Matthieu David interviews Michael Chiao, a Founding Partner at MEGI and Axel Standard. Finance and accounting management are important for companies as they weigh heavily in decision-making. That’s why MEGI, cloud-based accounting software has seen a great subscriber count since it’s creation. But is there a local market for such software? Are Chinese companies getting this type of management done internally or are they moving towards streamlining it? Find out the answers to these questions and more in this new China Paradigm interview.

• 2:55 MEGI – brief company history
• 4:33 The coronavirus outbreak – growing the company in uncertain times
• 7:10 MEGI – current client base
• 8:03 Small numbers or niche numbers – what is MEGI’s focus demographic?
• 9:35 Foreign companies vs Local companies in China – the culture difference in finance management
• 13:42 Do Chinese companies do analog SaaS services internally?
• 17:23 Are Chinese small and medium companies changing the way they manage their business internally?
• 23:25 Current company yearly revenue
• 26:24 What was the initial subscriber goal for MEGI?
• 29:38 What specific key features do clients value for MEGI?
• 33:04 How hard is the process of bank reconciliation through MEGI?
• 35:23 China’s baking system accessibility – how hard is it to integrate with MEGI software?
• 37:48 How is MEGI able to handle finance reconciliation in the present?
• 41:16 Why did MEGI decide to focus on the financial statements?
• 46:12 Big Data Collection – has MEGI achieved critical mass yet?
• 51:42 What type of loans can small and medium companies expect to get from other companies or banks in China?
• 56:38 What is the process of deciding and then implementing a new feature for MEGI?
• 1:00:30 Listening to your client – a key requirement in software feature development?
• 1:01:49 What is Axel Standard and what do they do?
• 1:06:26 How has computer science evolved since 1998?
• 1:08:51 How has China benefited over the years by opening up to the world?

We believe, that China, with 20% of world population and as the second world economy, is impacting every single business, small to big. That is why it is a new paradigm. How does China impact your business is the ultimate question we will answer through those podcasts.

China paradigm is a China business podcast sponsored by Daxue Consulting where we interview successful entrepreneurs about their businesses in China. You can access all available episodes from the China paradigm Youtube page.

This article China Paradigm #113: Understanding business practices and technology maturity in China through a SaaS case is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

Full transcript below:

Hello everyone, I’m Aurelien Rigart I’m the co-founder and Vice President of IT Consultis, I’m from France. I’ve been in China and started this adventure nine years ago. So, IT Consultis is a digital transformation company. It’s a team of 80 people in three countries, which are China, Singapore, and Vietnam. So, we’re helping Fortune 500 and fast scaling start-ups to work on their digital transformation. It can range from eCommerce, from building mini-programs, from building websites, App, integrating systems together, or overall work as a consultant on their digital transformation initiatives.

What are the main requests during and after the COVID-19 lockdown?

I mean what’s interesting is that a lot of people do believe that China is fully digitally transformed. They believe this because they see that there is a deep penetration – like the whole ecosystem, like the usage of WeChat, the Alipay, the JD and so on, but there is a big war right now on traffic ownership where basically brands are really struggling to at the same time survive and gathering the data of the users. So that’s why the concept of private traffic which has never been used in the past, suddenly came in 2019 where brands finally they did understand it – like the more money they were investing, basically they were having a negative revenue. So, they were losing money on any kind of growth that they were having. So, like you’re always looking for growth, I mean in this period of time you’re looking more to survive, but looking for growth – they didn’t understand that if basically they wanted to find other channels, they may need to go back to basically private traffic and private traffic was made easier with basically the WeChat and the mini program. Because – before we started the mini-program, you didn’t have that channel. Tomorrow you’re not going to bring everybody on the website – websites are still important but it’s hard to drive people on a website unless they are already a fan of your brand and they want to see oaky – this particular car, that particular car – so brands that are at a certain level should always have a website, but what really makes a difference is really the capability within a WeChat mini program ecosystem to have the API’s for brands to be represented and to have like the full ownership of their traffic and this has been the major, major change.

In early 2019, when we did an interview with you, you said that the keyword for 2019 would be ‘omnichannel.’ How does it look like for the first quarter of 2020?

