Strategic application of a hybrid customer experience (CX) is a key to better serving customers and increasing their loyalty, according to Infobip, a cloud communications platform that helps businesses build connected customer experiences.
Brands in Thailand perform well in terms of customer experience, with a CX score of 4.2, compared with the Asia Pacific average of 3.9, according to a survey conducted for Infobip by Forrester Consulting. Scores were calculated based on three dimensions of customer experience quality: ease, effectiveness and emotion.
The survey showed that although automation now plays a pivotal role for businesses that want to elevate and scale customer experience, a mixture of human-assisted and automated service capabilities is still required.
Thus, businesses must build a strategic hybrid customer experience in order to fulfil the unmet needs and expectations that persist, says Infobip.
The conclusions were based on a survey of 1,210 consumers in mainland China, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan and Vietnam.
As digitisation accelerates, Asia Pacific consumers have increasingly adopted self-service and automated support. For example, customer preferences for automated chatbot services have risen from 24% to 26%. This highlights the opportunity for organisations to invest in automation and scale convenience, providing the autonomy that customers seek.
However, consumers still habitually rely on live human support, as phone and online live chat interactions were the top two preferred touchpoints across all support scenarios.
In Thailand, the top three customer service touchpoints preferred are social media (41%), online live chat (38%) and a human agent over the phone (38%). While a strong preference for live human support is clear, social media is seeing increasing uptake as the most preferred interaction channel for general customer service/support and feedback/complaints in the post-pandemic era.
At the same time, a human agent over the phone is now the number one option for pre-sales support (42%) and sales support (44%) post pandemic, followed by social media and online live chat, respectively.
"The data is an indication of the changing landscape, which will pave the way for decision-makers to enrich their CX and to generate tangible business value in the long run," said Akarat Ngandee, country manager of Infobip Thailand.
"As the research indicates, there is a linear correlation between advanced CX and improved customer advocacy, retention and wallet share.
"Therefore, the information gathered from this research can help companies to better manage CX, by taking into consideration a strategic placement of human touch, which is the key to improving the customer experience and boosting customer loyalty."
Across Asia Pacific, the study also suggested that a strong correlation exists between the value of human agent interactions in addressing highly emotional or complex cases and the CX scores identified.
When human interaction was tapped for general customer service and complaint cases, a boost in CX was reflected in the overall CX score. However, for less complex requests like delivery tracking, self-service touchpoints sufficed in resolving customer inquiries quickly. Therefore, as the need for human touch has been diminished, CX scores did not show a significant improvement, even if human assistance was utilised.
