THE REALITIES OF CUSTOMER

EXPERIENCE IN APAC 2021 REPORT

Uncover the strategies being implemented by brands in the APAC region as they optimize their
CX efforts in the face of disruption from the Covid-19 pandemic

INSIDE:
Discover exclusive insights from CX leaders in Asia

DISCLAIMER:
The information in this piece does not constitute as legal advice and so should not be regarded as such.
 Foreword
As the world endures the ongoing impact of the
Covid-19 pandemic, including the social distancing
and remote-working mandates it has enforced, brands
have been forced to adjust the experiences they deliver
to satisfy demanding and uncertain customers.
Despite the disruption of the pandemic, customer
preferences and demands remain fairly similar across
the globe, as all customers desire worthwhile and
convenient experiences with brands. However, some
differences in customer preferences can be observed
across geographical regions due to variables such as
culture or population.
One particular area of note is the Asia-Pacific (APAC)
region. With its large share of the global customer base,
the region represents a significant opportunity for any
Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report
2
brand. To capitalize on opportunities in this market,
organizations will need to understand the shifting
Contents
nuances and trends that are specific to customers in
the region, such as the rising prominence of digital CX
that was observed in CX Network’s 2020 Customer CX trends and customer behavior shifts - Pg 3
Experience in APAC Trend Report.
Understanding trends such as digital CX is critical for
brands looking for a competitive edge in the APAC Challenges - Pg 7
region. Through analysis of survey data drawn from
a research group of leading CX experts from a range
of organizations, who offer their observation of APAC
trends over the last 12 months, this report will shed light Exclusive insights from CX leaders in Asia - Pg 10
on the key trends, preferences, challenges and pain
points that are manifesting or developing in the region,
offering comparisons to those uncovered in the 2020
edition of this report. Investments and opportunities - Pg 11
Culture change and achieving stakeholder buy-in - Pg 14
Final remarks - Pg 15
About CX Network - Pg 17
 CX trends and customer behavior shifts 3

Top 10 APAC CX trends

Respondents could select multiple answers

Artificial
Data and Digital customer Customer loyalty Employee
41% intelligence/
chatbots
36% analytics 36% experience 32% and retention 32% experience

Omnichannel
Digital Rising customer Covid-19 safety Emotional
32% (channel
integration)
27% transformation 23% expectations 18% concerns 18% engagement

Trends in customer behaviors Strongly agree Agree Unsure Disagree Strongly disagree

5% 5% 5% 9% 14%
18%
23% 13%
32%
Covid-19 safety is Average order value Customers are Customers are more Customer are
influencing customer 45% has decreased in the becoming more conscious willing to switch happy to spend more
41% 54%
purchase decisions last 12 months of sustainability brands if unsatisfied on convenience
14%
50%