Well I would say that – that’s interesting that you remind me of this – it is definitely Omni channel, it is definitely headless, I would say that the keyword for the end of 2019 was really private traffic, so there was like a little bit of a change between Omni channel, basically private traffic is kind of like englobing the entire ecosystem, the entire Omni channel ecosystem and what I believe is that yes – it’s going to push more and more in that direction. Brands are still going to go to TMall, brands are still going to grow on all those marketplaces and they should do it, they should as well make sure that they have good ownership and at least a specific percentage, maybe 10 – 30% of their users coming on their platforms, to make sure that they have like a deep connection, but at some point they get into a fight with the category manager of Alibaba, they just don’t drop their self to zero from one day to another – I think that’s something that we’ve seen over the past and so – Omni channel is still going to be here, private traffic is going to be important, O2O which was probably 3 or 4 years ago is still very relevant, so this is going to continue but the most important is really the digital transformation that we’ve seen that is being operated and what’s interesting is that B2B is really leading the charge right now and there’s a lot of B2B brands in some very specific industrial ecosystem that are largely investing, they’re working through distributors and the problem is that they’re entering a Chinese market where – okay there are the products that are dropped, containers here – and then of course they’re doing all the marketing, they’re doing all the branding, but then comes the black box where they’re going to have one distributor, second layer of distributor and then they have the Alibaba ecosystem and basically those two are kind of like black boxes. So, trying to make sense of what the users wants, how they can adapt their strategy, their pricing points and how there can be some loyalty program and some deeper connection with the users and with their fans and that’s something we’ve never seen in the past and that’s something where we see a lot of players are really investing into that particular area and they need to find ways to create those connections because they’re not made easy. So there’s not like a magic formula where you’re going to say – hey, all of a sudden I’m a distributor, I’m a brand here and I want to target somebody that is here that is going through five layers of ownership and I have the opportunity to reach this person. So, there is no magical solution here, there’s no magic potion to make it up. So, it’s a laborious and really step by step approach using CRM, marketing automation, content, frictionless user experience, it can be app – it can be mini programs, there is many, many ways to do it, overall I’m using and leveraging as well distributors as well is something that is important, but that’s really what we see as a huge opportunity when it comes to the digital in 2020.

In the West, we see that CRM companies like Salesforce or Zoho have been able to expand massively and be titans in their industry. What CRM players are big in China?

First of all, we need to remember that it seems that we’re going to have Salesforce coming to china supposing July 2021, so of course, if things are not moving forward politically or with the virus – we never know when things are really going to happen so I think it is safe to say that those big players are going to come to China at some point, but China has not to wait to create their own ecosystem and you get a lot of start-ups that have been backed up by both Alibaba and Tencent, one of them is Xiaoshouyi which is like a CRM that is backed up by Tencent that is working pretty well, then you’ve got a few ones that are backed up by Alibaba. So, each of them is supporting their ecosystems together and kind of like blocking the other one from their own ecosystem. So, I think it’s something that is interesting and I’m very curious to see because Salesforce has a partnership with Alibaba and so they have announced already that they’re going to launch in summer 2021. So I’m very curious about how this partnership is going to influence basically the opportunity for Tencent and the mini-program to connect with this because we’ve seen over the past that they’re tried to silo those ecosystems, so I think there’s going to be a very interesting conversation, but clearly, there’s a lot of b2b players in the market that are very strong, but as well I know a lot of brands that are using salesforce globally that are just waiting for one thing that when the sales force is coming here, then we’re going to use potentially salesforce commerce and sales force here in China to replicate what they have done globally and to make things easier in terms of maintenance, in terms of programming and so on.

So, I think 2021 is going to be an interesting year to see if companies will want to resist and continue leveraging using what they’ve been developing for years or if they will say okay – let’s follow what global is saying and we’ve seen of course in China a lot of resistance. You don’t actually have the full ownership of the strategy and the governance of the country for those brands, so I think it’s going to be very interesting.

Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments, or send us an email at dx@daxueconsulting.com.

