients or potential patients will first ask.
That’s why you should always start with Implementation of Chatbot That Can Generate FAQ choices.

How does it work? We work together with your team in finding out what are the “Frequently Asked Questions”, and proceed to automate them on Chatbot services. Easy! Saving the bulk of time for your team, and your patients for more important matters. Believe us, your patients will be more than glad to have their time saved, with accurate information gained.

Not only saving time in the process, through scripting FAQ replies powered by Chatbots you can control thus ensuring the “company standard answers (SOP)” are being upheld. One can’t fault a new trainee to sometimes give the wrong answer.

Connect me to a HUMAN please! Though it’s “only” a LIVECHAT through Chatbot.

We’re pretty sure you’ve been in one of these roles before. As a fellow consumer of services, customer or even calling in as a patient yourself, it is truly frustrating when calls go unanswered, dropped or connected to the wrong department.

The constant dropping of calls could also be the sole reason for some customers switching loyalty to a competitor hospital. What more when it’s really an emergency at that point of time.
The feeling of not being valued plays a strong factor when patients encounter these scenarios.

LIVECHAT Chatbots are the answer to all the above problems. We humans can discern once the Chatbots’ conversation switches from Ai to an actual Live personnel behind. The feeling of appreciation, and subconscious affirmation that your hospital is the right choice would be felt. Thus, indirectly you have gained a loyal customer.

A Fishing Net of Information

Just like a fishing net, through implementation of Chatbot you have another source of Data collection. We can create something like a fulfilment of information (covering PDPA of course), before the requester can proceed. It is true when they say Data is power. From the frequency of the selection in the FAQ, one can identify what are the services or products most patients look for. This is just one example.

Simple information are filled in the chat like name and contact details, is it a General Practitioner they are looking for or a certain Specialist, in which field is the most sought after, or more before they can proceed to the next stage of inquiry. Data such as these are valuable equating to potential clients at your doorstep.

There’s always room for Expansion

Once you’ve started with engaging our Chatbot services, you can then explore more on the different ways we can help automate. Not limited to front-liners only. Hospitals can plan marketing activities on a much larger scale. Marketing ideas such as health talk seminars, or special packages and ongoing promotions, or even blood donation drive, and etc via outbound dialler/ outbound call. How does it work? The campaign can be communicated through mass blasting via call to many customers concurrently.

As your business grows, allow us to grow with you, supporting you to greater heights. Just like how you are looking out to constantly improve the quality of health of your patients, we are constantly on the lookout to help improve your patients Customer Service journey with you.

Set an appointment with us today, Chat more with our experts.

Key to a Successful Contact Centre for Logistic Companies

Logistic companies such as last-mile delivery should not ignore the fact that having a strong foundation in a reliable Contact Centre is part of the cornerstone that enables many legacy logistic companies to be where they are today.

Strike when the Iron’s Hot, is sound advice that many businesses in any industry attribute their success to. Hence, striking the iron with the ‘Key to a successful Contact Centre’ is a wise step to take in your business planning. More so now, when ecommerce is booming, and Logistic companies play an important role to both B2B and B2C customers. Simply put, they need you. However, with the boom in opportunities, give rise to new key players in this industry.

The question is how are you going to differentiate offering your services?

If you’re an owner, or the managing team of a delivery services and logistic company today, one would truly understand and can identify some of the frustration faced by the company, On The Dot Delivery Services.

These are some of the challenges faced.

On The Dot Delivery Services uses a traditional Telephony System to answer calls without any capability to monitor and track. Thus, unable to gather any data on answering service level and the number of abandon calls rating. These numbers are vital in order for supervisors to find out the main causes of complaints, and advice on Call Centre Agents performances. However, this is by far half of the problem. The company had to endure potential loss of business due to missed calls. How can the management tell if it’s genuine fault by their employees? Or a false accusation by a few scrupulous customers, seeking refunds or spreading negative feedback on social media. All this due to outdated technology, whereby the calls were not recorded for quality monitoring, and dispute management, as there is no proof. *The name of the logistics company has been changed due to pdpa.

What was the turnaround plan?

