Get Started
Singapore’s risk exposure: High turbulence, low visibility

ARTICLE | December 19, 2023

Untangling experience in APAC

How to bypass the challenges—and cash in on the dividends—of a unified approach to customer, employee, and user experiences.

By Mark Yeow, Workflow contributor

Organisations that adopt a holistic experience strategy—blending customer, employee, and user experiences into a single seamless whole—tend to reap both financial and reputational dividends in some of Asia Pacific’s biggest markets. How can they avoid roadblocks that may threaten progress?
 

Related

AI joins the conversation

Read article

Recent research from ThoughtLab, commissioned by ServiceNow, suggests that organisations in Asia Pacific stand to significantly benefit when they adopt a unified approach to experience. Amongst those that are already creating and managing unified experiences in the three markets we surveyed (Australia and New Zealand, Japan, and Singapore), the majority witnessed boosts to customer satisfaction (63%), user satisfaction (60%), and employee Net Promoter Score (62%). Those benefits extend all the way to the bottom line, particularly for more mature organisations: 74% have become more profitable, while 68% are better able to attract talent.

Amongst the markets we surveyed, those leaders are most likely to hail from Japan—where 23% of organisations have achieved significant maturity in adopting a holistic approach, compared to 10% or less in Singapore and Australia/New Zealand. Why might this be the case? Kaizen—the Japanese workplace philosophy of constant operational improvement—may provide an answer. We found that 61% of Japanese organisations consistently evaluated the effectiveness of the tools they were using, while 63% regularly collected and connected feedback—substantially more than those in other markets in both instances.

APAC organisations would do well to embed this culture of constant assessment and improvement into their experience strategy. More mature organisations are already doing this with technology: The fastest-growing technologies amongst experience leaders in the region over the next two years now include workforce automation and no-code/low-code platforms, both of which lend themselves to agile, continuous experience improvement. However, technology adoption also requires strong direction to succeed: In the three APAC markets surveyed, 68% of experience leaders take pains to develop an experience-focused strategy and culture, while 61% set a clear vision, goals, and principles for technologies and processes to abide by.

The findings from ThoughtLab’s research also highlight the importance of strong fundamentals when adopting a holistic or unified approach to experience. At present, some of the most practised initiatives amongst leading experience organisations include integrating experiences via digital solutions (77% of organisations) and the use of AI to hyper-personalise experiences (61%). However, only 35% of experience leaders we surveyed in the three APAC markets are currently looking to modernise their IT systems as part of their experience strategy—although that is set to increase by 66% over the next two years, faster than any other strategic initiative.

The surge in focus on core IT systems reflects a growing awareness of one important principle: Strong foundations lead to smoother all-around experiences. It may also reflect some of the challenges that early-adopter organisations are now facing: 58% of experience leaders currently face challenges from a lack of integrated digital solutions, while 45% suffer from poor-quality or inaccessible data and 42% face a lack of visibility into their workflows and processes. Modernising IT first, with well-integrated, composable platforms that span business functions, can help avert many of these challenges.

Refocusing on fundamentals bears repeating, particularly in Singapore, where organisations tend to prioritise immediate action over clear direction. Creating new cross-disciplinary teams and adopting new business models are both on the agenda for 55% of organisations in Singapore, but only 46% are actively developing a strategy and culture for a unified experience. That’s substantially less than in Australia/New Zealand and Japan, where strategy and culture emerge as the foremost imperative for preparing people and organisations for change.

Sixty-one percent of leading organisations [in APAC] are already using AI to hyper-personalise experiences—suggesting growing recognition of the importance of providing emotive, empathetic responses at scale.

Singaporean organisations are also less likely to create a shared value proposition to guide their experience-related processes—something they will need to do if they wish to ensure those new teams and business models drive a cohesive experience rather than spiralling into fragmentation.

To date, most APAC organisations have focused on technology and processes in their experience efforts, but the emotional effect of those solutions has gone overlooked. That appears to be changing. While only 35% of experience leaders in APAC are currently working to build emotional connections between their brand and stakeholder groups, such as employees and customers, that number is set to increase to 57% over the next two years—making it one of the fastest-growing priorities in experience overall. At the same time, 61% of leading organisations are already using AI to hyper-personalise experiences—suggesting a growing recognition of the importance of providing emotive, empathetic responses at scale.

In this regard, Australian and New Zealand organisations are already ahead of the curve: 53% are already taking steps to build emotional connections to their brands, substantially more than those in Japan or Singapore. Australian and New Zealand organisations are also much less likely (only 10%) to associate holistic experience with creating more stress and unhappiness for people than their counterparts in Japan (19%) and Singapore (20%). That may itself reflect different ideals and goals for experience, with Australian and New Zealand organisations potentially focusing more on emotional fulfilment and well-being and those in other countries defining it in terms of meeting transactional needs anywhere, anytime.

In all three markets, organisations stand to benefit substantially from unified experience. However, they can boost their odds of success if they invest in a compelling culture and vision around experience, build constant improvement into their processes and technology, and remember to account for the human factor of emotional connection in how they engage with—and even learn from—customers, employees, end users, and others. Experience is, after all, the difference—as is whether organisations learn from it

Trending articles

Related

Understanding proactive customer service

Learn more

Related articles

4 organisational truths to keep Singapore growing
ARTICLE
4 organisational truths to keep Singapore growing

Sustaining the ‘red dot’

 

Teaching tomorrow’s jobs
ARTICLE
Teaching tomorrow’s jobs

Talent shortages and tech-induced disruption put a spotlight on future-proofing careers 

Singapore’s risk exposure: High turbulence, low visibility
ARTICLE
Singapore’s risk exposure: High turbulence, low visibility

New research warns of unpredictable risks for the city-state’s businesses

Author

mark yeow headshot

Mark Yeow's first foray into the world of journalism and content was in high school, writing articles about antique furniture that he patched together between studying and video games. Since then he's written about everything from environmental science to wireless technology to trends in global trade, alongside citizen video journalism for social impact causes around Southeast Asia. Raised in Australia, he currently resides in his birthplace of Singapore but struggles to say which is truly home.

Articles by Mark Yeow