This article Daxue Talks transcript #75: China’s digital transformation and CRM players is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

Our guest Aurelien Rigart, Vice president and partner at IT Consultis, shares his insights on brands’ online survival during and after COVID-19, how digital marketing is evolving, and how he is anticipating a CRM collaboration between western and Chinese companies.

Jump to the questions:

• 0:54: What are the main requests during and after the COVID-19 lockdown?
• 2:58: In early 2019, when we did an interview with you, you said that the keyword for 2019 would be ‘omnichannel.’ How does it look like for the first quarter of 2020?
• 6:27: In the West, we see that CRM companies like Salesforce or Zoho have been able to expand massively and be titans in their industry. What CRM players are big in China?

Daxue Talks is a show powered by daxue consulting, a china-based strategic market research company founded in 2010! With Daxue Talks, you will stay up to date with all the latest business updates in China.

This article Daxue Talks 75: Digital transformation and the CRM landscape in China is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

Full transcript below:

Hello everyone, I’m Aurelien Rigart I’m the co-founder and Vice President of IT Consultis, I’m from France. I’ve been in China and started this adventure nine years ago. So, IT Consultis is a digital transformation company. It’s a team of 80 people in three countries, which are China, Singapore, and Vietnam. So, we’re helping Fortune 500 and fast scaling start-ups to work on their digital transformation. It can range from eCommerce, from building mini-programs, from building websites, App, integrating systems together, or overall work as a consultant on their digital transformation initiatives.

We know that email Newsletters are not effective in China. Which channel can replace newsletters?

That’s a good question. I think there’s a different means – SMS – like marketing is somehow still here. I receive here and there SMS notifications from a lot of different vendors, like subscription accounts on WeChat is as well very powerful, official accounts as well, service accounts. Even though the opening rate – that’s kind of like been going down, down, down – I think people now they want to have more like visual, video content. Like Douyin has been a great example of it, that has been getting a lot of market share, you know like people they don’t have the time to spend reading it- so that’s one part of it. Another part is creating group chats on WeChat and we’ve seen a lot of initiative like in many community where people want to grab the attention of their users, so they’re going to put like 500 people in a group chat and then talk about something specific, it can be beauty, it can be cosmetics and they’re going to share very specific tips about it, so there is like many scale ups that have been using it and that’s another segment actually of the private traffic that we were talking about earlier, the ability to use WeChat groups as like a community to interact and to purchase and there’s a lot of KOL that’s going to have maybe like 500 group chats and they’re going to animate them in a very specific way and they’re going to generate a lot of sales through this, so basically that’s like another way to do your newsletter.

You mentioned SMS solutions several times, what kind of software do you use in China to distribute SMS easily and to command them to your platform?

Well I mean like there’s been like some operators and like they have a very good French one called Splio that has been SMS and email marketing, at some point, you have like web power – so they have like very specific technologies working on this and right now a 360 picture – when you work on marketing automation – usually the user journey is going to include at some point a WeChat post, a WeChat message, a WeChat push, but as well as SMS – so now also shows CRM – at some point, it was just email and SMS marketing and then WeChat came into the loop and now most of the solutions are providing WeChat but as well SMS marketing at the same time when you’re building the entire user journey.

Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments, or send us an email at dx@daxueconsulting.com.

This article Daxue Talks transcript #74: Do email newsletters work in China? If not, what does? is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

Jump to questions:

• 1:06: We know that email Newsletters are not effective in China. Which channel can replace newsletters?
• 2:56: You mentioned SMS solutions several times. What kind of software do you use in China to distribute SMS easily and to connect them to your platform?

Daxue Talks is a show powered by daxue consulting, a china-based strategic market research company founded in 2010! With Daxue Talks, you will stay up to date with all the latest business updates in China.

This article Daxue Talks 74: Marketing in China: Alternatives to email newsletters is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

Find here Daxue Talks episode 73. Aurelien Rigart, Vice President and partner at IT Consultis, answers our questions regarding the development of the 5G in China and discusses the differences between developing software in China and in the rest of the world.

