State of personalized CX in APAC 2022

State of CX in APAC region

The Asia-Pacific (APAC) region holds vast potential for brands as it is home to 55 percent of consumers globally, according to the World Economic Forum. To harness this potential, brands must deliver customer experiences that meet expectations. Research conducted by CX Network for the Customer Experience in Asia-Pacific 2022 report found the number one priority for customer experience (CX) practitioners in APAC is customer loyalty and retention, meaning delivering on these expectations is more important than ever.

Personalized experiences are rapidly becoming part of these customer expectations. Research by Instapage revealed that 74 percent of customers are ‘frustrated’ by website content that is not personalized. In a similar vein, consultant management company McKinsey found companies that focus on CX personalization can increase their revenue by five to 15 percent. This means companies that do not offer personalized CX risk losing both customers and revenue.

In this report, CX Network explores how brands across the APAC region are using personalization to differentiate the services they offer and how to avoid the common mistakes companies make when introducing personalized experiences. It contains key insights on implementing personalized CX from Virgin Media, Huawei, HSBC and LivePerson.

“Customers take personalized CX for granted, but if companies get it wrong, customers will depart for a competitor.”

Kassia Gardener, Head of communications at Cranfield University

The benefits of personalization

This section will look at the benefits of introducing personalization to CX, not only to customers but to employees as well.

Personalized CX refers to companies delivering messages, offers and products that are tailored to each customer. Kevin Wordon, director of strategy for APAC at Conversational AI company LivePerson, notes that by offering a customized experience businesses can demonstrate that they know and understand customer preferences, leading to increased engagement with their brand, a higher lifetime value and an increase in customer loyalty and advocacy.

Personalization is also beneficial for increasing customer loyalty as it allows companies to better connect with their customers on an emotional level.

K V Dipu, senior president at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance, explains that companies can leverage the customer data they have to create this emotional engagement.

“A credit card company can highlight how a particular lunch expense was a birthday celebration event and convert a simple transaction into an emotional engagement opportunity via personalization,” K V Dipu remarks.

This emotionally engaged personalization allows companies to create meaningful experiences for their customers, making them feel valued and ultimately building brand loyalty.

Likewise, personalization can be enhanced through pairing it with other digital CX solutions, like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and automation. By combining personalization with customer data, analytics, AI and automation, companies can introduce hyper-personalization to their CX offerings.

This hyper-personalized service allows automated solutions like chatbots to react in real time to customers by tracking customer interactions across multiple different digital touchpoints and offering them a relevant, streamlined CX.

Wordon explains that hyper-personalization uses real-time signals and data to react and respond to a customer in the moment, allowing automated solutions like Conversational AI to understand customer tone and sentiment. This understanding enables chatbots to proactively engage with customers to increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

These tools can help streamline customer service through automation, allowing agents to be more efficient. This ultimately boosts customer satisfaction, as customer queries are resolved faster, freeing up agents to dedicate more time to more complex or urgent enquiries.

Case study: Virgin Media

Virgin Media implemented a number of chatbots in early 2022. This included Discover Bot, which helped assist with capturing accurate customer requirements, a T&C bot that relayed the terms and conditions of sales and a VMP Bot which helped gauge specific insurance needs.

Chris Huggins, senior conversational manager at Virgin Media, says: “Bots are designed for accuracy and speed; humans are masters of empathy and instinct – neither can replace the other. Together they generate synergy that ultimately drives unmatched business outcomes, CSAT and agent job satisfaction.”

Following the introduction of LivePerson’s chatbots, Virgin Media was able to increase its streamline its customer service process and increase sales. Within weeks of implementation, the company reported a 35 percent reduction in handling time and increased sales revenue.

Challenges to implementing personalized CX

This section analyzes the top challenges CX practitioners face when implementing personalization and offers operational solutions for companies facing any related challenges.

Personalization is becoming more of a need than a want in CX. Kassia Gardener, head of communications at Cranfield University, says that customers expect a high level of CX, to the point that personalization has become a hygiene factor.

“Customers take personalized CX for granted, but if companies get it wrong, customers will depart for a competitor,” she explains.

This means companies must implement personalized CX to prevent churn. It must be done correctly, however, or there is a risk of alienating customers more than if it was not offered at all. The first hurdle CX professionals can face in implementing a personalized CX is getting the buy-in from other stakeholders in the organization

Traditional views on what CX ‘is’ and what is or is not part of CX may hold companies back. Ahmad Samir, CX planning and design director at Telecom Egypt, explains that companies must understand that CX now goes beyond impersonal, polite service as customers seek an authentic connection with the companies they interact with. This, he explains, makes customers feel like valued individuals and personalization is an integral part of this.

Samir notes that CX leaders need to drive this change and ultimate transformation to customer centricity by building CX strategies like personalization around the customer. By looking to these long-term drivers of growth and customer lifetime value, companies can meet customer expectations and increase the ROI of their CX investments.

Once a company is on board with personalization, CX professionals must ensure that they are introducing personalized services where customers want them. LivePerson’s Wordon notes one common mistake businesses make when implementing personalization is not applying it to the correct touchpoints.

“Sending a personalized email after someone has disengaged or abandoned a journey is no longer best practice. Personalization needs to happen in real-time across all touchpoints, from your website and its content to the two-way conversations you have with your customers,” he explains.