On The Dot Delivery Services invested in these measures. By implementing IP Based Call Centre solutions with Skills Based Routing for them to manage the calls effectively. Over a period of time, customers’ feedback became more positive, smoothening channels, and the overall moral of the staff was elevated. Boosting confidence and job satisfaction. The implemented programme does also have an Integrated Voice Response, allowing easy automation such as voice commands and touch key routing selection. Helping to ease call-in traffic being answered for long periods, or dropped calls. Overall, Accordia contact centre, within the system in itself has a Voice Recording functionality as well. Enabling for better performance tracking, training purposes, as well as customer response evaluation. Or as a proof in the case when there’s a grid-lock with a customer dispute. Thus, on a management level the ability to gather data, your PR team can have the tools to clarify certain extreme situations, and reward deserving agents accordingly. Of course proceed to rectify underperforming ones too.

One cannot emphasize enough the importance of a strong customer service team, and in order to have a strong team the investment in a technological advance Contact Centre is a must these days. Proven by data extracted from the chart below, published by Statista Research Department 2022, 73% voted for ‘Improving customer communication for customers’ as the main point in improving customer service for your last mile delivery.

Make your ‘Last Mile Delivery’ count.

Finding out more on what Omni Channel Contact Centre can do to boost your Logistic Company status is the key. The power of choice is yours to implement it either by Cloud base or On-Premise.

It can get confusing sometimes, as there are so many channels to pick and choose from. Engage with our associates. Let us diagnose your situation and advise the best customer support software with the right services for your needs.

The Relevance of Contact Centre for Healthcare Providers

“If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.”
– Jeff Bezos (Founder & CEO at Amazon)

Healthcare Providers play a crucial role within their community and beyond. Be it government or a private healthcare facility, its role is crucial in ensuring the overall well-being of its community living within the area from a physical perspective or mentally. Being one of the ‘pioneers’ investing in customer-focused technologies such as Contact Center’s Integrated Voice Response (IVR) would be the way forward. Thus bringing to attention the relevance of a strong Contact Centre support, now more than ever to Healthcare Providers in Malaysia.

How can it help?
IVR allows 24/7 Customer Care support, whereby your call centers are able to switch to automate services for transactions that typically require assistance from live customer service representatives, which can now be executed via voice commands or touch tone key selection. Imagine the assurance you can bring to the community when they reach out to your customer call center and the deep first impression your call center is able to leave with your patients.

Can’t imagine how IVR works?
Here is an example of a seamless IVR managed Call Flow:
Thank you for calling St.Déborah’s Hospital. For emergencies, press 1. For Women & Children specialist appointments, press 2. For billing purposes, press 3, For operator assistant, press 0.

Customize your greetings, and options for call flow to related departments, thus preventing lost-in-translation calls, and frustrated customers. Save on re-training new hires for customer service, and upskill those to be taking on greater responsibilities thus contributing to the hospital overall. Last but not least, IVR is able to assist you to gather data on your patient’s behavior, such as call time, frequency, call resolution, etc. With the gathered data your management will then be able to make sound business forecasts better for the future, be it in addressing the patient’s needs or from a marketing strategy perspective.

Is there any relevant industry experience?
Allow us to share some of the frustration faced, based on a study of Healthcare providers’ current challenges in this area. The Healthcare provider is facing an un-trackable number of missed calls. Sometimes calls to Specialist clinics goes unanswered or are transferred to the wrong one, thus resulting in patient frustration, negative review, and ultimately a loss in business. The establishment is also lacking accurate statistics on how fast calls are being answered. The after-office hours for patients can turn into a fearful nightmare when there’s no self-service option, even during peak periods. After all, emergencies could happen at any time, even during odd hours. However, it’s a gain of loyalty throughout the duration of the patient’s lifetime for the hospital should their call-in experience is positively memorable.

“The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best but legendary.” – Sam Walton (Founder for Walmart)

In keeping with Standards
Thus with the above experience, on point, the establishment is seeking to revamp their patient’s experience starting with the Customer Care team. The first stark point to improve would be routing the patient’s call to the correct department.