45% 50%
77%

Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report

 CX trends and customer behavior shifts: Analysis
Artificial intelligence (AI) and chatbots
Considering the intense acceleration in the global AI
and chatbot market, which is expected to reach $5.63bn
by 2023, it is unsurprising that these technologies have
climbed to the top of the list as the strongest CX trend in
the APAC region. CX Network’s 2020 APAC trend report
saw AI and chatbots place fifth, showing an increase of
almost 20 per cent in 2021.
In 2021, AI-powered chatbots have the ability to assist
customers by automatically responding to queries or
issues, which helps to free up employees to handle
larger, more complex tasks. Given the impact of Covid-19
in APAC, these features are critical for brands to optimize
CX offerings.
Customers today expect speedy responses and
resolution for questions and complaints around the
clock and across an array of channels. However, staff
shortages caused by the pandemic complicated this
task for many organizations. In March and April 2020,
when many of the world’s call center locations had to
close, the world experienced a 39 per cent increase in
customer messaging across channels such as WhatsApp
or Facebook Messenger, leaving many brands that
had not implemented chatbots, scrambling to stretch
contact center agents to cover the influx in enquiries.
Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report
InMoment’s managing director (APAC), David Blakers,
expects brands to deepen their use of AI and machine
learning technologies in 2021. As customer experience-
led strategies become more prevalent, brands will
leverage AI to help them evolve beyond low-impact
CX measurement scorecards to embedding CX
improvement capabilities across their organization.
AI, chatbots and ‘digital humans’ are becoming the
standard. As more brands start to harness the power of
these technologies, new enhanced experiences need
to be carefully designed. Ensuring a new AI-driven
experience delivers a seamless experience for customers
is not enough – brands must also focus on the way
they make each customer feel after an interaction. This
emotional reaction to your product or service leaves
a lasting impression, which has the biggest impact on
customer loyalty.
4
This spike in customer messaging, coupled with
staff shortages and enforced contact center closures,
offers an explanation for the significant increase in AI
and chatbot implementation. As customers become
more aware of the convenience offered by messaging
with chatbots, demand for these channels will only
increase. Many brands are picking up on this and striving
to ensure they do not fall behind competitors when it
comes to automated, AI-powered customer experience
solutions, as suggested by AI taking top spot in the
minds of APAC respondents.
Data and analytics are the key to
understanding your customers
Data and analytics has long been a key pillar of most CX
strategies and has, unsurprisingly, retained its spot as the
second most significant trend in the APAC region, with
36 per cent of respondents flagging this as a key trend
impacting their roles in 2021. With the global data and
analytics market displaying a compound annual growth
rate of 25.5 per cent and expected to reach $89.6bn by
2022, it comes as no shock that our research panel of
APAC brands has mirrored this trend.
A full, holistic understanding of customers in your region
is critical to successfully optimizing CX strategies,
which could explain the maintained focus on data and
analytics. It is likely that APAC brands are adopting
 CX trends and customer behavior shifts: Analysis
analytics initiatives to shed light on the impact of
Covid-19 and what alterations or enhancements to CX
strategy are necessary.
A focus on data and analytics opens many doors
for organizations in the APAC region, such as the
opportunity to implement a level of personalization to
customer journeys.
According to Troy Barnes, chief digital experience officer
at Pizza Hut, who spoke at CX APAC Live 2020, if brands
can find the right ‘nuggets’ of data, they can customize
and personalize experiences so they engage with
individuals in a targeted and relevant manner.
These ‘nuggets’ refer to customer identity data that
allow a brand to create customer profiles, in order
to help them correctly spot customers and provide
smoother experiences. According to recent CX Network
research, the most common customer identifiers that
brands apply include email addresses, phone numbers
and authentication credentials. With around a quarter of
respondents in this research noting that they struggle to
identify customers across multiple lines of the
business, it is advisable to broaden the spectrum of
customer identifiers that are applied to CX efforts. In
efforts to achieve this, organizations can look to data
such as third-party identifiers, social media handles
and offline transactional data to ensure that customer
profiles offer a holistic view.
Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report
In 2021, brands will need to understand the value of the
data they collect and look to utilize data from all sources
to ensure that personalization efforts hit the mark. With
Forbes revealing that 71 per cent of consumers feel
frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal,
this has become mission-critical for brands in the APAC
region. Consumers are increasingly aware that brands
can apply the data they collect to enhance their
experience in a personal way and have come to expect
brands to understand, and effectively serve their needs.
Pro tip from InMoment:
Four must-have criteria for text analytics solutions
Quality:
For most businesses, it is simply not feasible to read
every customer comment, so text analytics solutions
must be able to accurately understand and surface
important trends and patterns based on individual
comments, sentiments and emotions behind them.
Actionability:
Another key objective of text analytics is enabling action
on key customer issues, which requires sophisticated
category sets that can identify themes on a granular
level (tuned specifically for your business, industry and
country), uncover sentiment, assign categories, identify
intent, spot legal issues and possible customer churn.
5
Sentiment:
We recommend using an adaptive sentiment engine
to detect the emotion in unstructured feedback. The
idea that inspired the adaptive sentiment engine
approach is that rigid rules do not lend themselves
to understanding human emotions. Instead, adaptive
sentiment is AI driven, meaning that it learns and
improves over time, giving you more accurate results.
This engine continually recognizes new terms and
phrases as well, meaning that it grows and adapts in
lockstep with your brand.
Scalability:
Any and every growing business (especially those with
a global reach) needs a solution that supports all of the
countries and languages your customers work and buy
in, so ensure your solution caters to regional nuances
and can be tailored to each market need.
 CX trends and customer behavior shifts: Analysis
Customer behavior shifts
With 95 per cent of respondents agreeing that Covid-19
is influencing purchase decisions and 63 per cent
agreeing that order value has declined, it is clear that
the pandemic is wreaking havoc in the APAC region.
Couple this with the fact that 95 per cent of respondents
agree that customers are willing to switch brands if
unsatisfied, it is clear that optimizing CX strategy has
never been more critical for APAC brands.
It is also clear that convenience is key, with 91 per cent
of respondents agreeing that customers are happy to
spend more on convenience. This supports the data
displaying a focus on AI and chatbots in the APAC
region, as automated, self-service features are key
options for any brand looking to enhance convenience.
Gabrielle Dracopoulos, head of customer success
and experience at global technology platform Intuit,
agrees that convenience is one of the keys to successful
customer experience strategy in APAC. However, she
notes that convenience will only get you so far and
advises brands to invest in building trust to secure and
retain APAC customers. Dracopoulos believes that
creating a customer experience that builds trust involves
defining the moments that matter and delivering on your
brand promise at these key moments, and shares her five
steps for achieving this:
Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report
6
1 Know what you stand for:  5 Measure success and keep innovating: 
Define an outside-in customer centered vision for Customer experience is not something that is
your brand with a set of principles that will be used to defined and executed just once, it is a continuous
guide the development of your end-to-end focus of innovation. Build a cycle of continuous learning
customer experience.  and experimentation. 
 
