In the fast-paced world of consumer electronics, it can be daunting to deliver exceptional customer service while managing complex backend processes. PRISM+, a leading Singapore-based electronics brand, faced this challenge head-on, but not in the typical way. An unconventional orchestration strategy, powered by Workato, allowed them to transform their operations to scale the way their teams deliver a seamless customer experience, from purchase to post-sales support. They have since earned the distinction of delivering Singapore’s Best Customer Service 2024/2025, and are innovating on several other fronts to blaze the trail for sustained growth. Here’s a closer look at their journey.
Growth, complexity and unscalable manual processes
The brand first made their mark by disrupting industry practices – doing away with distributors and middle-men to take a “direct-to-consumer’” approach to its business practices. This business model meant that the brand had to take a more hands-on approach with its customers, ensuring that it could not approach customer service in the traditional manner of writing it off as a cost centre. PRISM+ pioneered an unconventional “direct to consumer” business model to make premium electronics more accessible, and even made end-to-end customer experience their top priority. Their investment into a sizable customer service team paid off through raving customer reviews and word-of-mouth referrals.
This marked a new dawn for their growth – new product lines, compelling partnerships, and ambitious ventures into regional markets. Each brought in added complexity, overwhelming work for their teams, and the reality that existing manual processes were just not scalable. Their customer service team was bogged down by tasks like manual daily data export and import, and individually checking customer orders before contacting them.
Keeping to the status quo also risked hurting the very customer experience that they were known for. Partners like Singtel were offering multiple promotion codes for each television order, which could mean that a customer buying 10 televisions could get bombarded with tons of SMSes if PRISM+ did not act to reimagine how they communicate such promotions to customers.
The search for a robust and reliable orchestrator
Chief Operating Officer, Joseph Tsao, brought onboard Management Associate, Vikki Chia, to automate away the inefficiencies, while upholding their stellar customer satisfaction score. The duo soon realised that they could not solely rely on any basic online tools – they needed a secure and reliable automation platform to handle time sensitive syncs. They needed to compose complex multi-step flows, so as to integrate with and feed data into enterprise systems like Salesforce, which are strict about how such data should flow in.
“We needed a much more robust and reliable solution that could tackle critical use cases on enterprise systems like our Salesforce CRM. Workato not only integrates seamlessly with our systems, it gives us the ability to build complex multi-step recipes that were not possible with our existing tools.”
Joseph Tsao, COO, PRISM+
“Workato allows us to build with multiple conditionals and loops, which are necessary for use cases like order creation and line item calculation. The platform’s advanced formula field also allows us to skip creating individual filters for each step. I especially love Workato’s chat support and helpful documentation.”
Vikki Chia, Management Associate, PRISM+
Reimagined retail management
PRISM+ first used Workato to streamline the dissemination of promotion codes and freebies for each television order they fulfilled. This paved the way for several game-changing orchestrations that cement their market leadership. Three of such innovations are detailed below.
Project “Singtel Redemption” batches promotions for television orders
Workato consolidates multiple SMS notifications to just one per customer, regardless of how many different promotion packages Singtel offered and how many televisions the customer purchased. Even with a huge volume of televisions being delivered each week, PRISM+’s customers get notified 2 hours in advance of the delivery and can claim their promotion code immediately, thus enhancing their experience significantly.
Here’s the end-to-end process that is now powered by Workato:
Project “PRISM SG” syncs air conditioner orders for seamless servicing and oversight
With air conditioners requiring a much more intensive sales and servicing cycle than televisions, PRISM+ leverages Workato to sync and update air conditioner orders from Shopify into Salesforce. This provides a bird’s eye view for managers who oversee a tremendous volume of orders, which contribute a significant portion of the firm’s monthly revenue. The integrated process also provides clarity to service staff who need such visibility when they go down to schedule a site survey, install the purchased unit and go back to service the unit.
With Workato, this reimagined workflow progresses automatically:
Project “Fridge Warranty” personalises emails to grow refrigerator business
Workato also empowers PRISM+ to retarget older customers who purchased a fridge but not the warranty, and performs Customer Relationship Management functions as well. In effect, the platform creates a custom checkout page that is personalised for each customer, so as to get them to repurchase the warranty which was not introduced to them at the time of purchase.
Efficient, top notch customer experience
Here’s what PRISM+ achieved with Workato:
- Better conversion at scale with 10% higher email open rate and 5 times better click-through: Enabled PRISM+ to increase order volumes without additional manual effort. Within 2 months of Project “Fridge Warranty”, PRISM+ sent over 2,800 targeted emails that strike when the iron is hot. These have delivered better conversion results, with over 60% of PRISM+’s customers opening emails, compared to less than 50% before, and at an above-average click-through rate of 8-10%, compared to 1.8% previously – 5 times better than before. In a single month, PRISM+ secured over 25 orders – a direct result of automated, yet personalised, retargeting emails orchestrated by Workato.
- Customer satisfaction: Enhanced customer experience by batching promotions into fewer notifications and providing timely updates in advance of delivery.
- Efficiency: Reduced manual work, especially for customer-facing employees.
- 26% cost saving: Reduced marketing costs by 26%, to less than $0.50-$1 per order.
“Workato bridges our communication with developers who may lack context on business operations, and gives us the flexibility to change the logic at a speed that hardcoding cannot achieve. We are now also able to prototype automation ideas very quickly, and grow the business without worrying about custom API development and automation connections.”
Joseph Tsao, Chief Operating Officer, PRISM+
The future of consumer electronics
Looking ahead, as PRISM+ launches new products and adds on new process flows, they plan to further leverage Workato to orchestrate the integration layer for their internal systems touching on Enterprise Resource Planning.
Here’s what that looks like:
Joseph elaborated, “With Workato, we are able to stay agile in terms of how we want to integrate various systems, and keep evolving until the process stabilises.”
Vikki is nowhere far from done. She has already begun teaming up with PRISM+’s Chief of Staff to innovate the way they outreach to both new and existing customers to drive sales. By pioneering an orchestration strategy with Workato, PRISM+ has not only streamlined their operations, they are revolutionising customer experience in consumer electronics.
