Digital experience maturity in ASEAN remains low despite the rapid migration to digital technologies driven by the pandemic, said Ecosystm, a digital research and advisory platform.
According to the company, it conducted recently a study across Asia Pacific with 600 businesses, including the 400 businesses in ASEAN (Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand) using Sitecore’s Digital Experience Maturity Model (DXMM) assessment.
The DXMM assessed organisations’ current capabilities on a five-stage digital index - ranging from organisations that are at the beginning of their digital experience journeys to those that set the benchmark that other businesses aim to achieve, the firm added.
Survey highlights
- Businesses in Singapore have the highest digital experience maturity.
- Overall, the region lags behind with a score of two out of five, in part because they haven’t realised the full potential of their marketing technology stack.
- Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) providers have the highest level of maturity, with 40% scoring a 4 or 5.
- Impacted by the many shifts in economies, competition, the pandemic and changing use of real estate, retailers have done particularly well across the region.
- Manufacturing and governments have a lot of work ahead of them in creating leading digital experiences.
In addition, the findings illustrate digital adoption efforts in the region with 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, Ecosystm noted.
Businesses also show a greater propensity to invest in data driven decision-making, optimisation, and marketing technology (martech) to improve their DX maturity levels, the company added.
Of the factors contributing to digital maturity, businesses in the region are strongest in driving robust executive vision and organisational strategy; and in their people and process strategies, according to survey results.
However, these efforts are often slowed down by gaps in their marketing technology stack, the company pointed out.
With only 56% of businesses having integrated their marketing technology stack, and just 50% supporting their martech stack with sophisticated optimisation—there is an opportunity to do more, survey results indicate.
“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 organisations 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,” said Nick Boyle, Vice President, Asia, Sitecore.
“Organisations in the region are at different stages of digital maturity and it’s crucial to provide them with a benchmark industry standard as well as best practices,” said Tim Sheedy, Principal Advisor, Ecosystm.
What companies need to do
As the report identifies, companies need to align their digital experiences around their customer needs, Eric Orton, Executive Technology Director AKQA, ANZ pointed out.
Companies who do this well are going further to recognise 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, he advised.
“It’s 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.”
