MANILA, PHILIPPINES – AFDigital, a Salesforce Multi-Cloud Partner, is a Filipino-founded multinational tech company pioneering cloud-based solutions in the local scene. Now celebrating its 10th year anniversary, catering to more industries, the company looks back on how it adapted in fast evolution and how it has helped companies transform themselves to keep up with digital growth with the use of technology and processes they have developed.
As AFDigital celebrates yet another milestone of being in the business for 10 transformative and strong years, adobo magazine went on a trip down memory lane with Elmer Tagarino, President, and Pauline Pangan, Founding Director for AFDigital, in an interview.
The earlier years of AFDigital have not always been such a breeze as the market was not very receptive of the technology and concept of clouds back then. According to Pauline, looking back, it was all thanks to the focus and continuous effort of AFDigital’s team in making sure a new success story comes out of a client’s hurdle. In the same interview, Elmer showed a journey board in which the company’s growth is depicted. As shown on the board, there’s no other way to read it but that the company kept improving its processes— making sure that AFDigital is always expanding its capabilities with new technologies offered by Salesforce, and in 2018 being Datorama Certified, then doing integrations practice with MuleSoft in 2020, down to becoming a marketing partner of Google in 2021.
In the same way, Pauline and Elmer both agreed that it was not only the team they had to thank but the continued support and trust of their partners, customers, and stakeholders as they embark on the journey with them. It was that very trust that enabled AFDigital to continuously grow and be able to help their customers with whatever it is that they needed.
On pivoting due to COVID-19 pandemic, Elmer said that it was not really pivoting but rather making a conscious decision to make sure that the plans they had set forth will still be in force while keeping in mind and strategically ramping up their team and service offerings. He went on and said, “Again, it wasn’t a pivot, it was more of an evolution of the intentions that we already set for ourselves… We had to evolve as a business.”
Later in the conversation, Elmer said that what they want to do is to help companies go through the change and so that is where the change in narrative is. The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed for much faster digitization and so they had to step in to make those changes happen in the shortest possible time.
Talking about how the clients’ needs have changed in the past 10 years, Pauline revealed how alarming it is that businesses now are in a state of panic due to the late adaption of omnichannel marketing. She explained how in their earlier days she had always explained that cloud solutions are the future but have now become the past as technology enters a new great phase— the Metaverse.
Pauline said, “Transformation requires a bit of pain and a change in the way you do business. No one, not everyone is excited about change, let alone a transformation.” Even so, businesses must adapt to it still and Elmer revealed how other business owners he knows privately admitted that their businesses were late in transforming. And so, this is where he has seen the greatest change in clients’ journey— “I think the acceptance of this weird concept back then of clouds [solutions] has become commonplace.”
Now more than ever, AFDigital is pushed to continuously widen the range of offerings they provide. When asked how they are expanding the services, Pauline prides in the fact that talking about client experience, their clients truly love working with the whole team as they work collaboratively. Elmer then added, “We respond in such a way that you can talk to us, we can have a share of knowledge or we carry the same experience that we can serve you not just on the marketing space, but we can talk to you about service management, we can talk to you about the customer— the CRM aspect of it, and your data integration.”
Following that, on new services, Pauline elatedly said that they offer new services all the time. Adding, “Any Salesforce technology that helps in terms of the customer success platform, we build capability with that. Right now, I am personally blown away by the power of Salesforce CDP. It literally brings all the customer data in one place without having to go through a huge integration project through a middleware! It is an absolute game changer! It is every marketer’s dream! The power of technology is growing exponentially. We are very privileged to be at the forefront of all these amazing innovations!”
Pauline and Elmer were also asked how they see AFDigital in the next 10 years. Elmer said that it’s a matter of becoming a one-stop-shop for everything that has to do with Salesforce. A personal agenda, he said, was to make sure that the company generates more jobs for Filipinos, doubling, if not tripling, the number of jobs in this exciting space of technology— cloud. Pauline then said, “We are a tech business, but we’re still very human-focused. And we want to serve our employees, our customers, our partners, and the community well.” Elatedly, she said that the company has doubled its size over the course of six months, and truly, there’s no stopping AFDigital.
As AFDigital celebrates its 10th year anniversary, Pauline revealed that after being digital for a decade, the whole AFDigital team is excited to celebrate with their customers by giving away their infamous AFDigital hoodie swags to express their deepest gratitude.
Physical celebrations also took place during the month of December 2021, starting with Adelaide, followed by Sydney, and Melbourne. Meanwhile, the celebration in the Philippines was virtual because of the restrictions in the country.
Thanks to their strong partnership with Salesforce, there is very little AFDigital cannot do. Their response to digital shifts only highlights how they can build better experiences and feed their clients’ desire to be more authentic and relevant.
After everything said thus far, Pauline and Elmer, on behalf of the whole AFDigital team, just wanted to extend their gratitude to everyone and renew commitment to their mission, this decade and the next decades to come.
