When and How to Pivot Customer Experience Strategies

When and How to Pivot Customer Experience Strategies

Across Australia and Singapore, customer experience team leaders are finding that it’s harder than ever to reach and engage prospects and customers — and to keep their seemingly infinite systems connected. 

What kinds of challenges are business leaders facing in Australia and Singapore?

These two major issues, of customer disconnection and systems disconnection, have combined with unfavourable market forces to yield a very challenging environment for companies of all kinds. 

But there’s a lot that companies can try to better connect with their customers. 

Signs That Show it’s Time to Pivot, and What to do About Them

Here are three major signs that show it may be time for a pivot — and how to address them.

Sign 1: Data and Systems are Disconnected 

The #1 pain point or signal found in our US research was disconnected systems. In the APAC region, this issue was only at at #3, which means there’s still an opportunity to improve and change course before it gets worse. 

41% of Australian business leaders, and 32% in Singapore, are experiencing challenges related to data and systems. Businesses are inundated with data generated by an average of 200+ systems, and often, the systems don’t integrate smoothly — leaving businesses with employees that spend their time managing dashboards, instead of connecting with customers. 

Now is the time to fix this: Of those who experience disconnection among their systems, 45% in Australia — and a massive 81% in Singapore, say the problem has gotten worse in the past year.

The Solution: Audit Your Tech Stack 

At Konica Minolta Business Solutions, the company was dealing with a fractured marketing automation system that caused messes across regions — and led to low content utilisation. 

They switched from Marketo to HubSpot, and saw a 20% time savings, a 50% cost savings, and they were able to increase local content utilisation by 20% across SEA — with a 36% increase in organic web traffic and a 53% increase in organic leads in Singapore. Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) also went up over 220%.

“We wanted to have an omni-channel marketing effort that is essentially located in a single platform without the need to engage an external partner,” explained Regional Marketing Communications Manager Loon Jian Yew. 

Sign 2: Lower Engagement Metrics 

What used to work may not be resonating anymore due to changing customer preferences — and this can show up as poor engagement metrics all across the flywheel, from social shares to email opens to conversion rates. And in the APAC region, which is so culturally and economically diverse, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to fix this. 

The Solution: Get Listening

One of the best ways to tackle this problem is by conducting surveys, consulting regional market research, and collaborating with front-line, customer-facing teams to really hear what they’re seeing and what’s holding them back. Find out where your target audience spends their time, and meet them there: Test into pivoting away from email marketing if the population spends way more time on WhatsApp. Try integrating WhatsApp messaging or SMS messaging into your customer experience channels and test engagement. Plus, WhatsApp and Stripe recently partnered, allowing brands to sell directly through WhatsApp, further streamlining the path to purchase and improving the customer experience. 

“Using the joint capabilities of HubSpot and MessageMedia meant we could create integrated, consistent interactions across all customer touchpoints and really build out an omni-channel customer experience,” shared Justin Dry, founder of Vinomofo. After meeting customers on the channels they used, Vinomofo saw a 120X ROI. 

Sign 3: Lower Spend, Higher Churn 

52% of Australian business leaders and 56% of Singaporean business leaders cite decreasing customer spend as a major challenge to their organisation, either due to market conditions or decreased customer loyalty. 

When everyone needs to cut costs because of challenging market conditions, it doesn’t take much for customers to walk away from a recurring expense — which is why companies may be seeing higher churn than usual.

And when brands aren’t meeting their consumers’ expectations, whether because their product isn’t performing as expected, their messaging is wrong or poorly timed, or their customer service is lacking, customers will happily walk away. 

According to B2B buyers in Australia, 35% of brands have a poor understanding of who the buyers are and what their organisation needs. And in Singapore, 30% of B2B buyers say brands show a lack of interest in improving their services.

The Solution: Improve Collaboration and Get CX-Obsessed

Facilitating inter-team collaboration and taking a microscope to the customer experience can help. Dig deep into data and figure out what 20% of marketing and sales content generate 80% of value for your customers — and make investments there. 

At Glints, the team was able to improve reporting efficiency and increase lead conversion rate by 40% by rethinking the customer journey.

“Customer journeys are no longer linear, and complete visibility on customer touchpoints is crucial to avoid mismanagement of the customer experience. Adopting HubSpot has completely eliminated the chance of duplicate communication, and has enabled our various customer facing teams to communicate the same messaging to our customers. This has significantly improved our customers’ experience with us,” shared Nitya Vootla, Regional Business Operations Associate at Glints.

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What Do You Measure to See if the New Strategies are Working?

There’s no magic strategy that will move the needle overnight — but by shifting go-to-market (GTM) and customer service (CS) priorities towards true connection, you can create a more sustainable, engaging business that’s ready to meet your customers’ expectations. 

In order to know if your changes are working, keep an eye on the following indicators.