How Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) Drives Customer "WOW" | Leading Through Change | Salesforce

Sam. Connectivity. It can be the glue that keeps us together. And never more so than in a time like a midst of a pandemic that we are at when we're all isolated at home and starved of the face to face connections that we're so used to in our daily lives. But what would happen if that connectivity is at risk? What would that mean to our conversation, to our interactions, even to our safety? So today we will learn what it takes to keep that glue strong and to keep us all connected when we need it the most. Good morning, I'm Cecily Ng and welcome to another weekly live conversation as part of the Salesforce Leading Through Change series. When you get to hear from leaders who are trying the best to get through these challenging times while giving back to the communities. And before I hand it over to today's host, Sujith Abraham Salesforce Senior Vice President and General Manager of the ASEAN region, I want to preview the next hour. Sujit will be interviewing Nick Lai, co owner and CEO of the Hong Kong Broadband Network and how the digital first strategy has allowed them to pay it forward and help Hong KONG Getting through COVID 19 stronger than before. We will then dive into a live demo demonstrating the power of an integrated platform and we'll close with a special performance from Leona Lewis. So for those of you watching on Twitter, you would want to go to salesforce.com live for that portion of the show. And as we do every week on Leading to Change we want to help those who need it the most. Millions of people already rely on the United nations well food program for the food they need during the pandemic and COVID 19 is making situation worse. This pandemic could double the number of people suffering from severe hunger by the end of the year. And to prevent a hunger pandemic, the world food program is scaling up to reach 138 million people across 83 countries with life saving support. So if you can please go to salesforce.com wfp and join us in ensuring the world's most vulnerable is have enough to eat during this crisis. And through to September 30, Salesforce will be matching donations up to US$160,000. Again that is salesforce.comWST with that I'm going to hand over the host today to you.

Sujith Abraham Cesley, thank you so much and thank you all for joining us today. Leading Through Change is all about how we can learn from each other, lead through challenging times and find the right tools to drive growth. This has been a Disruptive year for so many of us. And for our guest today, that disruption started a lot earlier. Nick Lai is a co owner and CEO of the Hong Kong Broadband Network. When the COVID 19 pandemic hit Hong Kong, it wasn't the first time we had to deal with a pandemic. Some time back, SARS had a massive impact on Hong Kong, more so than in most other parts of the world. When Covid hit, HKBN was ready. By using a digital first strategy, HKBN was able to help get Hong Kong through COVID 19 even stronger than it was before. To talk about how they did it, please welcome Nick Lai. Nick, welcome. And thank you for being with us today.

Thank you, Suchet. It's a pleasure to be here.

You know, Nick, on a personal note, I've been your customer since 2013, I might add, a very happy one. That's why I feel so honored to be able to share your story with the rest of the world today.

Thank you for your custom.

No worries. Nick, I have to say, I really love the way you think about partnerships and what you shared with me the other day when we were catching up. It's a big part of why our two organizations work so well together. Would you mind sharing what you shared with me?

Sure. I mean, we see our relationship as a partnership. We don't see us as a customer and you as a vendor. In fact, we take that through our whole company ethos. We don't have a million retail customers, we have a million retail partners. So for us, we see how can we maximize value to make a biggest possible impact on purpose that we can by working together. And purpose does include profit, but profit is a subset of purpose.

So, you know, on that topic of purpose, your core purpose as a company is to make our Hong Kong a better place to live. You know, with the onset of COVID 19, it must have felt overwhelming. How did you respond as a company?

Yes. So our core purpose is to make our home a better place to live in every region that we operate. And we operate throughout Asia and mainland China. And I hope through working with Salesforce, we can contribute to making our world a better place to live. So everything we do, we take a step back and say, are we meeting our core purpose? Are we actually executing on this? And we want to make decisions today that we will be proud of three years from now, not just kind of emergency stopgap decisions. So what we've done since January, we've given away one month free revenue, one month free service to our entire customer base. So that's 1/12 of our revenue base up to 1/12. And that's been a phenomenal response. At the end of the day, one month of free broadband is not going to change the family income that much. But we hope to inspire other companies to do likewise. If we can get the utility company, if we can get the landlord, the supermarket chain to all contribute towards our own community, I think will make a massive impact in terms of paying it forward.