Will you place your health in the hands of a hospital that time and again fail to transfer your call to the correct clinic or department? With the integration of the Contact Center’s IVR, the system is able to route callers to the right agents based on skillset. Thus, avoiding miscommunication. What’s more, being able to provide after-office hours customer service care without incurring additional costs would be an important factor to the bottom line. The system also enables the hospital to record agents’ calls for better performance monitoring and improvements thus allowing the training department to create a quality coaching program.

With the recording services provided, the hospital legal team is able to avoid customer unreasonable disputes. Supervisors can manage the team by monitoring the calls on a single platform. With the gathered data, as mentioned above, sound business judgment is now possible. Seeking to personalize each patient’s experience with flexible solutions. IVR is one part of the omnichannel solution provided, whereby calls and emails are gathered in a unified platform. Meaning in one single dashboard with a few clicks the agent is able to pull out patients’ data on billing, previous medical visit records, call logs, and more. Personalized experience within healthcare services is the common core value that every patient requires.

The local community will always reach out to the nearest healthcare provider when they encounter discomfort, a regular health check-up, or in the case of emergencies. Elevate your game.

Talk to our specialist and find out more about how we can help your Healthcare Establishment achieve a better patient experience.

Did you know? AI is now a new trend that offers a mixed bag of risks and benefits. Here’s what customers expect when you use it. AI is almost everywhere now; between our digital assistants, chatbots, virtual assistants, automobiles and recommendation engines across many spaces such as medicine, finance, insurance, manufacturing, marketing and entertainment.

Now, AI is spread even more into the healthcare, customer service and financial sectors to inform healthcare decisions, help customers resolve customer service issues, talk with us as companion bots, make financial decisions, drive autonomous cars and help employees make more informed and faster decisions. Many brands are already using AI and will use it more often as time goes on. But do their customers trust those brands’ use of AI?

Consumer Trust in AI Is Variable
Most of our customers are rightfully concerned that AI may pose the risk of being used for wrong or evil purposes. Artificial Intelligence has been featured prominently in so many science-fiction movies usually with negative influence. AI has been incorporated into the human consciousness and many consumers are hesitant to trust the use of AI in their daily lives.

That said, consumer trust in AI, at least when it comes in the form of chatbots, is still fairly high. A report from Capgemini showed that 54% of customers have daily AI-based interactions with brands and 49% of those customers found their interactions with AI to be trustworthy. That trust isn’t limited to just customers — employees also trust their interactions with AI.

The Importance of Transparency in AI: Explainable AI
The complexity of most AI and machine learning (ML) applications prevents most people from understanding what is going on. Even those who are part of the development process may be unable to understand all but the parts they are working on — the AI seems to exist in a “Black box” of mystery.

The complex nature means that AI is making decisions in real-time based on the insights it has discovered in the data it has been fed. AI allows people to understand how organizations use AI and machine learning (ML) to make decisions, predictions and insights and enables brands to be transparent in their use of AI applications, which increases user trust and overall acceptance.

It is useful for companies to look at AI through the lens of business capabilities rather than technologies, supporting three important business needs: automating business processes, gaining insight through data analysis and engaging with customers and employees. AI technology benefits big and small businesses as it helps them grow, ensures smarter decision-making and transforms the field of management. But how exactly does AI affect the business world?

Explore further and find a list of 10 ways AI can help your business grow.

10 Ways AI Can Help Your Business
1. Boost revenue with product recommendations.
2. Chatbots for enhancing customer service.
3. Create the best content marketing strategy.
4. Sentiment analysis to gauge customers’ emotions.
5. Powerful competitive intelligence.
6. Sales forecasting to grow your business.
7. Optimize your price.
8. Smart cybersecurity.
9. Create delightful In-store experiences.
10. Save time and reduce costs.

AI is not only for global tech giants and leading companies. AI is for every future-oriented business that aims to grow and stay ahead of the competition. How exactly you will use AI, depends on what your business is trying to accomplish. Make better decisions more quickly, offer transparency and explainability to create better buyer experiences.

