By Yi-Di Ng
Think about the last time you filled in your contact details signing up for an event, a sales deal or for an email newsletter online. While that action may have taken a few seconds of your time, it is actually worth more than you realise. Such forms are a crucial part of lead generation, the process of gathering customer interest for future communication. In turn, customer data gathered through lead generation feeds the sales and marketing campaigns of various organisations.
As a sales outsourcing company that provides lead generation as well as event and data management services, Spex Asia knows how important it is to gather and manage customer information. Indeed, through the years, the company has amassed some notable clientele of its own—including financial analytics corporation S&P Global and local events solutions firm SingEx Exhibitions. According to Spex Asia director and co-founder, Mr Daniel Malkiewicz, client campaigns that utilised list generation were able to sell twice as much as campaigns that didn’t.
But as valuable as lead generation may be, the manual collection, sorting and verification of customer contact information is repetitive and time-consuming. This led Mr Malkiewicz to consider automating the process. Doing so would enable the Spex Asia team to spend more time engaging with customers and improving their services. They just needed to find someone who could help them do it.
Enter the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s (IMDA) Open Innovation Platform (OIP). For Mr Malkiewicz, a platform that connects problem owners like himself with solution providers was just what he needed. “I realised that OIP would get us in front of a lot of problem solvers. That was attractive to me,” he said.
Finding the one
Since July 2018, IMDA’s OIP has aimed to accelerate digital innovation by matchmaking and fostering collaboration between problem owners to potential problem solvers. Problem owners post their problem statements on the OIP website, where they can be seen by problem solvers who stand to win financial rewards for developing a solution.
Spex Asia put out the call on OIP for a solution provider that would be able to automate parts of the contact list building, data cleansing and data building processes. One of the potential problem solvers was Australian business technology provider Neevista. In response to Spex Asia’s desire for automation, they came up with a proposal to build a custom lead generation application to automatically extract and cleanse data from disparate sources with an easy-to-use and intuitive user interface.
“Neevista had a good understanding of our problem,” explained Mr Malkiewicz. “Everybody tells you that it’s technically possible, but having somebody who is able to empathise and understand what we are doing made a difference for us. They also provided proof of concept and showed us a small part of what the solution would look like. Based on that, we decided to award them the project.”
Building an automated custom solution
To answer Spex Asia’s needs, Neevista built a custom application with automated data extraction capabilities called the Spex Lead Generation Application (SLA). “First of all, we explored what their immediate needs were and defined a scope which would address that as well as future needs,” said Mr Gaurav Sarin, Director and Principal Consultant at Neevista. “We scoped our project in a way that would provide a robust application for Spex Asia, which they can utilize to repeatedly use for different events.
SLA has enabled Spex Asia to partially automate the process of collecting prospective data for their clients’ events.
In just two months, SLA has been able to reduce Spex Asia’s reliance on manual labour and double its work output, something Mr Malkiewicz is pleased about.
“We’ve seen efficiency improve by around 20 percent. It now takes half the effort to build and clean an average-sized database,“ he said. “We’ve been able to take on more projects with the same amount of people.”
While their eventual goal with SLA is to automate up to 80 percent of their work, both Spex Asia and Neevista know that it will take time and further development. Mr Sarin explained that artificial intelligence and machine learning models can potentially be added in the future, which could further automate the process and increase the accuracy of the collected data.
With the successful partnership that he has experienced firsthand, Mr Malkiewicz has become a firm advocate for the OIP.
“I have shared it with other companies who are looking for some kind of automation or digitalisation,” he said. “OIP lines up companies with problems with companies that can solve them. It’s a win-win for both.”
To sign up as a problem owner or to browse available projects as a problem solver, visit the OIP website here.
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