Nick, I can completely relate to that. As you know, having shared values is such an important thing for us. As a partner with you, you keep the customer experience at the heart of everything you do. How did your interactions with your customers though change during this time?

It's one thing to want to give and it's another thing to be able to give. And that's what's changed between SaaS and now SaaS. We were still an analog company in 2013. Today we are a full digital company. In fact, working together with you as our partner, we have transformed the company digitally. We are no longer a fiber company. People used to think of Hong Kong broadband as like a fiber company to the home. We are actually a distribution company. One in three residential households and one in two active companies in Hong Kong. Our monthly billing relationship, this is incredible reach. So what we can do is bring people together, bring supply and demand together. So we bring our corporate customers and match them with our massive residential base and being digital allows us to do that.

You know you just thinking about that point you make about digital and that transformation, I think it's a really important point. You've obviously gotten ahead of that. And what we've seen coming out of COVID is that companies are really now accelerating their digital strategy. And that's partly in response to the way that our customers lives have changed. Everyone is going digital in their day to day. Can you walk us through how HK beyond responded, what it meant for you, for your digital strategy and your response?

Sure. I mean we believe our whole company is based on change or die, change or die, and we want to live. So we believe you can't predict the future but you can anticipate almost with full certainty that the future will involve change. So it's the Agile that will survive. For example, we've been rolling out and this has been kind of slow go process but really hyper accelerated with COVID is that we have a bundle and barter. So instead of charging our customers, our enterprise customers, purely just cash, we're happy to accept coupons. The services that you provide to offset your cash payment to Us and then we take the coupons and bundle it with our retail services as a benefit to our one in three households in Hong Kong. So it's a massive distribution and it's a true win win. In the past when we're analog company, you can't do this because it's incredibly difficult to match. But today because we're pure digital, it's very easy to match. For example, I'll give you a specific example. Petrol coupons. If you have a car, a petrol coupon is worth almost 100 on the dollar. If you don't have a car, a petrol coupon is worthless. So when we do a bundle and barter, when we get petrol coupons, because we're a digital back form, we can directly match the coupons with the people who have cars who want a petrol coupon. So it's incredible value. That's what we do.

So, you know, I think it's great. I'm wanting to drill down on that a bit further and I want to also talk a little bit about this whole giving a month's way in a matter of a few short days, which is not easy to do, you decide to give away a month's free subscription to your corporate income, your residential customers. How did having a unified view of your customer help you decide to do this? And you know, I'd love to know if it helped you execute your plan.

It'd be impossible to execute without being digital. I mean, in our company in terms of crisis management, we believe perfect is the enemy of good. And we set out to do good. If you wait for perfection, in terms of readiness, in terms of information, you will always be behind the ball. So we rather err on the side of excess when it comes to trying to do good. So we sat together as a management team. We decided that we wanted to give one month free. But you can't just do that. So we relied on the team to be able to digitally engage our customers to go through the process and they managed to turn around the concept, we managed to turn around the concept to execution across our entire 1 million subscriber base in, in one month. Now normally when we do a Digital program, a 5% take up rate will be considered acceptable. In this case, we had the far majority of our customer base take up this offer. An unprecedented, unheard of take up rate. And I think the goodwill that we generated, it's a lifetime of value.

That's incredible. I know you've also used, you touched on the whole point about the vouchers and I know when we were catching up for lunch the other day, this whole idea of matching, because I think it's a really unique way to think about vouchers, and you talk about redemption and how important that is to consider and how people value vouchers. Can you talk a little bit about how you're leveraging your unified view to make sure the right people get those vouchers and so they value them and so that they're not going to waste?