With our AI chatbot, you get to do all three easily and in real-time whilst building trust in your customers’ hearts. Discover how Accordia chatbot can help you achieve.
 

Bring Me There

Source: https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/do-your-customers-trust-your-ai/utm_source=cmswire.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cm&utm_content=nl-daily

For the past five years, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and conversational AI have gained exceptional popularity, becoming top investments for companies helping to streamline productivity and efficiency in their offices while inviting better customer-employee experiences. Among the other benefits of RPA implementation together with conversational AI are process improvements, customer satisfaction, reduced costs and automating mundane tasks related to the business.

So it’s no wonder that, according to Gartner, organizations will be able to run 25% more tasks without human intervention by 2023. The idea of autonomy is achievable by using automation for front office, critical operations, infrastructure and data processing.

Customer satisfaction increases when automation takes place and followed with improved efficiency, effective sales and customer service. Front office automation can help by gathering customer data, responding to and updating customer inquiries or complaints, registration and security checks are often completed by a human, front-office team member.
RPA can complete these tasks with great speed and accuracy, vital for all other operations to serve customers efficiently and effectively. Two intriguing things about automation; it motivates employees to become more involved in their roles and within the business while enjoying the benefits of no monotonous tasks, fewer errors, reduced transaction costs and time plus better customer service experiences.

How Can Automation Improve Front Office Productivity?

1. Enhance Customer Service Experience
Brilliant customer service is essential to your business success and sustainment. Customers depend on and desire a seamless experience across any channel’s communication efforts. They expect you to extend great support, fast responses and simple solutions. With emerging technological advancements, customers these days are fond of quick responses to inquiries. Automation makes it easier to deliver the results customers want. The desire for fast response has led many businesses to invest in RPA and simulate human-customer communication. Automating repetitive tasks helps us achieve faster results, shorter wait times for customers, clear communication and consistency across all channels leading to greater customer engagement and satisfaction, better productivity, reduced costs, fewer errors and faster resolution for customers.

2. Improved Communication and Collaboration
Automation in the front office can encourage better communication with customers and other team members. RPA is deployed and instantly works by sending out automatic alerts or notifications. Companies can preconfigure these reminders or notifications and then employees can follow up with customers when needed or desired by the customer.
With these automated notifications, companies can inform customers of new products, services, or offers/deals on existing products. Excellent communication is vital for understanding customers’ needs, desires and opinions and position an organization to better foster these relationships. When communication is seamless, consistent and in-depth, opportunities arise for all parties involved.

3. Lead Nurturing
Keeping customers informed, happy and engaged across their buyer’s journey is the most challenging yet rewarding part of sales. To increase close rates and shorten sales cycles, it is vital to nurture sales leads with the best and most accurate information to ensure that customers are fully informed and understand the solutions, value and frequently asked questions before the sales team contacts them.
Automating the lead nurturing process ensures that all leads are attended to and followed up, all while delivering the right content. Companies can systematically and automatically track rates of engagements and send out additional content at the critical stage of the sales cycle. Automatic lead nurturing can eliminate some types of sales pressure, enhance efficiency, cut costs and allocate time to more valuable sales process elements.

4. Improve the Sales Order Process
The entire sales order process can be challenging. It involves various stakeholders and departments (including sales, customer service, finance, and analytics/logistics). It can involve
many applications, customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP) platforms, business processes management, accounting software, approvals, and workflow exceptions.
Sales orders are traditionally processed manually, which is incredibly slow, mundane and inefficient. A lot of time is wasted, and unexpected delays can reduce profits and annoy customers, resulting in loss of business. By automating order entry, your company can boost sales and marketing efforts, keep track of business growth and reduce the costs of manually performing these tasks involved in the sales order process.

5. Make Tangible Improvements
Without an implementation strategy, these automations can fall flat. The entire point of automating your front office is not to do things entirely, but to do things better. Employees can save vast amounts of time by not having to do the mundane tasks and can spend time doing more important ones. Front office automation can create improvements in that area first. Automation is incredibly accurate, which streamlines tasks and delivers the correct information to the right person, in the right department much faster. This frees up more time to focus on business growth, revenue, and innovations within the organization.