2 Know your customers and the experience
you are delivering:  Data case study
Develop your customer personas, not customer
marketing segments. Then map their current experience Australia Post is using customer insights to
to uncover the moments that matter most to your enhance the delivery experience it provides,
customer and your employees where trust can be broken by analyzing key themes and creating action
or earned.   plans accordingly. Led by customer insight
  Australia Post allows feedback to take the
3 Redesign the moments that matter: wheel and steer its direction toward making
Focus on the areas where customers have the greatest meaningful improvements for customers. One
opportunity to be successful in accomplishing their goals of the key initiatives is the ‘Text Your Choice’
and the effort it takes in achieving these goals. Work in program, which allows customers to take
cross-functional teams designing the ideal experience control of their experiences by flagging their
surrounding these moments. Do not forget that customer preferred methods of parcel delivery.
input is critical in achieving the right outcome.
  Results from Australia Post’s data-centric
4 Create an employee movement: approach to enhancing customer journeys
You can invest in technology and customer-centered includes a AU$1.7mn reduction in operational
processes but it is your employees that are the ultimate costs, NPS boosts of 27 percent, 91 percent first
custodians of the customer experience. The people time parcel delivery and project pay back in
doing the work and making decisions everyday are the less than 12 months*.
ones that have the greatest impact. Build customer
*Australia Post achieved these results in FY18/19
obsession into your culture developing an outside in
approach to everything you do.   
 Challenges 7

Top 10 APAC CX challenges 38%

Respondents could select multiple answers
38%
33%
Building a customer-first culture
Linking CX initiatives to ROI 24%
Ensuring channel consistency (omnichannel)
24%
Competing priorities
Siloed customer data: Incomplete customer profiles, 19%
disconnected customer experiences 19%
Covid-19 safety concerns
Rapid changes in technology (including digital and social) 19%
Upgrading or working with legacy systems 14%
Assigning internal CX responsibility
Moving from product-focus to customer-focus
14%

0% Respondents (%) 40%

In order to win needed CX budget or

resources is the pressure to prove ROI:

