Catering to the demands of digital-first clients

Photo by Tembela Bohle

Orange Clove was founded in 2008 to fill the market gap for mid to high-end Corporate Catering offering reliable service with restaurant quality cuisine. While continuing to enjoy a strong standing in the food catering scene, it has expanded to offer a wider range of services, from event conceptualisation to logistics setup and creative food catering.

While the company is known for its creative and innovative catering concepts, it also stays up to date on the ways it connects with its clients. SMEhorizon speaks to TL Tan, Assistant Director at Orange Clove, on consumer expectations in the food industry, how new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions have ensured these are met, and how the challenges of transitioning to a new technology were overcome.

How have consumer expectations shifted in the food industry? How has this changed the way brands engage with their customers?

Fuelled by rapid technological advancements and an accelerating pace of digitalisation, today’s digital-first landscape has placed information at the fingertips of consumers. This has set in motion a shift in consumer expectations in favour of faster, more efficient, and above all, tailored experiences. This evolution is being keenly felt in the F&B industry, with industry players constantly striving to provide more personalisation options to customers in the form of customisable food options and menus.

This has given rise to an increasing convergence of human engagement and innovative technologies, as businesses work to most effectively meet these new demands. For example, many of our customers want to be able to quickly and easily find answers to their questions. While technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) can certainly help to automate the delivery of accurate responses at speed and scale, it is also essential to balance this with human support.

In fact, global studies have shown that a leading frustration among customers when it comes to chatbots is the number of questions they have to answer before they are transferred to a human agent.

Going forward, we foresee that the most successful businesses will be those who strike the right balance between automation and human interaction to provide customers with the best experience possible.

What were the current challenges and primary pain points that led Orange Clove to adopt new CRM solutions?

While Singapore’s F&B industry has undergone significant digital transformation in recent years, technology adoption has been relatively muted within the food catering sector. Before the implementation of HubSpot’s solutions, Orange Clove largely relied on traditional methods of customer outreach. This included cold-calling and mass distribution of marketing collateral among others.

A key drawback of these methods was the limited visibility they yielded on customer feedback and preferences, impacting potential conversion rates and overall satisfaction. Being manpower-heavy methods, they also contributed to resource constraints during high-demand periods such as festive seasons, raising overall operating costs.

Other challenges, which are also prevalent for industry players, are manual-intensive processes and alignment between marketing and sales functions. These collectively contributed to longer working hours, less targeted and personalised customer experiences, slower conversion, and lower sales.

A review of our sales and customer outreach processes led us to the realisation that improvements were reliant on obtaining a more holistic view of the customer journey. We recognised the benefits that a CRM platform could bring, empowering our teams with the data necessary to understand our customers beyond the immediate order placed.

How has onboarding a CRM platform helped you optimise sales and marketing efforts?

We were able to optimise our sales and marketing efforts with various tools within the HubSpot ecosystem. One of these involved the use of HubSpot’s Service Hub, which consolidates and streamlines all customer inquiries under a single platform for better management. Having visibility into all customer inquiries enabled us to identify their top concerns and the most commonly asked questions.

This in turn allowed us to improve our self-service support capabilities by ensuring the most relevant information was easily accessible to all customers on our online knowledge database. Implementation of HubSpot’s Service Hub led to a decrease in related customer queries by approximately 50% during our 2023 Christmas campaign.

The self-service capabilities powered by HubSpot’s Service Hub also included chat automation solutions that were deployed alongside human customer service teams. During our 2023 Christmas campaign, traditionally one of our busiest periods of the year, the live chatbot managed approximately 90% of incoming customer queries, saving the team approximately 163 man-hours, and freeing them up to focus on processing orders and pursuing more customers.

Another important component of HubSpot’s customer platform was Marketing Hub, which consolidates all marketing efforts to create a single source of truth. This centralised information was especially helpful for us in creating targeted email marketing outreach lists and reviewing key metrics of our social media marketing efforts. This made it easy for us to review performance, and make more informed decisions on doubling down on better-performing campaigns.

Last, but not least, HubSpot’s integration with WhatsApp, the leading communication app in Singapore, enabled us to more efficiently manage customer queries, lessening the workload on the marketing team, and enabled us to reduce the first response time from an average of 1-2 days to 30 minutes.

What were the key technical challenges Orange Clove encountered during the initial phases of transitioning? How were these challenges addressed to ensure a smooth implementation?

We recognise that every new technology implementation will inevitably encounter challenges. For Orange Clove, the primary challenges included the time needed for our marketing and sales teams to adjust to a new platform.

With regard to technical challenges, syncing our customers’ data from our database into HubSpot platform was a key obstacle for our team. This was primarily due to the sheer volume of data involved, as well as reiterative mapping of the data sets to achieve an accurate representation of our customers.

Another initial challenge faced by our marketing team involved integrating the HubSpot platform with the right workflows. Identifying which workflows were necessary for the right customer data to be captured, and thereafter implementing clear operating procedures to ensure this data was collected was key.

This empowered us with accurate data from key touch points throughout the customer journey, yielding deeper, richer insights into our target audiences. In addition, this data also enabled us to quickly identify areas that require our attention across various channels.

These are potential obstacles that SMEs are likely to face in their technology adoption journey. Collaborating with technology partners, mapping out workflows that align with the customer journey, and implementing the right operating procedures have all been key to our success.

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