Qualtrics, a US-based SaaS company has released its inaugural study on Customer Experience (CX) in Asia Pacific. Surveying 1,100 consumers across Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand, the study titled “The Asia-Pacific Region’s Changing Customer Experience Environment” reveals differing consumer perceptions in various markets and highlights the top 10 CX trends across the region.
“Qualtrics is committed to helping brands in Asia Pacific measure, prioritise and optimise the experiences companies deliver across the four core foundational aspects of business – customers, products, employees, and brands. This study offers a deep dive into the region’s specific customer experience demands and offers key insights into the evolving landscape,” said Bill McMurray, Managing Director, Qualtrics, Asia Pacific and Japan.
According to McMurray, consumers in APAC have a wide variety of choice and if they do not like the service an organisation delivers, they will simply find another organisation that does it better. He believes that brands need to understand that nailing customer experience management can generate immense rewards, while getting it wrong will result in loss of customers, decreased revenue, reduced market share and even a damaged brand reputation.
The study reveals these top ten CX insights across Asia Pacific:
1. Customers demand action – Approximately 75 percent of Singaporean and Hong Kong consumers indicated that it is very or extremely important for organisations to respond to their feedback, markedly higher than Australia (64 percent) and New Zealand (52 percent).
2. Ignoring feedback is a fireable offence – An average, 39 percent of respondents in the Asia Pacific region are unlikely to continue doing business with an organisation that does not respond to their feedback. Singaporeans are the most unforgiving – only 23 percent are likely to continue using that brand if their feedback is ignored.
3. Fix it the first time – Just 2 percent of respondents feel that first-time resolution is anything less than moderately important. Some of the top frustrations cited are having to ask for the same information multiple times, and not having issues resolved the first time.
4. Respond today, not tomorrow – Nearly half of all respondents (46 percent) expect a response from an organisation within the same working day. Hong Kong customers appear to be more demanding, with 68 percent expecting brands to reply to their feedback on the same day.
5. Beware of the experience gap – Organisations must prioritize minimizing the amount of effort customers exert to have their issues resolved. Companies must learn what customers’ value most in the experience you provide to them and then ensure that these aspects are executed at the highest level.
6. Make customers believe – While Asia Pacific customers are keen to provide feedback, with 83 percent being likely to complete a customer experience survey from an organisation they deal with, 37 percent of these customers are uncertain as to whether organisations listen to and act on it.
7. Invest in the online experience – Online processes and offerings makes organisations more efficient and enable rapid, effective scaling. Results show that more than half of Asia Pacific customers (58 percent) are open to making the leap to online-only offerings.
8. Be one easy call away – 84 percent of customers thought it was important to have a company contact number on the homepage or within a single click of it.
9. Put security first – 87 percent of the respondents believe that it is very important to be able to trust organisations with their customer data.
10. Welcome new technology – 48 percent of customers would be satisfied dealing with an organisation staffed by artificial intelligence. When it comes to consumers’ preferences in Singapore, locals ranked service (22 percent), quality of product (21 percent) and value for money (18 percent) as the top three attributes they value when dealing with an organisation. In terms of communicating with a brand, Singaporeans listed email (49 percent) as their preferred mode of interaction over other channels such phone (23 percent), online chat (15 percent) or face-to- face (13 percent).
On the other hand, the majority of Hong Kong consumers found the product quality to be far more important (55 percent), followed by service (54 percent), and trust (43 percent). In contrast, they prefer to interact with an organisation via phone (31 percent), instead of email (30 percent), face-to- face (20 percent) or online chat (18 percent).