The CX Opportunity – a lens on APAC

Where businesses across Asia Pacific (APAC) once took cues from their Western peers, many have become market leaders. They are driving innovation, solving problems, and creating value on a global scale. As they step up to meet growing demand for their products and services, they have a huge opportunity to develop a first-class customer experience (CX).

Only 22 percent of organizations across APAC are currently CX Champions, according to the new report, CX Champions: How CX Leaders who raise their game are driving business success, by Zendesk and Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). The report identifies three levels of CX maturity based on how organizations use their support teams, technology, and data to drive better performance: Starters, Risers and Champions.

Champions have the most advanced CX operations, while Starters have the least developed operations and Risers fall somewhere in between. Today, 48 percent of organizations in APAC are Starters and 30 percent are Risers. Therein lie tremendous opportunities. Businesses that double down on delivering a great CX can become Champions, reaping the benefits through customer loyalty and acquisition.

Champions in APAC are 4.4 times more likely than Starters to have gained market share over the past six months and 10.8 times as likely to have increased customer spend significantly. To become Champions, Starters and Risers must invest in the tools, technologies and training to keep pace with evolving customer expectations.

Meeting customer expectations with technology

If you give customers a great experience, they’ll keep coming back. The challenge is remaining consistent in the face of change. Today, consumers want experiences that are fast, convenient and personal across a broad range of new and emerging channels.

Personalized service is crucial, with 79 percent of consumers saying that it’s more important than personalized marketing. Likewise, 86 percent expect conversations with support agents to move seamlessly between channels. That’s a tall order for most businesses which have small support teams like Singapore’s Carousell.

Carousell’s online marketplace experienced explosive growth across Southeast Asia over the past several years. That put tremendous pressure on the company’s customer support team, which had outgrown their support platform. This led to highly manual processes, and poor data collection, while ultimately resulted in slower responses and lagging customer satisfactor scores. In order to become a CX Champion, Carousell needed a solution that could scale.

In 2017, Carousell adopted a suite of Zendesk solutions that enabled a 45-person team to solve 30,000 support tickets per month. With more opportunities to automate, customize and analyze data, the support team was able to spend more time helping customers in a personalized way. In turn, it answered more than three-quarters of all tickets within 24 hours, managing high volumes while maintaining great customer satisfaction.

Carousell’s success story underscores one of the biggest takeaways from the CX Champions report: APAC’s Champions are increasing their investments in CX tools and technologies where others are not. As digitalization, innovation, multi-channel touchpoints and data analysis create new opportunities to meet customer needs, organizations must invest in customer-focused solutions lest they get left behind.

Helping customers help themselves

While a well-trained support team is crucial for a superior CX, customers use self-service options more than any other support channel. In fact, 76 percent of customers prefer self-service because it offers the least amount of interaction friction. In turn, offering self-service has become a new baseline for customer service.

It’s with that in mind that Bitkub adopted Zendesk customer service and self-service solutions. The Thai cryptocurrency exchange broke seed-funding records when it launched in 2018 and quickly became the country’s leading exchange. The rush of activity came with a daily deluge of customer inquiries. Many required detailed responses about transacting in the relatively young cryptocurrency marketplace.

Bitkub co-founder and CEO, Atthakrit Chimplapibul, understood that being able to manage those inquires efficiently was essential to the business. The exchange’s support team used Zendesk’s ticketing, live chat, and FAQ solutions to field hundreds of inquires per day. It also used Zendesk’s knowledge base solution to write over 500 articles that helped existing and potential customers find answers on their own. Without the knowledge base Bitkub would have to double the size of its support team.

This story reflects another big takeaway from CX Champions report: CX is a critical focus area for senior executives among APACs Champions. In fact, senior executives at Champion organizations in APAC are 7.8 times more likely than those at Starters to review metrics daily. Those metrics play a central role in understanding and enhancing CX.

Organizations with more mature customer service and support capabilities deliver superior CX, put their support agents in a better position to succeed and enjoy dramatically better business outcomes, according to the CX Champions report. And while that’s hardly surprising, the lion’s share of organizations in APAC are still in the early stages of developing their CX strategies. As their products and solutions compete on a global scale, they have a fresh opportunity to follow the path of CX Champions.

Read More:
Five indispensable lessons from today’s CX champions
Impactful CX in a disrupted World