5 trends APAC brands are building their CX strategies around

A recent CX Network report found that 59 percent of Asia-Pacific (APAC) businesses are increasing their investment in customer experience management to meet consumer requirements.

As APAC customer expectations continue to evolve, it is becoming imperative for brands to stay up to date with the latest CX trends if they wish to remain competitive and retain their market share.

In this article, we explore five of the current CX trends making waves throughout the APAC region.

Personalization is being placed at the heart of CX strategies

Customers increasingly expect a personalized experience. For example, according to research conducted by Instapage, 74 percent of customers experience frustration when website content lacks personalization.

Through personalization, a company can target specific customers by tailoring messages and products in a way that shows it understands a consumer’s preferences, priorities and values, increasing engagement and building loyalty as a result.

Companies can leverage the customer data they have to create this emotional connection, according to K V Dipu, senior president at Bajaj Allianz General Insurance.

“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,” he explains.

A recent McKinsey & Company analysis of Asian insurers’ digital capabilities found that the majority had created large grouping segments or customer profiles based on demographics, life stages and measures of customer value. As a result, many offer products with customized messages reflecting the customer’s age, gender, location and past behavior.

In CX Network’s CX personalization in APAC 2022 report, David Wray, global accounting and reporting senior director at Huawei, recommends that companies store all data in a repository such as a cloud environment or data lake.

“This will allow you to start to extract value from the data, whether it's structured or unstructured, [in the form of] intelligent analytics insights,” Wray notes.

AI is helping APAC businesses meet increasing customer expectations

AI automation is fast becoming a common tool Asia-Pacific workplaces where chatbots are often implemented to improve and enhance CX.

Computer Weekly reports that 64 percent of APAC businesses have registered a notable improvement in the performance of AI and chatbots in the past year, citing Zendesk's most recent CX trends survey. This indicates that the technology is becoming more human-like and natural for interactions.

Customer expectations have also risen, with a substantial 73 percent of consumers in APAC expecting chatbots to deliver services on par with a human assistant, according to the same survey.

In response to such consumer requirements, Australian banking and financial services corporation Westpac has embedded conversational AI into its CX.

“We wanted our conversational AI to answer any question for any customer and be helpful at the same time,” David Walker, group chief technology officer at Australian bank Westpac, told McKinsey & Company. “That’s complicated in the chatbot business, so we co-built this state-of-the-art ‘brain’ to be able to do that.”

Walker claims the capability, built with the help of Kasisto, is the first of its kind in the world.

Other companies are taking a more mixed approach. In CX Network’s Contact Centers APAC Expert Insights eBook, Christopher Douglas, director of member services for the Pacific for Accor Plus, reveals how the hotelier combined AI-assisted chat with agent interactions and self-service.

Since the introduction of Accor’s omnichannel model, customer satisfaction has risen by 23 basis points, with the new channels having the highest satisfaction and delivering the greatest efficiency, Douglas notes.

Growing numbers of APAC consumers are entering the metaverse

According to Fabio Moioli, head of consulting and services at Microsoft, the metaverse is a “network of interconnected virtual worlds… giving users a wide range of choices and options for their experience”.

Using technology including (but not limited to) virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the metaverse is already offering consumers immersive experiences. The deep connections formed in the metaverse is offering APAC businesses a plethora of engagement opportunities to enhance their CX strategies.

A recent Yahoo survey offered insights into APAC customer expectations surrounding the metaverse. In a study of 15,000 individuals aged 13 to 65 in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, 60 percent of respondents said they would like to know more about a brand venturing into the metaverse and pay more attention to its events or products.

Evidence suggests that companies are responding. Twimbit’s State of CX Report 2023, for example, observed a growing adoption of the metaverse by brands in the APAC region.

One of those brands, Hong Kong hospitality group Regal Hotels International, is responding to the trend with the launch of Meta Green, a virtual metropolis using the Sandbox platform.

Philip Chau, vice-president and group head of marketing at Regal Hotels International, tells CDO Trends that the customer initiative forms a loyalty program, aiming to offer an immersive experience for young, tech-literate online consumers, with offline rewards designed to drive them back to the physical hotel experience.

“This loyalty program is one of our new initiatives to elevate the digital footprint of the company, but we also build marketing automation around them to drive results, not only noise,” he says.

CX measurements are shifting from quantitative to qualitative across APAC

Current efforts directed at measuring CX in the APAC region have shifted from a quantitative approach to a qualitative approach, according Balaji Raghunathan, vice-president of technology and digital experience at ITC Infotech.

In an Economic Times CIO interview, he says: “What is becoming quite popular [is measuring] your customer effort score. Thus, the question of how easy it is for the customer to find the product they want and move toward that direction. The customer lifetime value also helps in satisfying your customer and plays a vital role in the future.”

In the same conversation, Kirti Varun Avasarala, chief product officer at online shopping platform Meesho, expressed the view that looking at net promoter score (NPS) as the overall CX metric is insufficient when operating at scale, because “you want to slice and dice [each metric] by every cohort possible”.

Similarly, writing for Martechasia, tech journalist Lorraine Resuello implores APAC CX teams to “stop being bothered so much about NPS”.

Instead of asking customers, ‘How likely are you to recommend our products and services to your family and friends?’ and hoping for a favorable NPS score, Resuello suggests businesses ask:

• What did we do well?
• What can we improve upon?
• What did you experience that made you feel your business is appreciated?

“While answering NPS questions only takes one to two minutes, asking more relevant questions is crucial to obtain real answers to measure true CX,” Resuello advises.

The robots are (finally) joining the CX party

Yes, actual robots. Over the last century, the idea of the human world being augmented by the practical abilities of physical androids has moved from fantasy, to novelty, to reality.

Huge technological strides have been made with the concept resulting in robot examples such as Softbank Robotics' Pepper, Hitachi's EMIEW3, and LG Electronics' CLOi.

And while robots might not be taking over the world just yet, they’re changing the face of customer service, according to Harvard Business Review (HBR).

Writing for HBR, Alicia A. Grandey and Kayley Morris explain that robots in a customer service setting are more common in Asia than elsewhere in the world. They cite a study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology which used the first robot-staffed hotel in Japan as context.

According to the authors, online satisfaction ratings from hotel guests showed that “interacting with a service robot evokes mostly positive emotional reactions, such as around the anthropomorphized ‘cute’ robot as a welcome agent, and the surprise and delight (especially for children) of a robot delivering room service.”

In August 2022, Kansai Airports Kobe in Japan undertook a demonstration experiment using remote interactive robots for customer service.

Part of the Moonshot Research and Development Program, conducted by CyberAgent’s R&D organization AI Lab and Osaka University’s Graduate School of Engineering Science, the project placed remote, interactive robots in airport stores to serve customers and recommend products.

The aim was to make the shopping experience more fun for customers and contribute to product sales promotion, according to Future Travel Experience.