Full transcript below:

Hello everyone, I’m Aurelien Rigart I’m the co-founder and Vice President of IT Consultis, I’m from France. I’ve been in China and started this adventure nine years ago. So, IT Consultis is a digital transformation company. It’s a team of 80 people in three countries, which are China, Singapore, and Vietnam. So, we’re helping Fortune 500 and fast scaling start-ups to work on their digital transformation. It can range from eCommerce, from building mini-programs, from building websites, App, integrating systems together, or overall work as a consultant on their digital transformation initiatives.

Have clients ever asked you to develop on the Huawei OS?

So far – never. So far never which is interesting. I’m pretty sure that it’s going to happen at some point but I think this is like for very, very specific types of applications and I think marketers and brands they’re really focusing more on mini programs and on websites or trying to understand what is going to be the next mini program that will make sense – Douyin? Is Weibo? Is it Baidu? Because Baidu as well as Xiaomi has worked on mini programs. So, depending on the category that you’re working – but for us mainly working B2B or working with brands, our types of customers they never ask us for this.

How is the development of 5G so far in China? What do you expect as an impact of 2020?

Well I would say 5G is a birth word and clearly something that is going to revolutionize step by step the user experience but what’s important – so on top of the live stream you’re going to have more consumption of heavy files, video, 3D augmented reality, so that’s going to be the first step but when you’re talking as a brand – you still need to create those contents. So that means like from one day or another – live stream is one of the disruptions, but brands are not going to start creating millions of videos where they’re already struggling to catch the attention of the user. So, from a brand perspective, I think it’s going to have a very limited evolution. The live stream I think is a great evolution. In the future, you’re going to have AR where you’re going to have virtual shops and you’re going to have the opportunity to visit them. We have seen this in the past and it has shown that it is not bringing the highest conversion and that it was kind of gimmicky and gadgets – so are brands going to go in that direction? I don’t think so too much – I think the live stream is going to be something great, and then you’re going to potentially use more like AR – but it’s not going to touch too much about the 5G here. I think 5G is just going to enable like to download mini-program much faster, or to download apps much faster, but I think the 5G is going to have a stronger effect when you’re talking about IoT, maybe bitcoins, or just opportunity to download heavy files or when you’re on specific platforms when you want to for example mimic – if you’re doing the app for the NBA or maybe FIFA then you want to create a heavy content application where it’s going to be easy to display 4K videos and to promote some very specific content and this is where it’s going to have an influence.

What are the differences in developing software in China and the rest of the world? Are the languages of programming different?

So, overall, not that many differences. Of course, there are always cultural differences in terms of project management, integration, speed of development and weight management – but in terms of languages what we are seeing is that – we’re seeing a little bit of emergence of specific languages created by Chinese developer – view.gs, for instance, is a very strong JavaScript frontend that is competing against ReactJS or AngularJS – React that is created by Facebook and Angular – which is a framework that is created by Google. So I didn’t follow the market trends, but basically React, Angular – was started first but then React became the number one and Angular number two and I think View has such a strong community in China that he has emerged as potentially the number three – so I have to double-check what are the latest figures, but this is a language that is highly appreciated by the local developers and that has a pretty strong quality and is kind of interesting the way it’s been built in order to really leverage the WeChat – the different ecosystems and even the WeChat languages have kind of been used in order to create itself. So, I think there are very interesting things happening where we see the Chinese market is not just copying but innovating a very specific advanced technology where we have seen WeChat through the mini-program, creating their own languages and we see Alipay through the mini-program creating their own front end languages. So, I think it’s very interesting. So in terms of backend – those very backend heavy languages are kind of like very similar – wherever you’re looking at, and front end has been a little bit the changing component and I think that it’s something that is very interesting and sometimes you see that those languages are performing even better than the React or Angular that have been developed by a very strong community. Yet at the same time – when you’re going to talk with these Chinese developers – they’re going to say – oh I really prefer that languages or that language and we’ve seen as well some framework that have been created as well in China that have been like having a huge adoption, order management systems as well have been created, CRM have been created – so in terms of the backend language itself – not too much, but the framework that has been assembled around those languages – there’s a lot of really interesting ones – I know some frameworks are competing against like the Oracle framework, some frameworks for example like order management systems are competing against other order management systems here – even in terms of eCommerce – Adobe, Magento is a little bit being challenged – although what we see is that brands they still want to focus on having a strong quality – on our side we’re doing a lot of Magento development, Magento integration for brands and like when international brands are looking at very specific development, they’re going to have the importance of technology choice is going to be important, and if you’re working for example like with German companies – they will want to focus a lot of SAP and so on, so I think the technology inheritance from global to local is something that is important to have a look at, but in order to reply to your question – I would say that there is an emergence right now of Chinese languages and Chinese technology that should not be disregarded, that should be really looking into it and I think if global players like Salesforce, when they’re going to come in China in 1 year down the line – they want to establish a supremacy like they’re doing in the rest of the world. It’s not going to be that easy; they really need to take the extra step in order to make it happen.

Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments, or send us an email at dx@daxueconsulting.com.

This article Daxue Talks transcript #73: Development of 5G and software in China is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

How is tech development in China different from the rest of the world? How is 5G revolutionizing the user experience in China? In this episode, Aurelien Rigart, an expert in helping brands with digital transformation initiatives, tells us all about the software development landscape in China.

Jump to questions:

• 0:54: Have clients ever asked you to develop on the Huawei OS?
• 1:46: How is the development of 5G so far in China? What do you expect as an impact of 2020?
• 3:53: What are the differences in developing software in China and the rest of the world? Are the languages of programming different?

Daxue Talks is a show powered by daxue consulting, a china-based strategic market research company founded in 2010! With Daxue Talks, you will stay up to date with all the latest business updates in China.

This article Daxue Talks 73: China as a tech powerhouse: 5G, software development, and programming languages is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

Full transcript below:

Hello everyone, I’m Aurelien Rigart I’m the co-founder and Vice President of IT Consultis, I’m from France. I’ve been in China and started this adventure nine years ago. So, IT Consultis is a digital transformation company. It’s a team of 80 people in three countries, which are China, Singapore, and Vietnam. So, we’re helping Fortune 500 and fast scaling start-ups to work on their digital transformation. It can range from eCommerce, from building mini-programs, from building websites, App, integrating systems together, or overall work as a consultant on their digital transformation initiatives.

What features and functions can be developed through mini-programs? Can we develop a chatbot, a mini-game, a payment system, a shop, a face recognition, or CR? Also, what can and cannot be implemented through a mini-program?

Well I think the beauty of mini-programs is that you basically can develop almost everything and anything. So, Apple is launching the M version of their mini-programs very soon, so believe it or not – TenCent has launched this revolution and Apply right now is going to follow through, in a couple of weeks. It’s been announced so I think it’s going to be interesting to see how things are moving forward. Once again, coming back to what we were saying, providing the fact that you have like a back-end, but allow your digital transformation to happen, then in the front end you can do everything. If you want to do artificial intelligence related to different price structure, depending on what time of the day you’re booking or depending on the traffic on the platform, you can implement all of this because most of the logic is going to be implemented in the back end and basically the mini-program is just a front end, that is kind of like plugged on it.

So, things that can be implemented on a mini-program that are very popular in China is, of course, loyalty program or referral system because like we’re saying – just like private traffics and those are very – they are isolated, they are kind of like silos and the issues that you have with the silos is that it’s hard to drive the traffic within the silo. So, you want to encourage people to recharge or to purchase on it or to come back to it, so you need to find different ways to make it happen. So, you can find some ways to build social components within your mini-program, or like driving the traffic through a specific KOL or like building some referral program. So, all of this is definitely possible, but the main system, the main function right now of those mini-programs is to really drive traffic for the brands, to have like full ownership and understanding of what their users need.

What features are usable with a native app that you cannot find in a mini-program?

