Pitfalls of point-solution chaos in businesses across APAC

Importance of data in CX 

Data is integral to customer experience (CX) as it enables organizations to increase customer loyalty by introducing personalization into customer interactions. According to Forrester research, “Drive conversational experiences for a future-ready customer support strategy”, 69 percent of support leaders believe the strongest customer relationships are built through personalized experiences. The use of data can also prevent customers from churning. Data, insights and analytics were labelled as the top CX investment priorities for this year in CX Network’s Global State of Customer Experience 2021.

The piece-meal approach most brands take when introducing new technologies into their workflows, however, often creates a range of data integration problems that hold back great customer experiences. As point-solutions are implemented to address individual goals, the lack of interconnectivity between these channel and project-specific systems generates a tangled mess of stubborn data silos: point-solution chaos. As flagged by the CX Global State of Customer Experience Report 2021 data silos are one of the main issues facing CX practitioners, with the Asia-Pacific region struggling more than the global average.

Also read: Omnichannel experts insight ebook

This report aims to highlight the pronounced CX challenges that stem from this point-solution chaos, including incomplete data sets, disjointed customer profiles and siloed internal teams, while offering solutions to them. It will also include the warning signs to look for when attempting to avoid or resolve point-solution silos.

This report will also compare and contrast the CX maturity of businesses in Asia-Pacific to the global average in order to explore market differences and address why the Asia-Pacific region appears to have a tougher battle with point-solution bottlenecks. It will also look at tips to avoid point-solution disorder based on lessons learned from market leaders across the globe.

“It’s important to think about data more holistically and prioritize an investment on building a strong data infrastructure that will allow your company to surface 360 customer views and provide an end-to-end customer journey/experience.”

Saki Takeda, Director of product management at Netflix

Problems driven by point-solution chaos

Point-solution chaos causes a number of problems for businesses, including disjointed customer experiences, issues with democratizing data, demonstrating ROI in CX and deepening departmental silos.

These challenges are especially prevalent in Asia-Pacific, as according to CX Network research in the Global State of Customer Experience 2021, businesses in this region are more susceptible to data silos than the global average.

Disjointed customer experiences

Disjointed customer experiences can frustrate customers enough for them to consider switching to a competitor. Point-solution-heavy tech stacks cause fragmented CX as the technologies and systems struggle to share customer information and insights. This lack of interoperability often forces customers to endure poorly targeted experiences. A fragmented maze of point-solutions in some cases can put the burden on customers for login information across multiple platforms resulting in duplicative and time-consuming actions.

Nicola Millard, principal innovation partner at UK telecommunications company BT, notes: “Nothing is more frustrating than a customer having to switch channels and start again, so channels must be connected. The danger [with disconnected channels] is that one customer problem is answered by three different teams who deliver disconnected experiences.

“Good companies make sure channels are connected and coordinated, if channels aren’t connected it increases internal costs as you end up handling the same issue several times,” she adds.

Departmental silos

Departmental silos in a business can trigger disjointed customer experiences, which can be a source of frustration for customers, as customer service issues often require collaboration between departments. Disconnects between advertising and sales departments, for example, can result in customers receiving discount promotions for a product after they have purchased it. This delayed access can frustrate customers due to their missed opportunity to save money.

“Nothing is more frustrating than a customer having to switch channels and start again, so channels must be connected.”

Nicola Millard, Principal innovation partner, BT

Silos between departments can also prevent teams from collaborating smoothly, leading to delays in issue resolution.

Francisco Remolino, co-founder of bankruptcy service Remolino Associates, notes the importance of breaking down these silos: “Internal organizational silos can impact time to market, drive up costs and damage quality and performance.”

He continues: “The task of breaking down organizational silos and making sense of disorganized and unstructured data may seem insurmountable, but it is not impossible. The first step is conducting a clear-eyed audit of internal systems, culture and goals, after which stakeholders can map a clear path toward a single source of truth.”

Linking CX to ROI

Data locked in silos can complicate the task of calculating the returns gained from CX investments (ROI). In order to win budget or resourcing for new CX investments and projects, CX practitioners need to build data-led business cases that demonstrate the business benefits CX investments can achieve. In the Global State of Customer Experience 2021, 59 per cent of respondents say they feel that the pressure to prove the ROI of CX projects is going up. The failure to demonstrate ROI can jeopardize the prospects of future CX investments and initiatives.

Democratizing data to the right business units

Point-solution silos can complicate democratizing data to the right business units. If data is not made accessible to the appropriate business units, it can create incomplete data sets and missed opportunities to enhance customer loyalty with optimized experiences.

Incomplete data sets blur the visibility a company has on customer preferences and past purchasing behaviors, which contributes to flawed business decisions and badly targeted messaging – such as sending a customer a promotion for a product they have already purchased.

