Apparently, the region is weak in leveraging marketing technology and data-driven business intelligence to create high CX.
The rapid migration to digital technologies driven by the pandemic has done little for ‘digital experience maturity’ in the ASEAN region, according to a new report developed by Sitecore, Ecosystm and AKQA.
Digital experience maturity is an organization’s level of mastery in creating great customer experience in the digital realm. To understand the digital experience maturity levels of businesses in the region, Ecosystm conducted a study across the Asia Pacific region with 600 businesses, including 400 businesses in ASEAN (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand) and Australia/New Zealand, using Sitecore’s Digital Experience Maturity Model (DXMM) assessment.
DXMM assesses organizations’ current capabilities on a five-stage digital index ranging from organizations that are at the beginning of their digital experience journeys to those that set the benchmark for others to achieve.
The findings indicate that digital adoption efforts in the region contains many bright spots, including more investments in building experiences that are not only easy and effective but also memorable to earn the loyalty of customers. Businesses also showed a greater propensity to invest in data-driven decision-making, optimization, and marketing technology (martech) to improve their digital experience maturity levels.
Benchmarking digital maturity levels
Of the factors contributing to digital maturity, businesses in the region are strongest in driving robust executive vision and organizational strategy, and in their people and process strategies. However, these efforts are often slowed down by gaps in their marketing technology stack. With only 56% of businesses having integrated their marketing technology stack, and just 50% supporting their martech stack with sophisticated optimization—the report asserts that there is an opportunity to do more.
Said Nick Boyle, Vice President, Asia, Sitecore: “Southeast Asia will be home to 310 million digital consumers by the end of this year, and their readiness to use technology presents tremendous opportunities for businesses. We created the DXMM assessment for organizations to not only understand their own digital maturity levels but also to benchmark themselves against their competitors and adequately prepare for emerging trends and potential disruptions.”
Organizations in the region are at different stages of digital maturity and it is crucial to provide them with a benchmark industry standard as well as best practices, said Ecosystm’s Principal Advisor Tim Sheedy. “We hope that by sharing the right data and actionable insights, businesses are able to carve out a roadmap to increase their own digital experience maturity.”
Said AKQA’s Executive Technology Director (ANZ) Eric Orton: “As the report identifies, companies need to align their digital experiences around their customer needs. Companies who do this well are going further to recognize that customers don’t segment their view of the business by channel, so when considering customer journeys, it’s important to look at the full picture of how your customers are engaging with your business beyond just digital touchpoints.”
Digitalization is also not a once-and-done exercise, Orton said. “Strong experience-focused businesses continue to learn and evolve their views of the customer journey as they strive to remove pain points across touchpoints and better engage their customers.”