So, I think there are still some limitations when it comes to AR – augmented reality, so WeChat came out with an AR Kit not that long ago. It was not fully necessarily used and now brands are going to start leveraging it. That’s something we’re going to see more and more, especially for new retails. We have a couple of projects with luxury brands working on new retail and how you build AR and how you build O2O experiences, but those are not as advanced as what you can do with the Apple AR for instance, but this is going to follow step by step. But apart from this – like right this moment there is a very little limitation from what you can do with a native app or a mini-program. The only difference is really standing with the user experience, like when you’re on a mini-program, every second you’re going to have your phone vibrating because you’re going to have another conversation taking place somewhere else. So, which means in terms of user experience you’re always going to have the top header and the bottom header that is going to be a little bit different. So in terms of user experience you’re going to be in an area where you very often need to rush, so basically usually what marketers are going to do – they’re going to work on the fear of missing out – in order to drive a purchase or in order to accelerate a conversion because they do understand that the patience of people when they are on a mini-program is going to be more limited than the one that they have on a full app where they’re isolated from the rest – although now you have the opportunity to minimise your mini-program and come back to it afterwards but you’re still multitasking and it’s not the finest experience, but like I’ve seen – people are more and more fully using the mini-program – afterwards if you need to have an app to learn Chinese or to learn English of course you want to isolate yourself and for 20 minutes be somewhere else, and this is where you would need your own app – but like if you’re a luxury brand thinking – oh I need my user to download an app to shop – I don’t think this is necessary, or you need to provide very specific user experience or very specific products to drive the user over there. Otherwise, it doesn’t make sense to do it.

What kind of AI can be implemented within a mini-program and how smart can a mini-program be with what Tencent is offering now?

Well I mean like AI is a very, very broad topic. We don’t – there’s going to be AI a little bit everywhere but like what you see for most of the brands right now, they’re just trying to work on their digital transformation. So, they want to do something that was paper based and they wanted to digitally transform it. So I think in China we are arriving at a period of time which is – like there’s a strong disruption where all companies, all brands – whether they’re B2C, B2B, B2B2c, they do understand that everything that was done on paper right now, they need to digitally transform it. So, the AI is probably going to be really the next layer that is going to come afterwards. Right now, it’s too early. If you’re talking about AI – you can talk about the AI that you have like for example on your booking engine that will calculate the difference price depending on the traffic that you ca have on a specific platform, but that’s not necessarily something that is related to the WeChat mini-program itself. That’s something that is related to all the systems that are created for the booking engine.

Does Tencent offer some AI libraries or building blocks that help you to process intelligence through the mini-programs?

So, I think this is really the early stage – don’t see any requests from any of our clients so – of course, you get the AR that is coming directly natively embedded in your chat system but the latest really strong digital transformation in mini-program has been the live stream. So live stream being made very easily available from the backend and what you can do – for a brand – and we tried it and we’ve done it for a few brands and it’s actually really interesting. Brands just go on the backend and they make a request to WeChat to have their live streaming function. Just a few clicks later you can see yourself and you are broadcasted to the entire world, and that’s the digital transformation and that’s what I know at some point we’re going to talk about 5G – that’s what 5G is allowing. It’s allowing basically everybody tomorrow that is from their home or anywhere, just with a phone – to do live streaming. Because in terms of bandwidths this is taking a lot of bandwidths overall – and what we see is that this technology is made very easy for developers, providing the fact that you have good developers and that they know how to handle the WeChat API and how to navigate it, but I think 2020 – in the beginning of 2020, especially with the Covid happening , a lot of brands have turned to live streaming, but at the same time what they do understand with live stream is that if you want to make it on Ali – then it’s going to be very challenging because once you’ve finished paying TMall and when you finished paying the KOL and then all the subsequent fees, plus the discount you need to make, then in the end you’re making maybe like 25% of the revenues – that’s coming to your bucket – we’re not talking about profit, we’re talking about revenue, so 25 to maybe 60% of the revenue, the rest is going to other people, so it’s a little bit hard for brands to have those live streams and still have the opportunity to make a profit out of it.

Any questions? We will find an expert to answer them. Drop your questions in the comments, or send us an email at dx@daxueconsulting.com.