Yeah. For example, let's say you receive a movie ticket. If you don't go to movies, the ticket is not worth much. And this is the problem that we had before as a analog company. So I joked with you at lunch, I used to sit with a safe behind me, and we had millions and millions of dollars of vouchers, physical vouchers with expiry dates. And it's a very inefficient way of doing marketing. If you're mailing someone a physical voucher and you don't even know they want it. So now, being digital, we can easily match. Now think about the middleman. Cost between distribution and the customer is massive. We're cutting out the middleman. So our customers, our enterprise customers get much higher profitability. And our retail customers get vouchers that they love. So you almost have a $1 to dollar value creation without the leakage by doing this matching. And we're in a phenomenal place to do it because of our reach. The one in three households in Hong Kong, the one in two active companies in Hong Kong.

You know, the whole bartering approach. I remember when I first heard this about HKBN a number of years ago. It's a very new way to think about a relationship, a partnership. I'd love for you to share a little bit about how you came up with the concept. Was it easy, for example, to drive this sort of a relationship with your customers or your partners? Rather, I'd love to learn a bit more about that and the impact that's had on the depth of your relationships with your partners.

I think the starting relationship, the starting ethos is we don't see us, as I mentioned, we don't see ourselves as having customers. We see ourselves as having more than a million partners. And our approach is, how can we help our partners make money? How can we make our partners achieve purpose better? And that's the ethos. So when we look back at the assets that we have, that reach, how can we intermix the reach so that we can create purpose and create value and create money, and that's the same relationship we have together. I think that's why Salesforce and HABN comes together. We were very Inspired by your 1, 1, 1 and that's why we decided to give away 10% of our revenue in January this year.

That's amazing. 10% of your revenue. I know that a lot of that is also inherent in the culture you drive internally in your organization. We were talking about this the other day and how everyone has a right to be an owner. I even love the fact that when I was exchanging notes from your assistant with your assistant, one of the pieces of information in her title was also co owner. I'd love to hear a bit more about the whole co ownership concept because I think this is very, very unique in the way you think about it and the way the entire HKBN culture runs and how you drive your ethos.

I respond to that question with another question. What's the simplest way to build a massive infrastructure bridge safely? We look back, if you look back at history, the Romans, you know, the aqueducts that the Romans built are still standing today. And how they did it is they get the bridge builder, the team to stand underneath the bridge once it's built and then take away the scaffolding. And if the bridge doesn't fall down, you live. If it falls down, you die. It's kind of selection bias. And that's what we do with our company. So we offer our supervisors and above the opportunity, the invitation to put their life savings into the company. So it's never given because we believe ownership has to be by choice. It cannot be given to you. So we do not believe in stock options. Every One of our 990Co owners, about one fifth of our whole base of talents is a co owner by election, by choice. We put our own family life savings into the company. And I'm incredibly proud to share my title with 990 colleagues. We all start with the title co owner. And once you own a company, think about the difference. Do you ever wash a rented car versus your own car? We own our company. We treat it as our own company. We're not renting our employer. Employer. Most legacy kind of structures, you're basically renting your employer and the employer is renting their staff. In our company, we have no staff. We only have talents and co owners.

You know, Nick, I'd love to understand, you know, how do your employees, when they first come on board, how do they react to that, that concept of ownership? I'm sure in the long term it starts to drive a lot of Loyalty and going that extra mile. But must be a bit of a change as much as the bartering concept is with your partners.

When we first launched it, it was taken with surprise and shock. There's actually a Chinese saying is something along the lines of don't bring money to your work. No, you come to work to earn money, you don't come to work to bring money. And we had responses like, is this a Ponzi scheme? Maybe I'll share with you a funny situation. You know, we had a fresh graduate trainee, elite trainee, he was top of his class and so forth and he joined us and hasn't been working before. So he doesn't have a year salary to invest. So he went back and borrowed a year salary from his parents and his parents thought he was joining a Ponte scheme. The more people you hire, the more money you bring in. But anyway, we got through the process and two and a half years later when we IPO'd, he paid back his dad, the full principal and a Rolex as interest. Wow, that's incredible. We have so many life changing stories. What we don't want to do is create wealth for a small number of people, but we want to create distributed wealth for a wide range of people and that's what we've done. We have created more Hong Kong dollar millionaires than any other telco in the history of Hong Kong.