20%
Going up
Staying the same
Going down
What pressure?
4%
Don’t know
8%

4% 64%

Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report

 Challenges: Analysis
Linking CX initiatives to ROI InMoment’s Blakers knows that one of the biggest
challenges of CX leaders is building a roadmap to
Similar to the 2020 APAC report, linking CX initiatives show the financial impact of an experience improvement
with ROI scored high on the list of challenges that APAC program. He has three tips for CX Leaders to plug this gap:
CX professionals are facing. However, 2021 has seen
this challenge move up from second place to tie with Link CX to strategic goals using
1
building a customer-first culture for the top spot. financial KPIs
“Have a human-centered view For each listening post (survey program), think about
the related operational and finance measures already
of ROI instead of the typical
being used by the business and link to those so the
financial perspective.” program is relevant.
Jin Wan
Experienced CX practitioner Set up an experience
2
improvement framework
Avoid trying to convince your C-Suite on the ROI from a
CX led strategy up front, but do commit to setting up a
measurement framework that will build over time. You will
not be able to truly quantify ROI impact until you start
driving action from the new customer-led insights you
will be generating.
3 Focus on cost saving assumptions
Cost out models focused on reducing failure demand,
for example, are typically easier to defend than revenue-
based models and generally require less calculations,
less assumptions, and less time to prove an impact.
Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report
8
Calculating and linking ROI to CX is consistently flagged
as one of the industry’s toughest challenges, wherever
you are in the world. However, the onset of the Covid-19
pandemic appears to have enhanced this significantly,
with almost 65 per cent of respondents agreeing that
the pressure to prove ROI is only going up.
Brands in the APAC region were hit hard by the
pandemic, experiencing one of the worst revenue
declines for any geographical region, with year-on-year
revenue plummeting by 43.7 per cent for brands across
the region following the initial virus outbreak and social
restrictions. This offers an explanation for the difficulty
APAC practitioners are having with evidencing ROI, as
decreasing revenue often results in shrinking budgets,
meaning less capital for CX investments.
Experienced CX practitioner, who has worked in New
Zealand for a number of leading brands, Jin Wan, is
aware of the challenges of evidencing ROI for CX in
the APAC region, and notes that a human-centered
approach can help to ease this burden.
“Have a human-centered view of ROI instead of the
typical financial perspective,” Wan advises. “Look
at ‘investment’ as everything needed to rally people
and change mind-sets, behaviors or culture, and look
at ‘return’ as the desired change in team, function,
company culture or behaviors.”
 Challenges: Analysis
Building customer-first cultures and proving CX ROI
JAX Tyres & Auto specializes in the sales and
service of tyres, wheels, brakes, suspension and
quick-fitting mechanical and is part of Hankook, a
South Korean multinational company with 21,000
employees. After taking home the 2020 prize for
Best CX Transformation and CX Leader of the Year
at Australia and New Zealand’s largest CX Awards,
CEO Steve Grossrieder knows what it takes to tie
experience initiatives to ROI, and create a
customer-first culture.
Link CX and profitability:
JAX has been able to crack the code on financial
linkage. The business established a baseline for
franchisees and watched how NPS affected each
store owner. Over time, JAX was able to demonstrate
a direct link between CX and higher profits.
Franchisees who achieve higher NPS scores are
“From the very start, brands need CX capabilities that have been designed
with a framework to outline the return on experience investment.”
InMoment
Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report
showing an additional revenue per annum of over
AU$52,000.
Focus leadership on driving customer-first culture:
Grossrieder leads the way at JAX, using voice of
customer insights to re-design the retail positioning
of the brand to promise consumers the best possible
quality and service. The JAX KPI framework is based
on key metrics such as NPS, closing the loop for
customers and sales targets. Once a franchisee