This article Daxue Talks transcript #72: Driving online traffic: Mini-programs, native app, and AI in China is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

In this China business vlog, we ask Aurelien Rigart, an expert in helping brands with digital transformation initiatives, about WeChat mini-programs and how it distinguishes from the isolated, native app. He also touches upon how AI, live streaming, and 5G in the future play a role when it comes to user experience.

Jump to questions:

• 0:54: What features and functions can be developed through mini-programs? Can we develop a chatbot, a mini-game, a payment system, a shop, a face recognition, or CR? Also, what can and cannot be implemented through a mini-program?
• 3:02: What features are usable with a native app that you cannot find in a mini-program?
• 5:36: What kind of AI can be implemented within a mini-program and how smart can a mini-program be with what Tencent is offering now?
• 6:55: Does Tencent offer some AI libraries or building blocks which help you to process intelligence through the mini-programs?

Daxue Talks is a show powered by daxue consulting, a china-based strategic market research company founded in 2010! With Daxue Talks, you will stay up to date with all the latest business updates in China.

This article Daxue Talks 72: Comparing WeChat mini-programs and brand’s native app is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.

Find here Daxue Talks episode 71. In this episode, Aurelien Rigart, Vice President and partner at IT Consultis, discusses the usage of chatbots for mini-programs and the mistake that companies do when developing a website in China.

Full transcript below:

Hello everyone, I’m Aurelien Rigart I’m the co-founder and Vice President of IT Consultis, I’m from France. I’ve been in China and started this adventure nine years ago. So, IT Consultis is a digital transformation company. It’s a team of 80 people in three countries, which are China, Singapore, and Vietnam. So, we’re helping Fortune 500 and fast scaling start-ups to work on their digital transformation. It can range from eCommerce, from building mini-programs, from building websites, App, integrating systems together, or overall work as a consultant on their digital transformation initiatives.

How do you implement chatbots on your mini-program, website, or platforms like Taobao or JD?

Yeah, chatbots for like 2-3 years they were an extremely hot topic. Some companies were actually specializing through chatbot’s and there was like – really the hot trend. Everybody needed chatbots and then like basically brands understood that chatbots were interesting but the more interesting topic at hand was marketing automation and in the future marketing automation, CRM and data management platform or customer management platform. That’s what makes sense as a whole ecosystem, understanding that we need to have a chatbot to reply as fast as possible in an official way to a customer to provide value it’s great, but people have for ages have tried to overkill it where most of the time when you’re talking with specific brands, you’re going to set up a chatbot and a chatbot from the human perspective makes a lot of sense and you’re going to have like a decision making tree where basically if the user is like from this gender or from this province or from this age, is going to have like a very particular segment and the question and the interaction that we’re going to do is going to be very specific in terms of adding something to the customer experience, but as who is trying to get data to improve as we go the customer experience. So, chatbots is a great way for tagging, segmenting and enhancing the customer experience and something that is starting to happen step by step is that social CRM is starting to be combined with like an overall global CRM and being built like as a customer data platform which is what market globally they are looking for a lot, which is enabling you to have like a full view of the customer, whether they are WeChat, whether they’re going to be on Alibaba or retail, so you’re going to be able to have like a full picture. Then coming back to the initial question about private traffic, a great initiative related to private traffic is going to be WeChat Work, which is like the sister app of WeChat that is like really enabling people within the company to discuss directly to do social selling, client telling with people from the public. So, in retail, it’s going to be something that is used a lot not.

What software is required to implement a chatbot in China? Is it implemented with the help of existing software? Also, what are the limitations of chatbots? In the past over the last three years we overestimated the intelligence of chatbots, how is it now?

