THE speed and action of insights will be an overriding focus and key investment area for many Asia Pacific (APAC) businesses this year, revealed report.
According to a recent Adobe 2021 Digital Trends Report, the pandemic-stricken year of 2020 pushed businesses to realise the need to understand and act on data faster than they were planning to.
That in mind, only 35% of business leaders in the Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) area believe their organisations have strong capabilities in accuracy, actionability, speed and access of insights.
Other Asian leaders are far more pessimistic to this, with only 9% believing so, despite most of the respondents agreeing to the fact that they faced a large amount of change in customer behaviour since COVID-19 hit local shores.
“Because that more people are doing things digitally, how can businesses leverage on that data and turn it into something useful, turning them into insights and using those insights?” questioned Adobe’s managing director for Southeast Asia (SEA) Simon Dale.
Identifying that the biggest challenge for businesses is being overwhelmed by data, respondents across Asia (49%) and ANZ (40%) are planning to invest resources in improving insights and analytics capabilities.
For leaders in ANZ, more focus is being placed on personalised customer experience (33%), while Asian leaders are more committed to enabling digital customer acquisition (35%).
“(As businesses), you need to have insights to personalise your offerings to the customers and gain a slight advantage from your competitors,” he added.
Meanwhile, Adobe vice president of DX marketing (APAC and Japan) Duncan Egan echoed the sentiment, saying: “For brands across every sector, 2020 brought a loss of predictability. Organisations of all kinds were driven online at an accelerated rate, creating a wave of new digital customers with increasing expectations.”
“A company with a strong customer experience (CX) strategy is more likely to achieve long-term growth than its competitors, as they are better positioned to adapt to changeable customer behaviours and markets,” he added.
Egan also mentioned that the report highlighted the need for organisations to accelerate their insight and action capabilities by moving to more flexible technologies and cloud-based platforms.
Additionally, respondents who are confident about their company’s customer experience feel optimistic about their corporate strategy (63% in ANZ vs 73% in India vs 56% in Asia) and their own prospects for career growth (61% in ANZ vs 70% in India vs 57% in Asia).
According to Egan, the most progressive companies are those that invest in hybrid workplace approaches in order to improve productivity.
“A hybrid approach to technology – comprising of cloud and other data management systems – allows organizations to be flexible and collaborative, letting them work better with existing solutions and quickly integrate new ones. The effects of such an approach within these organisations can be seen in the improved capability in key areas of analytics and insights,” he explained.
The report showed that many organisations across APAC have already taken a hybrid approach, with 43% executives in ANZ and 26% in both India and Asia reporting they use a cloud-based platform in concert with other marketing data management systems. – March 12, 2021