exceeds these goals, franchise and marketing fees
are reduced by up to 25 per cent for the quarter.
Leverage the right technology:
JAX has launched and embedded a first-class
experience improvement initiative across the
business, and InMoment is proud to be their
technology partner. Giving staff real-time access to a
9
combination of voice of customer, employee
and franchisee insights helps the business identify
opportunities to improve best practices and
performance across the store network.
These initiatives resulted in a business uplift across
the board:
Proven link between better CX and store profitability
Repeat business is up from 58 per cent in FY18 to 72 per cent
in FY20
Sales and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and
amortization (EBITDA) have exceeded targets with both growing
by over 20 per cent year on year for the past two years
Early in 2021, sales hit an all time record, 22 per cent higher
than best
Franchisees are rewarded for customer-centric behaviors, which
promotes a customer-obsessed culture
CLICK HERE to read more about the
JAX Tyres & Auto case study
 Exclusive insights from CX leaders in Asia
“This report validates that data and analytics are key to opening
opportunities for personalization, which really is about responding to
your customer needs in a way that is relevant, value adding and drives
differentiation. It is a key building block for the success of your CX strategy
and transformation efforts.”
Manpreet Singh
Senior MD and Group Head – Customer Experience Management, CIMB Group
“In Southeast Asia, the new normal has created a reality that makes customer
experience crucial for survival. Lazada has stepped up continuously as a trusted
platform and enabled our customers to maintain a sense of normalcy as they turn
to us for their everyday necessities. Many countries continue to experience
limited movement due to the pandemic. Sellers have to pivot from selling
offline to new channels like eCommerce. Digital literacy is sometimes taken for
granted in this part of the world – the reality is Lazada has to come up with
innovative ways to help our sellers onboard. It requires an end-to-end approach
and service-centric mindset. Today, we continue to listen to their needs and
empower sellers to thrive in their online selling through our platform. As a
company, Lazada values the importance in understanding and incorporating
a customer-centric culture and this is reflected in every aspect of our business.
We build on a customer first company culture and recognize that it can go a long
way in separating a good company from a great company into the future.”
Brigitte Daubry
Chief customer care officer at Lazada Group
Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report
“Lazada recognizes the importance in providing the best end-to-end customer
experience. As an e-commerce platform handling millions of transactions every
day, it is a priority for us to be a trusted and reliable platform for all customers.
Customers will always provide guidance as long as we pay close attention
to what they are saying. It takes a village – everyone in the company – to
listen well and develop that customer-first culture. It is also about looking at
the insights we can draw from the myriad of data points to better understand
how best to serve our customers. The past year has been difficult for many of
our users, but Lazada has enabled its customers to have a continued sense
of normalcy during the pandemic and has even provided them personalized
experiences to access anything they need to live their best lives. All this is only
made possible when we keep our focus on serving our customers’ needs.”
Brigitte Daubry
Chief customer care officer at Lazada Group
“As CX trends show that consumer behavior is being driven more by
convenience, availability and simplicity of transaction, we need to ask
ourselves how we can respond to that toward being the brand of choice.
Being top of mind or preferred in any business requires a translation of
the capabilities of the organization toward meeting and exceeding their
expectations, as well as delivering delight across a variety of experience
dimensions such as product, brand, sustainability, purpose and value.
We believe that there is a wave coming that will break the boundaries of
industry-specific CX toward best-of-breed industry-agnostic CX emulation.”
Alp Altun
Regional chief transformation officer – Asia-Pacific, Allianz
 Investments and opportunities 11