So, overall like the chabot is an easy decision making tree where you ask a question, then you have 1, 2, 3 answers and then from this you decide this and that’s from a standpoint – that can be easily programmed and having a look at the WeChat API we can already reintroduce and adapt it and program it within a couple of hours or maximum a couple of days, so that’s something that can be easily done. However, what you see is that companies need to have as well tagging, segmentation, retargeting, intelligent posting, having tailor-made content for that specific audience that has been segmented, so usually, you’ll start using what you call social CRM or marketing automation tool. You have a great solution like JING Social, which is a company that was set 5-6 years ago that has like 100 people, which is kind of the market of China. Which is like a solution, which has really worked very well on WeChat, leveraging the entire WeChat API and ecosystem and then you’ve got added tools like convert Labs for instance as well that is working well, but most of the time we recommend Jing which is a very powerful solution. So in terms of the limitation, most of the Chinese – more like human limitation – because whatever you’re doing usually when you’re working – if you’re working with the luxury house, you want to plug and play those solutions here in China and you want to basically ensure that they’re going to be made available and you’re going to have a person that is in charge of your marketing information that is going to set the user journey for the user. So, in the end, you don’t need to overkill it. You don’t need to have a layer of artificial intelligence that is going to be crazy, because people are not going to stay here to have a conversation with you and they don’t care. So they’re going to spend a minimum amount of time on what they’re looking for is buying and be in touch with you and right now basically what’s happening is that this chatbot is step by step replaced again by a human connection, basically using people that are operators behind a desk or that are using WeChat Work in order to create that connection. So we’ve got entire CRM – social CRM where people have a specific checklist to re-contact each and every single of those users, and here we’re not talking about luxury, we’re talking about as well FMCG where they have like a client list and they have to make a specific push to a certain segment of the population and we have seen that brands that have been the most successful during the Covid crisis have been the ones who have implemented those social CRM, marketing automation, as well as WeChat Work to create that connection, and not to create that robotic connection.

What are the main mistakes you have witnessed from companies developing a website in China?

I think that’s a good one. Like usually companies mistake with coming into China, having no understanding of what will be the behavior, what will be the pinch point, and how clients will arrive here. So the main mistake will be to keep the website hosted outside of China, to have a user experience that will be very slow, to have a user experience that will not be fully localized, like there are some small tips and tricks about – for example like to open your product page in another tab, or having the social media that are going to be appearing at the right places or like not displaying, for example, Instagram on a Chinese page, that is going to block basically the loading. So there are tons of very specific ones but if you’re talking here about the payment getaways and the system that Chinese users will await, there’s the very specific user experience that whether you’re on a desktop, on a mini-program, a lot of brands and even if you’re talking about like Luckin Coffee, Luckin Coffee, for example, they’re an interesting company, especially they’ve done a negative buzz, but they’ve created their own private traffic and their own infrastructure whether it’s like mini-programs or apps, and they have tried their best to drive all this traffic to the apps and even their user experience is very similar to the user experience that you can have on a TMall or you can have on a Xiaomi store, kind of like copy paste – why? It’s like you want to make sure that the learning time is going to be so little that you’re going to be able to build a frictionless experience and that’s really what’s making the difference here. So, no matter what if you copy-paste everything that is happening, the most important is to ensure that the user experience is going to be seamless. And of course, for mini-program there are very specific tips as well such as ensuring that you’re not going to ask the user to log in at a specific time – sorry – at the beginning when they’re just loading the experience like they’re just discovering it, so you want to make sure that they’re logging in when they’re going to purchase their – to ensure you can basically have the integration between the WeChat API to pull the WeChat address, for example, the WeChat Fapiao or like added preferences that could have been saved into WeChat. So what you see is that through the mini-program and with the technology moving forward, you really have the opportunity for brands to provide to the user a frictionless approach where the person is going to come on a platform and say ‘I want to buy this bottle of fine whiskey’ and just a few clicks and then they’re going to click WeChat address, then the WeChat address that was saved is going to populate directly the field, WeChat Fapiao for the invoice is going to populate the thing, just click – mobile payment, facial recognition and one day later everything is going to be delivered to your doorstep. So, what was creating friction in the past is being eliminated like step by step as we go. So that means brands they are posting content and tomorrow – just one click and they’re going to be able to buy any products. So, this is the future and this is going to be very interesting, and this is what you see with the live stream. Live stream you’re like on a page, see a KOL – you just click, click, click and the next day you’re receiving your product and now the live streams are not enabled only on TMall, they’re enabled as well on WeChat mini program which is the product traffic.

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This article Daxue Talks transcript #71: How are chatbots used in mini-programs in China? is the first one to appear on Daxue Consulting - Market Research China.