Targetbase hits the mark among Indonesian
state-owned enterprises

The following interview was conducted with Nick Maclay, Targetbase Co-Director; and David Soemali, Business Director.  They were joined by Caroline Villien; Asian Pacific Manager in Jakarta for a Targetbase seminar on ‘Winning strategies in a deregulated and competitive market’.       

So what exactly was this meeting in Jakarta all about?

Nick:  This all started from having discussions with another marketing services company in Jakarta who were interested in jointly presenting on the benefits of Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM).  Whilst locally the value of using CRM techniques was well understood by the attending business enterprise delegates, the seminar stimulated further interest in leveraging CRM to maintain state owned market share.

This seminar gave us the opportunity to collectively meet these delegates and present some sound CRM strategy ideas for their deregulated and competitive Indonesian marketplace.         

What can you tell us about the type of enterprises that attended?

David: It really was a diverse mixture of enterprises from the Aviation, Finance, Petroleum, Telecommunications, Insurance and Steel sectors.  The delegates from these companies were at the CEO, President Director and Director levels. 

Were there similarities that you found between these enterprises?
   
Nick:  Generally all of these enterprises are trying to acquire and maintain customers in a deregulated environment.  This is not a bad thing, as although there is more competition, these enterprises also have access to more customers.
 
We also found that without having any real obligation to do so, just about all of these enterprises are contributing a significant proportion of their profits to Corporate Social Responsibility. 

What were the main topics that Targetbase presented on?

Nick:  With regard to the deregulation of Indonesia, our seminar topic was ‘Winning strategies in a deregulated and competitive market’ - but CRM was really our focus within this topic. 
     
‘CRM’ is widely understood by large Indonesian state-owned enterprises, but its implementation tends to be IT driven, rather than marketing driven and we believe there is still a long way to go in terms of creating a practical level of touch points and eliminating customer churn.  A lot of this comes down to data simply not being maintained to the level that it is in Australia.    

At the same time, Targetbase specialise in CRM for global clients such as Lenovo, BlackBerry and VMware with high levels of activation and retention, and so we felt that this was where we could make the biggest difference for these companies. 

A point that we made repeatedly was that there are some major advantages for CRM to be within the control of the marketing department of an enterprise and NOT within the IT department.  IT gurus are obviously the best people to set up the infrastructure, but the channel marketing aspects need to be handled by experienced marketing personnel.  If the marketing department handles this process then the message can be refined and tracked - with the information fed into making a campaign more effective the next time communications are sent out.    

What do you see as some of the major challenges of operating within Indonesia?

David:  Due to customer habits and data often not being maintained, getting messages out to customers can be difficult. 

Internet adoption [currently about 15%] is still pretty low compared with western standards.  This creates a challenge to create meaningful channel marketing campaigns that use other platforms effectively such as mobile and print.

What do you think is distinctive about the Indonesian culture?

David:  In a business sense it’s very hospitable.  It’s also a hard-working society where the 9-5 workday usually doesn’t apply. It depends on the industry, but it’s not uncommon for people to start working from 8am and continue until 10pm or midnight – six days a week!
 
Being the country with the largest Muslin population in the world, praying is also a daily habit for most people and prayer rooms are standard in offices.  There’s also an agreeable blend of religion within Indonesia where you could find a Mosque and a Cathedral - directly opposite one another on street corners!    

Can you sum Indonesia up in just three words?

Nick:   Cooperative, hospitable, exhilarating

David:  Industrious, empathetic, home        

 

Editor’s note: Since the seminar, follow up meetings have been put into place between Targetbase and delegates from the above state owned Indonesian enterprises for the second half of 2011. Additionally, Targetbase Directors plan to ramp up resources within the Singapore office, and are talking with an Indonesian services provider to support these initiatives within the Asia-Pacific region.