Top 10 CX investment priorities

Respondents could select multiple answers

40% 35%
Customer insight
32% 32%

50%
AI
Over of the research Customer journey mapping
23% 23%

Respondents (%)
Data and analytics
panel is responsible for customer Net promoter score (NPS) 19%
experience investments at their brands Digital customer experience 16% 16%
Multichannel / omnichannel 13% 13%
Voice of the customer
Contact center solutions
Digital marketing

0%

Annual budget for CX solutions Top 10 CX investment obstacles

Respondents could select multiple answers
50%
50%

10% 40%
Demonstrating ROI
2% 37% 37%
$0 - $50,000 26% Integration into company culture and processes
$50,000 – $100,000 10% Finding budget
27%

Respondents (%)
$100,000 – $250,000
Integration into existing tools
$250,000 – $500,000
Lack of human resources
$500,000 – $1m
10% Developing or locating the right talent
$1m– $2.5m 17% 17%
Lack of time
More than $2.5m
Complicated internal sign-off process 13%
19% 10%
Gaining board level buy-in 7%
Getting regional sign-off
23%
0%

Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report

 Investments and opportunities: Analysis
Investment goals
The turbulence of the last year can be evidenced in
the fact that none of the top three investment priorities
revealed in the 2020 APAC report have retained their
spot, suggesting a significant shift in focus from brands
in the APAC region.
The top three APAC investment categories are customer
insight (35 per cent), AI (32 per cent) and customer
journey mapping (32 per cent). There could be several
explanations for the prominence of customer insights in
the minds of CX investors, one of which is the fact that
data and analytics featured in second place in the 2020
APAC report. A focus on attaining meaningful customer
insights is a logical next step to investment in data and
analytics capabilities so brands can capitalize on the
benefit of having a deeper understanding of how their
customers think and feel. Customer need and
perspective insights also set the foundation to build
productive customer-first business cultures.
In the 2020 report, AI was an area of interest but
failed to break into the top three, suggesting a lack
of confidence in this trend, potentially due to the high
price points these systems come with. With AI-powered
chatbot functionality featuring in the top spot for
key trends in APAC in 2021, it seems that brands are
beginning to step up to the plate. As such, it is no
Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report
surprise that brands are ready to invest heavily in this
functionality and are allocating the funds to do so.
AI and chatbots did not even feature in the top 10
investment priorities for 2020, which shows how far the
technology has come and how widely the advantages
of non-human options for handling customer queries
and concerns have been demonstrated.
Investment obstacles
The primary investment obstacles for APAC practitioners
remain almost unchanged from the 2020 APAC report.
Demonstrating ROI for CX holds a commanding
first place, with half of surveyed APAC professionals
highlighting this as one of the top obstacles for bringing
investment goals to fruition.
Integration into company culture and processes retains
second place, with the only change from the 2020 APAC
report coming in the third spot. With digital customer
experience on the rise in APAC and an accelerating
focus from brands on data analysis, it is no surprise that
integration has become an issue and many brands
begin implementing new, digital CX initiatives.
In 2021, the challenge of finding budget has moved
up in the minds of APAC professionals to tie with
integration into existing tools for the third spot. If we
consider the significant revenue decline that has
12
been observed for brands in the APAC region since
the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this offers a
clear explanation for the fact that finding budget for
CX investments is proving difficult for those brands.
Mara R, customer experience and activation at global
life sciences organization Bayer, notes that this is a
problem she experienced early in her career and
was able to mitigate this by simply showing
stakeholders how initiatives can impact business
results once implemented.
“I used to take directors and senior leadership to visit
start-ups, or smaller companies that could be related
to our field, to see that small things can make the
same movement more assertive,” Mara explains. “It is
important to get them to recognize that it’s something
that we need, something that is possible and something
that is already done in some places.”
“I used to take directors and senior
leadership to visit start-ups, or smaller
companies that could be related to our
field, to see that small things can make
the same movement more assertive.”
Mara R
Customer experience and activation, Bayer
 Investments and opportunities: Analysis 13

Pro tip from InMoment: As your experience program matures, there are multiple business benefits to be realized:
Building a business case around CX’s financial benefits
Reduce Sales Deflection

From the very start, brands need CX capabilities that Higher Core Sales
Up-sell & Cross-Sell
have been designed with a framework to outline the
return on experience investment. The financial impact of Access To New Prospects
the CX capability should be outlined in the onboarding Higher New Sales
INCREASE Improve Win Rate
process, tested and controlled along the way and REVENUE
measured and reported against at each quarter of the Drive Product Innovation

financial year.
Higher Margin Price Optimisations

Reduce Churn
Higher Retention
Increase Tenure

ROI IN CX Reduce Failure Demands Costs

Lower Cost To Serve
Reduce Warranty & Recovery

Differentiate Services Levels

DECREASE
COSTS Focus Marketing And Promotional Spend
Lower Cost To Sell
Increase Tenure

Optimisation Logistics Expense

Lower Cost To Operate
Product Design For CX

Reduce Failure Demands Costs

Lower Working Capital Reduce Warranty And Recovery

REDUCE
Differentiate Service Levels

Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report

 Culture change and achieving stakeholder buy-in 14

Which of the below best describes your business culture? Top metrics for measuring CX success