Communication and collaboration with the back office is vital. If both front-office and back-office tasks are automated, things can be done faster. They can take the customer service experience to another level and unify a business’s customer service protocols. Automation enhances team member engagement and productivity within the company. Improves retention to lower the total cost of ownership and improve a team member’s overall experience. It allows businesses to provide guidance, automatic approvals and coaching or training across multiple channels.
Collaboration between the front office and the back office ensures issues are resolved and experiences are personalized for customers. Automation can shorten the time it takes to address customer questions or concerns and it’s crucial to front office success.

Automating the front office can save your business money, enhance productivity, and improve the customer service experience. By implementing RPA and conversational AI such as a chatbot, team members are spared the tedious tasks and can focus more on customer-facing operations. Discover what a chatbot can do for your constant biz growth, placing a huge impact on customer satisfaction, responsiveness, and smarter customer service. Here’s more info on the benefits they offer.

Bring Me There

Source: https://www.druidai.com/blog/how-to-automate-the-front-office-for-improved-productivity

Did you know that the CRM software can provide a wealth of benefits for your small business, from customer retention to increased productivity? In this article, small business owners and marketers will learn about the benefits of CRM software for small businesses and how CRM is used to gather customer interactions in one central place to improve CX and satisfaction.

“CRM is one of the world’s fastest-growing industries, expected to grow at a rate of 14% between 2021 and 2027.” – SAP
The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software has become an important tool for businesses of all sizes. The software can provide several benefits to any business. Here’s a checklist of how CRM systems can help your business.
Dive deeper.

11 Ways CRM Can Benefit Your Business
A CRM solution can be used in various ways and provide numerous benefits to your business. Here are 11 key benefits a CRM could provide.

1) Better customer service.
2) Increased sales.
3) Improved customer retention.
4) Detailed analytics.
5) Higher productivity and efficiency.
6) Centralized database of information.
7) Managed communication with prospective leads.
8) Improved customer segmentation.
9) Automated sales reports.
10) More accurate sales forecasting.
11) Streamlined internal communications.

Key takeaway: The benefits of CRM include increased sales, detailed analytics, automated sales reports and better customer retention.

Lead nurturing can be a difficult process but it doesn’t have to stay that way with many opportunities to communicate. A CRM automatically manages the process, sending your employees alerts when they should reach out to the prospect and tracking every interaction, from emails to phone calls.

One great benefit of CRM is that you can view your customer’s journey holistically and what’s more intriguing? With every phase in the design and email, you sent out reviewed, you can quickly figure out the next move to make. It’s like viewing it from the top view and you can easily create a decision on what to do next. With the Zoho CRM Integration, you can create customer journeys and experiences into smarter and easier ones. Discover how our comprehensive cloud contact center solution can help you do just that.

Find Out More

Source: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15963-benefits-of-crm.html

What if there’s another opportunity waiting for you to step into it? These days, technology has placed a huge impact on almost all aspects of life and education is no exception. Or is it? In some ways, education seems much the same as it has been for many years.

Modern tech is reshaping the entire education system and together with previous conditions of disease appearing worldwide, most universities have taken their classes to the next level. The lectures in higher learning institutions are digitally empowered as the internet is made available to everyone. The same goes for the processes and operations happening in the education sector.

Technology has profoundly changed education. Tech has greatly expanded access to education. Up-to-date, massive amounts of information; books, audios, images and videos are available at one’s fingertips through the Internet with opportunities for formal learning available online worldwide. Access to learning opportunities today is limitless, thanks to technology.

The best of the crop include the opportunities for communication and collaboration which have also been expanded by technology and tech enables forms of communication and collaboration undreamt of in the past. Now, universities can collaborate with their dream biz partners using tech-based tools. Tech is a very powerful tool that can support and transform the education sector in many ways which include coming up with new ways for people to learn and work together, making the student recruitment process easier and ensuring lasting students to recommend their peers a place to study together.

It will be up to you and your workforce to make the most out of education while adopting new solutions so that effective and efficient collaboration takes place, student enrolment process run smoothly, data management is secure with education being available to everyone everywhere.