That's amazing. I mean, it's so inspiring to hear that Nick and I, I know that one of the things that you do, you do, you know, you and the entire HKBN group, the organization, you're very intent on purpose. Everything you do has meaning and purpose and is about influence more than anything else in terms of change and culture. Can I ask, you know, I know that, you know, one month of broadband, you know, is not going to solve every single problem, but it has influence and has an impact on the world. How has everybody reacted to some of the things you've done during this crisis, this moment? How have people reacted? How has it had an impact? Love to get a sense for that.

I think our people, our colleagues are incredibly proud. I believe our customers, our partners, now a million partners, are incredibly proud. And we wear with bright pride this T shirt. We also have the socks which I won't show you for now, but I believe our talents. You know, when we walk around town and there are thousands and thousands of habn manhole covers on the ground, we become very sentimental, very geeky, very nerdy and we want to stand on top of a manhole cover and take a selfie with our family because we're proud of the company that we own. That's what we want to do. Now if you look at our history, broadband started back in year, say 2000 as exclusive for rich people. It was priced beyond the masses. It was priced at US$75 a month and the mass cannot afford this. So what we did was we took the income pyramid, turned it upside down, rolled out our fiber to the public housing estates of Hong Kong, the ghettos if you like, or super dense areas. And we price broadband at US$12 a month. Rocket fast broadband in year 2000, US$12 a month. And we believe that if you can get on the Internet, you can learn your way into prosperity. So we're all about giving a hand up, not a handout, not so much into charity, but we're certainly into giving a hand up, defining our purpose.

I love that as you know, one of Salesforce's core values is equality and certainly alongside that is driving access. And I love all the work that you've done to be able to provide access. I remember my first interactions with Hong Kong broadband and how simple you've made it to be able to provide access to anyone. It's an incredible story and you've done a lot for the community for sure. There's been so much of an impact that an impression that Hong Kong broadband has left in the community. And I as a member of this community, I'm so thankful for you for that. As we think about reopening and you know, with Hong Kong being on the forefront of the reopening process, what advice do you have as we as the rest of the world looks to reopen safely?

I think the agile there's going to be, we talk about in our company we're going to get punched in the face that you cannot avoid. Covid was a huge punch to the face. What we can determine is how we respond. So giving people the flexibility, maybe I'll divert a little bit in terms of having alignment and flexibility. So in our company, one in four people get a corporate credit card and you're authorized to make a decision. So we talk about assume yes unless we tell you no. No yes is the default and the only reservation that we have on the credit card. There's no spending limit, there's no entertainment guide, etc. The only requirement that we have on a corporate credit card is we reserve the right to put the corporate credit card spent on the Internet intranet and let 990co owners see how you spend our Life savings. And if you think it's the right thing to do, do it. And, you know, very clear priorities. You start with our core purpose. Make our home a better place to live. Second is safety, the community safety. And the third is we have stakeholders, not shareholders. Shareholders is only a subset of our objective. Profits is an important subset, but it's not the purpose of what we come to work for.

I love that. Ownership, transparency, you know, being really connected, I can see why the culture is so strong. The impact you've seen is felt everywhere. So I gotta ask, as you look forward, you know, you've set the bar high. What comes next?

We want to scale. You know, we're still far from being the market leader. We have aspirations to become the market leader and that's a key difference. Many of our peers just want to survive. They just want to subsist. We want to thrive. We don't want to just merely survive. So that's why I think we have to be at the forefront of change and really embrace the opportunities. And in our view, every crisis has opportunity. The bigger the crisis, the bigger the opportunity. We went into SARS and came out much stronger from the experience and we fully intend to do that with COVID We intend to enter Covid and come out far stronger than when we entered it.

Well, Nick, this has been incredibly inspiring. I want to thank you so much. I really appreciate you joining us today. Your work and your contributions have made the Hong Kong community truly. They're truly inspiring. All of your work and what you've done contributed and I think they really are an example for the world. As I mentioned before, as a member of this community and on behalf of Salesforce, I really want to thank you and the entire Hong Kong broadband network for all that you do every day. So thank you.

