Much of Asia Pacific is at an ‘intermediate’ stage when it comes to understanding their customers’ journey, while 8 percent of Hong Kong respondents admit that their organisation doesn’t have any insight into the customer journey, the highest percentage in the region.
These are the key findings of Econsultancy’s Understanding the Customer Journey in Asia Pacific report, published in association with Emarsys, a global B2C marketing cloud company.
“The promise of marketing has always been to deliver personalised interactions that consumers deserve, and that many of them are growing to expect,” said Ohad Hecht, CEO, Emarsys. “Marketing teams around the world work hard to exceed customer expectations; however, a gap is emerging between customer demand for personalised interactions and the marketer’s ability to deliver. An explosion of data, channels and point solutions are at the core of this growing gap and are ironically making it harder, not easier, for marketers to understand the customer journey.”
Main barriers for HK companies
According to the report, complexity of the customer journey, difficulty with unifying different sources of data and IT bottlenecks are the main barriers for Hong Kong organisations looking to understand the customer journey, very similar to the overall picture of APAC.
However, while a lack of internal collaboration is a key barrier throughout the region, it is particularly true for Hong Kong, with 43% of local respondents stating there is a lack of sharing between departments, the highest percentage among markets.
Meanwhile, 36% of Hong Kong respondents blame silo-based organisational structure for the lack of customer insights, the second highest in the region.
At the same time, 43% of Hong Kong respondents say they are only just beginning to develop a strategy for improving their organisation’s customer experience. Indonesia, by comparison, emerges in the lead with 18% of company respondents claiming they have a well-developed customer experience strategy in place, and just 3% saying there is no strategy.
Hong Kong trails far behind in this respect, with just 6% saying their customer experience strategy is well developed, the lowest in the region.
It appears local companies may also be taking the wrong approach when it comes to improving their customer journey. Almost one third of Hong Kong respondents (33%) say that their customer touchpoints across different channels are integrated within their organisation, but are channel-focused, not customer-focused.
Mobile web growing in importance
While desktop is considered the most important channel for understanding the customer journey, mobile was selected as the combined first and second choice for three-quarters of respondents, highlighting the growing importance of the mobile web as a customer experience channel.
The majority of respondents believe customers are using mobile for product research and will later purchasing online.
Companies say a lack of systems (79%), data (74%) and analysis skills (68%) are preventing them from effectively mapping the mobile customer journey.
Two-thirds of companies rely on email data to inform their understanding of the customer journey.
Sales and revenue is considered the primary indicator of success and way of measuring the impact of initiatives aimed at understanding the customer journey.
“The idea of providing a consistent and connected customer experience across marketing touchpoints is not a new concept,” said Jefrey Gomez, Managing Director, Asia Pacific at Econsultancy. “However, the ability to achieve this remains a challenge for the majority of APAC marketers. In 2017 we may see change in this regard with more organisations focusing on customer needs and established channels.”