59 percent of respondents say they feel pressure to prove the ROI of CX projects going up.

This scenario can be avoided by using a platform that unifies data sources to create a single view of the customer and democratizes insights to give access to employees that need it, allowing real-time understanding and action. Noritaka Wakuda, an advisor at Maruti Suzuki, explains that a single view of the customer is created by “…aggregating structured and unstructured data. The less tech, the easier the view of the customer is to manage.”

When Virgin Money unified its technologies and data sources, it was able to upgrade its customer care levels in the pandemic to support customers worrying about financial stress. Kerry Matheson, research manager at Virgin Money, explains: “Our business strategy is aimed at keeping customers at the heart of the organization, listening to customers and quickly actioning insight is within our DNA. We could see the need from our customers in the very early days of the pandemic and worked together in an agile way to develop our solution.”

Also read: VoC in APAC experts insight ebook

She continues: “We were confident in the robustness of our voice of the customer (VOC) real-time feedback program and our response rates increased when the pandemic took hold. We also use other listening posts such as complaints analysis, call reasons and external sources to ensure we have a well-informed view of the environment.”

Point-solution chaos in Asia-Pacific

The Asia-Pacific region appears to be more heavily affected by data silos and point-solution chaos than the global average, according to findings in the Global State of Customer Experience 2021. This section examines the results seen in Asia-Pacific in comparison to the global average and considers the various impacts on business performance around fixing data silos, actioning customer feedback and contact channel functionality.

Investing in fixing data silos

The biggest data challenge facing the Asia-Pacific region is data silos, with almost half of respondents (48 percent) in The Global State of Customer Experience 2021 citing them as their biggest customer data challenge. This put them slightly over the global average of 47 percent, and significantly over the Americas, which recorded 42 percent.

Market research shows that many Asia Pacific brands are still contemplating which investments to make to address the silos in their businesses.

Research by Forrester in its Asia Pacific Tech Market Outlook For 2019 To 2020 found that while software and services purchases grew by five to seven percent from 2019-2020, many firms in India, China, and ASEAN were still in the process of acquiring their first enterprise resource planning and CRM systems.

With the large size of tech buying teams existing in APAC brands, teams can struggle to achieve consensus on expensive investment decisions around enterprise-wide data unification. Cheaper point-solutions may represent faster alternatives to upgrading corporate technologies, but in exchange these systems often intensify the existing silos within organizations.

“In our model, data is collated and analyzed at every level in the organization so that there is a joined-up approach across all levels and networks within the branch.”

Anthony Brown, Senior CRM developer at NatWest

Exploring the data fragmentation in more depth, although 34 percent of Asia-Pacific respondents in CX Network’s research reported that within their companies, data is accessible and unified from most sources, they noted that incomplete customer profiles still hold them back. This state of play was only seen in 20 per cent of the global respondents.

Anthony Brown, senior CRM developer at NatWest, offers insight on the power of unifying data sources: “In our model, data is collated and analyzed at every level in the organization so that there is a joined-up approach across all levels and networks within the branch. Every week our individual branch and telephone teams will review the data and the interactions they have with customers through closing the loop. Regions then get together once per month to share best practices across the group.”

Democratizing and actioning customer feedback data

As the Asia-Pacific respondents trail behind the global average for democratizing customer feedback data, practitioners in this region should look to their peers in EMEA for best practice measures.

The majority of respondents from the Asia-Pacific region (36 per cent) reported that customer feedback insights reach the relevant business units ‘sometimes’, while the majority of respondents in the EMEA region (37 per cent), reported that insights ‘mostly’ reach the relevant business units.

Fern Roberts, CX insight manager at Tesco, recommends using an omnichannel model as it allows a business to provide thousands of employees access to CX data, ensuring the correct insights reach the right people. She says: “We are able to empower store managers with the relevant information to put routines in place to improve their customer satisfaction by making sure what they see is simple, easy and intuitive.”

A lack of data democratization is a common problem faced by point-solution-heavy organizations alongside other issues the Asia-Pacific region has reported, including siloed internal data and incomplete data sets.

Providing seamless channel integration

Internal fragmentation creates external fragmentation that disrupts customer journeys. Providing an omnichannel model can eliminate inconveniences for customers by delivering an integrated framework for communication channels. This means data is no longer siloed and customers do not have to navigate a fragmented tech stack.

In the Global State of Customer Experience 2021, 34 per cent of all CX practitioners noted they have a multichannel model, but the connections between channels are quite fragmented. A slightly higher representation of Asia-Pacific participants resided at this stage (38 per cent). In addition, no Asia-Pacific respondents could state they had connections between all channels or that they had an omnichannel model, as compared with the global average of 7 per cent. This data demonstrates that the point-solution challenges felt by the Asia-Pacific respondents are translating into fragmented contact channel experiences for customers.