Mutual. I think the respect and admiration is mutual. We take great pride in just looking back at what we have achieved together working with Salesforce. We would not be here today without our partnership.

Thank you for that. I really appreciate it. We have enjoyed the partnership and we evaluate so much.

Likewise.

Now I'm excited to hand it off to Trina to tell us more about the power of an integrated platform. Trina, over to you.

I'm so excited to be with you today to talk about why it's never been more important than now to embrace digital and go digital first in your businesses. And for hkvn, that's meant an organization wide digital transformation, upgrading that business technology and also reorienting all of its departments and all of its talent around the customer and it's happening on the Salesforce Customer360. This is the platform that's helping businesses around the world put the customer at the heart of their business strategy, Build a single source of truth and a single view of those customers, break down those departmental silos and grow their businesses in this digital first operate from anywhere world. And what does that meant for HKBN's customer? It's meant that it's become absolutely effortless to engage with the company. So let's take a look at what that looks like. Here we are@hkbn.net, it's the company's E commerce site built on Salesforce's commerce cloud. And a customer, Amy Chan is looking for an iPhone 11 Pro. She adds unlimited data service and then she sees an offer for Global Talk Plus. It's a package that'll let her stay connected with family and friends back in Hong Kong for free, no matter where she's traveling. It's a great deal. So she goes ahead and adds it, gives over her details, gives her payment details, and she's ready to check out and look at that really seamless, super quick process. A few days later, she's gotten the phone in the mail, she's activated the service, and thanks to Marketing Cloud, she's been put on an onboarding journey with hkbn. And Marketing Cloud triggers this welcome email welcoming Amy to hkbn. And right there in the email, she's invited to download the MyHKBN app. It'll let HKBN stay connected with Amy and also lets Amy stay on top of her account. So she goes ahead and downloads it. Now, a little while later, Amy's realized that she's really not using that Global Talk plus service. It's Covid and she's staying at home. So she's wondering if HKBN would let her switch that service out for some other feature or service. So she opens up that app and connects with customer service right from it. Now, Amy prefers chatting over calling. And service Cloud integrates with many popular messaging apps. So Amy goes ahead and chooses that online customer service option and connects to HKBN through WhatsApp. Now, what you're seeing here is the Lightning service console to the left there you can see that the service agent can engage with amy on that WhatsApp chat right from the Lightning service console. In that service console, the agent can also see Amy's past orders, like that, iPhone services, HKBN subscriptions, and even her billing data. It's a true 360 degree view of the customer. Amy and I want to pause there for a second about that billing data. As you may know, it sits on an external billing system, but it can get integrated into the 360 degree view of Amy thanks to MuleSoft. And what's MuleSoft? It's Salesforce's API platform, helping businesses connect and unify data from any system. And there's more. Einstein Intelligence is built right into the Salesforce Customer360, making every customer interaction smarter than ever before. And to the right here you can see that Einstein's been hard at work. Einstein's been looking at Amy's Global Talk plus usage, knows that it's low, knows that most people are staying home right now and probably in need of entertainment. So Einstein's recommending to the service agent that my TV Gold, HKBN's premier entertainment package, is the next best offer for a customer like Amy. So the service agent suggests to Amy that she replaced Global Talk plus with this My TV Gold package. Amy thinks it's a great idea, it's exactly what she needs. And so she accepts it right from this lightning service console. The agent can go ahead and activate that service. And there you go. Amy's managed to replace Global Talk plus with an awesome entertainment package, the My TV Gold package, in one conversation right from her phone. It's an absolutely effortless experience for a customer like Amy. And this is exactly the kind of experience that HKBN aims to deliver to all all of its customers using the Salesforce customer 360. So just to recap what we saw, we saw how Salesforce is helping HKVN build a single source of truth of its customers using commerce, cloud marketing, cloud Service Cloud, MuleSoft, and even Einstein AI. But we've only just scratched the surface of how HKVN is leveraging the full power of the Salesforce Customer360 to deliver wow to its customers. So we encourage you to go learn more about this story and how HKBN is using that full Salesforce customer360@salesforce.com.