In addition to not providing relevant personalized experiences, companies may not adequately ensure that their employees are fully aware of and understand the initiatives that are being introduced. By not doing so, they will miss out on a rich level of data on the solutions, as employees can dynamically monitor customer conversations and give their frontline perspective on how customers are reacting to the personalized experience.

Another challenge companies may face when implementing personalized CX is not having the amount or type of data necessary for effective personalization. Adam Ng, founder and CEO of online payment service TrustedMalaysia, explains that using first-party data is crucial for personalization as it can show companies how customers are interacting with their content and how they respond to advertisements. All this information can help brands better personalize their promotions and business.

To collect first-party data, he advises brands to invest in as many first-party data sources as possible, while also utilizing tools they may already have like email, SMS, apps and tools like contact forms on their company website to their advantage.

The next section of this report looks at how companies can best roll out personalized CX solutions company-wide.

Implementing personalized CX

CX Network research for its Big Book of Customer Data, Insight and Analytics 2022 found that 41 percent of CX professionals use process improvement from feedback to personalize CX. By collecting voice of the customer (VOC) data, companies can use this to introduce and improve their personalized CX solutions.

When looking to improve processes from customer feedback, companies should not only listen to customer feedback, but plan, prioritize and act upon it. Ayelet Mendel-Girin, general head of CX at Australian fintech Humm Group, says that it is important that brands identify the data sources that can be mined to produce the relevant customer data for the experience they wish to create.

By noting these sources, brands can collect the type of data needed to personalize their CX offering in a way that their customers connect with. Additionally, companies should make sure that they have a complete view of the data they have collected through VOC programs.

David Wray, global accounting and reporting senior director at Huawei, suggests that companies store all data in a repository such as a cloud environment or data lake. Wray explains: “This will allow you to start to extract value from the data, whether its structured or unstructured, [in the form of] intelligent analytics insights.”

Automation can also be used as part of a personalized CX offering. One way this can be done is through the introduction of Conversational AI, which works by applying Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to customer intent throughout a conversation with a customer. By utilizing conversational AI, companies can provide customers with the correct tools to solve their queries and free up employees by automating repetitive and low complexity enquiries.

LivePerson’s Wordon explains that conversational intelligence can also allow organizations to baseline current performance and measure the impact of personalization changes to the system, as alpha and beta testing can allow organizations to do a side-by-side comparison of personalized experiences vs. current interactions.

By using this testing model, companies can tangibly demonstrate the value of personalized CX by using a combination of customer testing and employee feedback. From there, stakeholders are equipped with quantitative and qualitative data to make the appropriate decisions to implement a successful CX strategy for their business.

Case study: HSBC

HSBC, in collaboration with LivePerson, introduced Conversation Builder, an intelligent automation solution, in April 2019 after identifying that it would help it grow customer interactions. It enabled agents to create bots based on their own conversational understanding and expertise.

With the bank expecting messaging to account for more than 50 percent of contact center interactions by the end of 2023, this move to Conversational AI is crucial to allowing experts on customer conversations to step up and help develop these bots of the future.

Warren Buckley, global head of channel optimization and contact centers at HSBC, explains how these bots help lighten the pressure put on agents by eliminating repetitive simple tasks.

“Being able to easily blend human empathy with intelligent automation has been crucial to our success,” Buckley remarks.

“Our frontline team now has control over its own destiny and can operate with increased agility – faster and smarter than ever before – to get our customers the resolutions they are seeking,” Buckley adds.’

By using a conversational AI solution, HSBC was able to create and introduce a fully functional bot with 15 intentions. It saw messaging become the channel of choice for frontline agents and saw customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores track at more than 90 percent week on week within five months of implementation.

“Being able to easily blend human empathy with intelligent automation has been crucial to our success. Our frontline team now has control over its own destiny and can operate with increased agility – faster and smarter than ever before – to get our customers the resolutions they are seeking.”

Warren Buckley, Global head of channel optimization and contact centers at HSBC

Final remarks

By introducing a personalized CX solution that has a foundation in both employee expertise and customer feedback, companies can better foster customer loyalty and prevent customers from detracting to competitors. Additionally, companies can use the customer data they already have access to, in combination with AI and ML, to deliver a hyper-personalized, automated service to their customers.

This is shown through Virgin Media’s introduction of chatbots to streamline its customer service process, which led to a 35 percent reduction in resolution times, as well as an increase in sales revenue.

To make sure they are in the optimal place to introduce personalized CX, companies should gather first-party customer data and ensure this data is properly and securely managed in a way that is accessible to all employees as and when they need it.

Additionally, companies should make sure that they are introducing personalization to customers at a relevant touchpoint. By doing this, brands can connect with customers and offer tailored experiences when they first interact with the brand, rather than after that interaction has ended.

This can be seen through HSBC introducing several automated bots to respond to customer queries and foster a tailored experience. By using the expertise of employees to create these bots, HSBC was able to grow customer interactions and increase customer satisfaction by offering a streamlined, personalized experience.

Key takeaways

• Leverage CX personalization to increase customer loyalty
• There are common hurdles companies face when implementing personalized CX
• It is important to identify and mine high-quality first-party data sources for conversational AI

Read the full report here