1 NPS score
12%

We have had a few wins from CX projects, which are 2 CSAT

helping us gain buy-in from various stakeholders 36%
The CX department needs to deliver returns to be
taken more seriously in the business 24% 3 Customer retention
Don’t know
The CX department isn’t really held accountable for
the returns it delivers 4 Customer churn

28% 5 Revenue

“In our business case, we included case studies from others

in the industry that helped us to paint a picture of where our
business could be. There are lots of stories on how to derive
value from CX, cutting insights and new ways of thinking.
When you point to other businesses in your industry seeing
success, it’s easy to say, ‘why wouldn’t we give customer
experience a try?’”
Trish Roberts
Voice of customer program manager at New Zealand Post

Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report

 Culture change and achieving stakeholder buy-in: Analysis
One of the greatest challenges that CX practitioners
face is attaining the buy-in of key stakeholders when
attempting to implement CX initiatives such as AI fea-
tures or customer insight programs. Integrating these into
company culture is particularly difficult when you consid-
er that building customer first cultures was one of the top
CX challenges in APAC, and it is one that has haunted
the industry for years. The majority of respondents agree
that past CX wins are helping here but agree that more
are necessary to truly cement stakeholder buy-in.
Trish Roberts, voice of customer program manager at
New Zealand Post, has taken on a transformational
program implementation of her own. Here is her take on
overcoming investment obstacles:
“In our business case, we included case studies from
others in the industry that helped us to paint a picture
Customer experience trends in APAC: 2021 report
of where our business could be. There are lots of stories
on how to derive value from CX, cutting insights and new
ways of thinking. When you point to other businesses
in your industry seeing success, it’s easy to say, ‘why
wouldn’t we give customer experience a try?’”
Metrics can be used to measure the success of CX
initiatives and as currency to attain respect and buy-in
from stakeholders, particularly when they are linked to
financial benefits. With revenue dropping out of the top
spot that it held last year, this indicates that this group
of CX practitioners are equipped in demonstrating
progress and project value through key CX metrics
such as customer retention, CSAT and customer return.
However, revenue will still play a contributing role to
add credibility to other metrics of choice, as the rising
pressure to prove ROI will mean that practitioners will
need to employ every arrow in their quiver.
15
Final remarks
Looking ahead, with brands now aware of
the impacts of Covid-19 and taking steps to
mitigate the damage, we will begin to see
organizations transform their CX offerings
over the next year. The stage is set for brands
to begin enhancing CX efforts in APAC by
applying the insights revealed in this report.
Some of the key learnings for brands to take
advantage of include behavior shifts that have
left APAC customers yearning for convenience
and accelerating regional prominence of
customer insight initiatives.
Those who keep their finger on the pulse with
regard to prominent APAC trends, such as the
increasing regional demand for personalized
customer experiences, put themselves in
good stead to react to customer preferences
and behaviors and secure a competitive
advantage over those who do not.
Stop Chasing a Score.
Start Improving Experiences.
86% of brands are not benefiting from their investment in customer
experience. Why? Most brands are too focused on feedback collection,
chasing a score and closing the loop with individual customers—not solving
systemic, strategic objectives.

We’re on a mission to change this.

It all starts with improving experiences at the intersection of value—where customer,

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About •JAN
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CX Network
CX Network is an online resource for customer
experience professionals providing value-rich content
such as industry reports, customer trends, best practice,
latest industry news, interviews with CX leaders and
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so much more! Our focus on the content that matters - Customer journey management
to customer experience leaders most, allows us to cut • RESEARCH REPORT
through the white noise that surrounds this - Contact center CX
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ever-changing subject, and makes us the primary - CX in financial services
resource for CX executives to turn to. • GUIDE
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By joining our network you will receive expert
commentary, reports and resources developed by and
for experienced customer experience professionals and • ONLINE CONFERENCE
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industry insiders. With a growing membership and global
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portfolio of events, CX Network ensures you keep your - Automation and chatbots
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advice to help you achieve your business goals.
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Sign up for free today!
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