Take part in the future of innovation+ education + tech = inneductech. Learn more on how our cloud contact center solution integrates with Zoho CRM to redefine the activities and strategies needed to reach potential students, track sales plus implement best practices on recruiting students. Find out further.

Bring Me There

Source: https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/feature-how-technology-is-transforming-the-education-sector/396082

The News Article

My Say: Malaysian start-ups set to shine as regional stars
Amiruddin Abdul Shukor
The Edge Malaysia

Dec 16, 2021 | 13:30 pm +0
It is generally accepted that our domestic market of 30 million consumers is relatively small. As such, any business with ambitions to become a market leader must look to scale up regionally or globally.

For start-ups, the ultimate achievement is to be acknowledged as a unicorn — which means the company is valued at over US$1 billion. It would be an understatement to say that it is difficult to become a unicorn by solely depending on our local market; it is almost an impossible feat.

Malaysia’s first unicorn, Carsome, achieved the status this year after acquiring a substantial stake in Australia-listed iCar Asia Ltd. It also has a presence in four countries — Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore — thus boosting investor confidence, resulting in successful Series A, A2, B, B2 and C funding over the years from international investors.
Similarly, Malaysia’s two other unicorns — AirAsia Digital and edotco Group — also have a strong regional presence. The AirAsia brand has always prided itself in connecting Asean, and has now diversified its business from aviation and is set to be a key player in the e-commerce and delivery space in Southeast Asia.

Telecommunications infrastructure services company edotco Group has a presence across Asia — in Malaysia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Pakistan, Laos and the Philippines — with a portfolio of more than 41,000 telco towers.

Paving the way for local start-ups to tap vast markets

Knowing the importance of regional expansion, and executing it, is what sets apart successful start-ups from their less ambitious peers. We know it is not easy. But it is crucial to our tech start-ups ecosystem that we provide them with a platform to grow and launch from.

For this reason, the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC) has been running more than 20 global and regional programs for start-ups with value creation of more than US$400 million (RM1.7 billion) since 2015. This includes the Asean Centre of Entrepreneurship (ACE) Initiatives, Global Accelerator Programme (GAP), e@Stanford and Startup Exchange to propel start-ups beyond Malaysian shores.

The e@Stanford programme witnessed the participation of 118 startups, including Dropee, Leaderonomics and Plus Xnergy, and resulted in a value creation of US$110.2 million.

Through ACE, start-ups have access to initiatives to help them grow their business regionally. To date, three start-up exchange programmes have been conducted with Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam with a 43% expansion success rate.

Another key programme under ACE is the Global Market-Fit Programme (GMP), which is designed for start-ups ready for expansion or commercialisation (TRL 6 or Series A above). Through GMP, we aim to propel them to the next stage, in particular regional expansion.

When launching into a foreign market, our start-ups expanding alone could be more vulnerable in dealing with the nuances of an unknown market. Key challenges are usually a lack of understanding of regulations, language barriers and infrastructure support, among others. Navigating the inherent competition in the market of entry is another key area. With established networks forged by government agencies such as MaGIC, some of these risk factors and hurdles can be lowered. It really is ultimately the survival of the fittest. There have been successful Malaysian start-ups that have expanded regionally, and we believe there are more that can do the same, given the right support.

Penetrating the Great Wall of China

Last year, through the GMP, MaGIC facilitated 17 start-ups to go to Taiwan, India, Berlin, London and Budapest, through which several participants signed MoUs and NDAs with potential partners in these new markets. MaGIC continues to monitor and provide assistance related to the growth and development of these start-ups for a period of 24 months.

Last year, Rentguard won the Outstanding Startup Award by Startup Terrace in Taiwan, while Ira Noah, Zapzapmath and Astariz Ventures signed MoUs with partners in India.

This year, the GMP’s focus markets are China, the US and Indonesia. The focus on China, in particular, is natural, given its large domestic market and rapid growth. We also kept in mind that we focused on Taiwan last year, which has positioned itself as the gateway into Mainland China.