Introducing a single view of customer data allows all channels to be pulled into the same location, so if the customer switches channel at any point, the new channel has all the historic data and takes the user straight to the correct stage rather than forcing them to start from the beginning.

"No Asia Pacific respondents could state they had connections between all channels or that they had an omni channel model, as compared with the global average 7 percent."

The benefits of addressing point-solution chaos

Companies can see a number of CX benefits from combatting point-solution chaos and breaking down data silos. This section will explore a number of strategies for achieving these advantages.

Data-led decision-making

Data silos can have a significant impact on CX initiatives, whether contributing to bad data decisions or impacting the scheduling of initiatives. By breaking down data silos, data can be shared more readily and easily across teams, allowing issues to be resolved more quickly and ensuring that customer profiles and data sets are complete.

Also read: Data & analytics in APAC CX network workbook

Improving employee productivity and satisfaction

Point-solutions can frustrate employees as staff often have to navigate inconvenient issues, such as facing exasperating time-outs when attempting to research solutions for customers. Simon Elkjær, the chief marketing officer of avXperten, explains: “Data siloes can be very harmful to a workforce since they not only hinder efficiency and productivity, but can also create a toxic work culture that will divide your employees.”

Breaking down data and point-solution silos can create a more positive work environment. This will allow employees to work better together and provide solutions to customer issues more seamlessly, increasing both customer satisfaction and employee satisfaction.

Saki Takeda, head of product management at Netflix, believes that a holistic perspective is key to breaking down silos: “It’s important to think about data more holistically and prioritize an investment on building a strong data infrastructure that will allow your company to surface 360 customer views and provide an end-to-end customer journey/experience.”

The removal of silos will enable brands to implement sophisticated automation such as machine learning that can save employees from repetitive customer care tasks. Takeda notes that boundaries should be coded into automated systems to prevent them from delivering poor customer service. “Any automation in place should have a rail guard when a particular customer reaches out to a brand/company, so that they’re not [at risk of delivering] conflicting customer experiences.”

Channel integration

Sprinklr’s industry-leading unified CX management (Unified-CXM) platform, helps brands improve both the customer and employee experience by enabling them to learn about their customers; understand the marketplace; and reach, engage and serve customers across all channels on one centralized platform.

Using Sprinklr’s AI-powered platform, The Prada Group enhanced its internal collaboration with its partners - global agencies - to increase return on ad spend, reach relevant audiences and gain insight into effective marketing content.

Looking at external integration, Prada’s partnership with Sprinklr bolstered the luxury retailer’s efforts to identify, reach and engage with Millennials and Generation Z demographics. The partnership also generated an effective digital and social media communications strategy by using an omnichannel model for all marketing and sales information and introducing AI to identify actionable insights.

Lorenzo Bertelli, head of marketing at the Prada Group, says of the partnership: “Today, digital transformation is changing relationships with consumers, giving them an unlimited amount of purchasing choices. In this world, it’s even more crucial to effectively reach and engage our customers. Sprinklr’s platform has helped our efforts to reinforce a digital culture within the Prada Group while improving customer experiences.”

Reflecting on the role united data solutions play in business today, Manolo Winkler, head of global social media at Acer notes: “We now have full visibility of what each market is doing, connecting different aspects from social listening to customer service metrics and creative performance on one platform. This allows us to make key decisions that are backed by data in real-time, which is so powerful to engage the right people. These integrated aspects of the platform are what makes Sprinklr so appealing for us.”

“Sprinklr’s platform has helped our efforts to reinforce a digital culture within the Prada Group while improving customer experiences.”

Lorenzo Bertelli, Head of marketing at the Prada Group

Causes of point-solution chaos

Point-solution chaos causes a range of issues that damage both customer and employee satisfaction levels.

While this is a problem experienced on a global scale, CX Network data illustrates that the Asia-Pacific practitioners surveyed are suffering from point-solution pitfalls more keenly, and as a result are experiencing a higher frequency of data silos, channel fragmentation and incomplete data sets.

However, while these negative aspects can deeply affect businesses and customers alike, there are solutions available in today’s marketplace, like Sprinklr’s Unified-CXM platform. By introducing software to integrate legacy systems, as well as creating a more unified internal culture, companies can move away from restrictive, siloed technological landscapes in the mission to build customer loyalty.

Breaking down silos is difficult to tackle. However, with the right strategies and partnerships it is not insurmountable. Addressing silos is a necessity to give your brand an edge in today’s competitive market.

Read the full report here