MANILA, PHILIPPINES – Digital transformation – it’s the buzzword du jour for organizations big and small around the region, as companies are urged to “catch up” in a rapidly evolving world.
Yet in a sea of changing technologies and fast-moving dynamics – from automating business processes to ensuring cybersecurity practices are in place – where does a business even begin?
Globe Business understands this challenge. The heart of digital transformation remains to be about people — which is why Globe’s business-to-business arm has centered its latest campaign, “Choose the Courage to Transform,” as this human aspect remains unique to the Philippine landscape.
KD Dizon, Vice President and Head of Globe Business, has shared that the inspiration behind the campaign is truly its consumers — shaping not only a product or service, but creating lasting relationships that help them create digital roadmaps for the future.
“The key word that we’re embracing here is the word malasakit,” Jonathan Cristobal, Marketing Head of Globe Business, tells adobo. “This is where Globe’s human connection comes out — our malasakit for our customers. If you don’t need this, we won’t recommend it, even if it’s gonna bring in much sales. We don’t recommend those things. We just ensure that what you need in that current stage is what we provide for you,” he shares.
KD and Jonathan share their insights with adobo on what makes digital transformation unique tot he Philippine landscape, and how Globe Business lives and breathes digital transformation, helping businesses of every size along the way.
Could you tell us a little bit about the campaign, why you decided to launch this, and what were the factors that led to get to this campaign?
KD: The inspiration for this campaign is really the customer. In understanding more and more about the customers, we got a lot of insights about what they’re struggling with in terms of digital transformation. And they know they have to do it, but they don’t know where to start. They don’t know what to do. They need guidance. We wanted to be able to address that with solutions and consultative guidance from Globe Business.
That is what we wanted to capture in the campaign – it is this relationship that we are trying to build with our customers, understanding their pain points and helping them through their digital journey by giving them the courage to get started on it and to change and transform.
Jonathan: The key word here to use is agility. We’ve seen a lot of aspects or times where at Globe Business, our company had to pivot a lot and undergo so many changes because of the changing technologies. We have to adopt new stuff, new things, new process, new approaches to how we manage things and address our customer concerns. So we are actually living and transforming every day. And it’s one thing that we noticed and reflected on as we were trying to define our purpose, our business purpose, which is unlocking business potential with the power of connection.
Reflecting on that, we realized we are what we are talking about. We are embracing change each and every day so that we can deliver differentiation and value to our customers better. We can provide the confidence for them to change because we have undergone it as well. And we’re talking about here digital transformation. And no one does it better than grow business.
Is there anything new that the Choose the Courage to Transform campaign introduces?
KD: It’s not a specific product or service, but a way with how we actually engage with our customers. It’s really more about just beyond providing solutions, but being able to build that relationship with them, understand pain points, build a roadmap for their digital transformation, and also help upskill them and make digital transformation easier.
We want to make it clear to them that digital transformation is a step, it’s not a mountain that they’re trying to cross because it’s something that we’ve also gone through in Globe, and we want to be able to help hold our customers’ hands along the way.
Jonathan: One thing about that is the campaign is based on the foundation of our value proposition — unlocking business potential with the power of connections.
It has been expected of Globe to provide connectivity for a long time. That’s what we’re known for. But this time around, we dimensionalized it into three pillars: Human connection, which is the people within Globe, the subject matter experts, the experts with malasakit, who have our customers transformed.
Second is network connections — the infrastructure that you rely on, such as mobile sites.
And then the last one is ecosystem connections – this is where we link up with partners to provide ICT solutions such as cloud, cybersecurity, and business application services. This is so when we approach customers, we now are able to offer a more holistic solution to address their needs.
How important would you say digital transformation is for businesses here in the country? If you were to talk to a business right now, what would you say are the most important aspects they should be prioritizing, given that there’s probably a lot of hesitation towards taking the first step towards digital transformation?
KD: I think that where we are in the country right now, it’s very rampant already. People want to be able to digitalize.If you don’t do it as a business, you might not even survive, because end customers are now all very digital.
So you also have to be ahead of them.
But, like I said, there are different stages for the different sizes of businesses, what it is they need. The first thing I would advise them would also depend on what their pain points are.
In general, when you’re a bit of a smaller business, usually what they are looking for is to be able to get more customers. So you start maybe getting them into e-commerce, digital advertising… and then as it gets a bit bigger, then they need to be more efficient. They need to get their data and their services into the cloud. And therefore, at that point, you already have to be very proactive on cybersecurity. Once your data is out there, and your customer’s data, your most valuable asset as any business, you have to make sure it’s protected. So, it will depend on where you are on your digital maturity journey.
Jonathan: And that’s where Globe Business comes in. So if you look at what KD was talking about, the different needs from mobile and then elevate to something more like cloud and cybersecurity, a business coming in would probably be overwhelmed.
They’ll eventually immediately start looking at the whole picture, when they should approach it stage by stage.
That’s where Globe Business comes in with our business consultations — we work hand in hand with our customers to first try to identify or diagnose their current state. That’s the moment when we start designing and doing architecture of solutions and testing and implementing with them. So we don’t really jump immediately to the whole stack. We start with an analysis of where you are in that digital transformation.
The word digital transformation is such a popular buzzword around the region with the advent of AI. But if we were to take that into the Filipino landscape, what makes digital transformation unique to the Philippine landscape?
KD: We’re a very digital country from an end-user state. But as businesses, I don’t think we’re as advanced. So there’s a bit of a gap there. I mean, if you look at a lot of businesses and a lot of the ones we work with, they’re still using very manual, paper-based processes.
Jonathan: And if I were to even highlight one thing about that, digital transformation in the context of Filipinos, the emotions. You will see within the campaign how you know a potential business or the business that we’re trying to highlight in our campaign suddenly gets assigned something big, you know a new challenge and they don’t know where to start. As KD mentioned, emotions come in — where do I start, who do I contact, do I have the capability for this, do I have the bandwidth to do this?
They start asking questions and the emotions come out and Filipinos are very emotional. So you really need someone to guide you in that aspect to be more rationalized about how to address this digital transformation.
Globe obviously is a leader when it comes to digital transformation in the country. How does Globe see itself as a guide in enabling digital transformation for businesses in the country?
KD: It’s really more about building that relationship with the customer and understanding their pain points deeply and their aspirations so that you actually build a digital transformation roadmap for them and with them.
And it’s not just about, ‘Oh, this is the technology now, get this product now, get this solution now.’ We’re trying to solve their problems. We’re trying to help them reach their dreams. So it’s not about selling. It’s really about providing guidance and helping them in their growth. It may sound cliché, but their success is also our success.
Jonathan: The key word that we’re embracing here is the word malasakit. This is where Globe’s human connection comes out. Our malasakit for our customers. If you don’t need this, we won’t recommend it, even if it’s gonna bring in much sales. We don’t recommend those things. We just ensure that what you need in that current stage is what we provide for you. That is malasakit. We really, sincerely want our businesses to succeed because eventually, if they succeed, we also succeed.