The exposure to China has produced early results, with three MoUs inked recently, signaling the start of a collaboration between Malaysian start-ups and their Chinese counterparts.

In the GMP with China, MaGIC collaborated with TusStar, China’s largest technology incubator with more than 300 locations across 70 cities. Its parent company, TusHolding, is a diversified science and technology holding group that holds US$30 billion in assets under management and is the largest science park operator in the world.

China is a hotbed for start-ups, as one of the fastest-growing and technology-adopting countries globally. In spite of travel restrictions due to the pandemic, and with TusStar’s guidance and assistance, some 20 business-matching sessions, involving more than 50 Chinese companies, with more than 200 rounds of evaluation, were conducted this year.

The Malaysian start-ups that participated in them included MyWave, Accordia Global, AOne Schools, TixCarte, Vencubator, Athletes for Athletes Solution, Urban Mobility Moovby, KelC Creative and NeuXP.

Opportunities near and far: Tapping Indonesia and the Silicon Valley

While China attracted nine start-ups, Indonesia attracted 15, and the most recent programme with the US attracted 10 start-ups. The GMP with Indonesia saw MaGIC collaborating with PT Ruang Kreasi Berdaya (KUMPUL), a premier digital entrepreneurship ecosystem builder. Empowering entrepreneurs in 70 hubs across 32 cities, KUMPUL will help Malaysian start-ups access Indonesia’s consumer market of 273.5 million people — more than nine times Malaysia’s population.

The early results are six Malaysian start-ups signing agreements with Indonesian partners — Anak2u, BIIB, Ejen2u, My AOne Learning, DF Automation & Robotics and IGG Arena Esport.

In the GMP with the US, which is ongoing, MaGIC is collaborating with US Market Access Center (US MAC) and Pixel Play Ventures (PPV). US MAC is a tech accelerator in the Silicon Valley. PPV is a venture capital management corporation registered with the Securities Commission Malaysia, focusing on investing in rapidly growing early-stage companies that fit its ethical venture-build philosophy.

Building a commercial pipeline of intellectual properties

Access to capital funding and new markets as well as market insights and collaboration with local partners are key factors in accelerating the growth of start-ups to become regional and global players.

We do acknowledge that not all start-ups are successful. In fact, the global success rate of start-ups averages at about 10%. And for that reason, we need to start with a larger base. The Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MOSTI) has set out to create 5,000 new start-ups with a commercial working model by 2025. But MOSTI’s plan does not stop there.

Quantity is not sufficient. If we are to hit our target of five unicorns, we will need quality in abundance. To this end, it is pertinent to fast-track commercialisation and enhance the participation, investment and collaboration in research by and with the private sector. A multi-stakeholder collaboration between the government, corporates and innovators is crucial to ensure sustained success.

We want to build a sizeable bank of intellectual properties (IPs), with a view that IPs will become an invaluable commodity. But IPs only have economic value if we are able to commercialise them. We have to unlock the economic value of our ideas, our knowledge and our IPs to propel Malaysia towards becoming an innovation-driven and knowledge-based economy.

This is where MRANTI — the Malaysian Research Accelerator for Tech and Innovation — plays a key role. Applying the quadruple helix partnership model, MRANTI will connect the government with industry, academia and civil society.

Through MRANTI, we seek to inspire the world with a bold new vibrant model to accelerate ideas to impact through the creation, development and commercialisation of technology and innovation.

MRANTI will be set up as a technology and innovation launch pad to help enterprises, researchers and inventors maximise their “return on ideas”, or ROI, at a quicker rate, with enhanced scalability and optimised synergies. While the conventional ROI — return on investment — conveys fiscal yields from capital outlays, return on ideas broadly refers to the conversion of knowledge to fiscal earnings.

We know breaking into new markets is not easy. You may be flying high locally, but that does not guarantee you success elsewhere. Different markets have different requirements and needs. We are here to help connect the dots. Let us accelerate impact and win together.

Amiruddin Abdul Shukor is CEO of the Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre (MaGIC)

Source: https://www.theedgemarkets.com/article/my-say-malaysian-startups-set-shine-regional-stars