While most Southeast Asian companies are now reaping the benefits of artificial intelligence (AI) in their operations, their Philippine counterparts still lag behind in the adoption of such technology to meet customers’ expectations and the kind of experiences this automation provides.
Today’s market, unlike before, is more demanding, especially when it comes to interaction with businesses. Technology plays a big part in this rapidly evolving behavior. Hence, brands need to embrace whatever change in the channels they have in order to continue to connect and reach their target market.
Among the modern tools that create a big impact on the customer experience, or CX, is AI. Entities that use this increase productivity of agents, resolve tickets faster, and scale their support.
To establish a self-service strategy, high-performing support teams also tap AI. In fact, 84 percent of managers using it to assist clients have a self-help tactic in place.
Zendesk, in its CX Trends Report 2020 that is based on industry research and product usage data from its 45,000 customers worldwide, shows that Filipino companies (4.8 percent) are slow adopters of AI-enabled customer support for resolving support tickets compared to their regional peers.
Singaporeans and Thais are leading the convenience economy as they partake 62.4 percent and 44.2 percent, respectively. Still on the catch-up mode are Indonesians and Malaysians given their 23.4-percent and 14.3-percent share of the total ticket volume by channel, respectively. Ticket volume pertains to the number of customer service inquiries per month.
Other self-service channels
WHEN issues arise, customers, more often than not, prefer to communicate with companies over familiar channels for immediate and efficient responses. And in this modern era, digital and mobile platforms are the instruments to turn to.
Providing customer support via messaging is starting to gain ground in the region. As expected from the Philippines, being the texting capital of the world, Filipino firms (42.9 percent) are the big users of messaging channels, such as WhatsApp and LINE, to engage with their patrons, based on the overall ticket volume results of the Zendesk study.
They are way ahead of Malaysians (3.7 percent), who come at a far second, followed by Thais (2.9 percent), Indonesians (2.7 percent) and Singaporeans (2.4 percent).
Social media as a way of communication is also popular among Filipino enterprises (2.9 percent) compared to Singaporeans (1.6 percent), Indonesians (1.0 percent), Malaysians (0.8 percent) and Thais (0.4 percent).
On the contrary, chat is the dominant self-help platform for Malaysians (18.2 percent) and Indonesians (16.4 percent), indicating how consumer behavior is being molded by mobile-first economies. Compared to them, though, Thais (5.2 percent), Singaporeans (4.4 percent) and Filipinos (4.2 percent) less likely resort to chatting.
Web-form self-service is highly utilized by Thai organizations at 24.9 percent; then Indonesians, 18.8 percent; Filipinos, 14.3 percent; Malaysians, 9.6 percent; and Singaporeans, 8.9 percent.
E-mail is the go-to self-help tool for Malaysians (41.3 percent), almost halfway ahead for Filipinos (24.3 percent), Indonesians (24 percent), Singaporeans (16.5 percent) and Thais (15.6 percent).
Nevertheless, phone is underutilized by Malaysians (3.5 percent), Thais (2.6 percent), Indonesians (0.7 percent), Filipinos (0.6 percent) and Singaporeans (0.6 percent).
Omnichannel industries, too, are shifting to digitization. The Zendesk research revealed that retail (68 percent), travel (63 percent) and financial services (60 percent) are using messaging to deliver a seamless service experience for customers in the region.
Accelerating CX performance
RESPONDING to customers’ concerns requires immediacy from any business. This is because when it comes to service, speed is their topmost priority: They want their issues resolved in a rapid and effective way.
As AI-powered customer support keeps on thriving in Southeast Asia, Zendesk’s report found that enhancements across different performance metrics have more than doubled from 2018 to 2019.
During the periods in review, for instance, the ideal first reply and resolution times in the region went down from 11.8 hours to 2.6 hours, and 16.4 hours to 4.8 hours, respectively.
The first-reply time metric measures the time between ticket creation and the initial public comment reply by an agent. The resolution time metric gauges the duration between ticket generation and its first resolution.
Even if they are significant in just one year, such improvements only translate to a +0.2-percent year-on-year improvement in the region’s customer satisfaction (CSAT) score (86.1 percent), reinforcing that rate at which customer expectations are rising is exponential.
“Improvements in insights and analytics can mean that Southeast Asia’s businesses are becoming more proficient at managing customer data, substantially improving customer experience and loyalty,” said Malcolm Koh, CX strategist in Asia Pacific at Zendesk. “In fact, research from Forrester found that when customers are engaged in the right way, with the right emotion, they’re even willing to pay a premium.”
Improved customer satisfaction ratings
MORE and more customers in Southeast Asia are satisfied with the kind of support they receive from business entities, or companies they engaged with for certain issues they have regarding their rendered services.
Given the level of digital maturity of such countries surveyed in the region, the average Southeast Asian CSAT rating has experienced a steady +1.5-percent growth to peak at 86.1 percent in the last couple of years.
Thanks to the gains of being a late-adopter of customer support technology, Malaysia sustained its regional lead for happy customers with a CSAT score of 89.3 percent.
Singapore exhibited the giant leap (+5.3 percent) to 88.1 percent during the same period. The Philippines saw a drop in terms of satisfied customers, but its score above 80 percent is still not that bad for a nation with developing digital infrastructures.
“The key to high-performing CX teams is a robust AI strategy backed by data insights and automation to effectively scale support. Looking forward, businesses across Southeast Asia will need to examine how AI can permeate more channels—including social media—for customers to self-serve, especially in reaching out to a growing demographic of highly discerning Gen Zs,” Koh stressed.
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