The State of Customer Engagement in APAC in 2023

Published annually, the Global Customer Engagement Review (CER) is an in-depth report that takes stock of today’s customer engagement landscape across a spectrum of industries and regions. The CER showcases a comprehensive picture of customer engagement around the globe using a robust combination of sources, including:

• Market research featuring 1,500 VP+ marketing decision-makers across 14 global markets
• Analysis of the interactions between 8.5 billion global customers and 775+ brands via our leading customer engagement platform
• In-depth interviews with best-in-class brand leaders such as HBO Max, KFC, and Hugosave

But while the CER provides insight into modern customer engagement and what it means to brands and their customers on a global scale, it also provides guidance on what those dynamics look like in key regions of the world. Today, we’ll walk through how brands can advance their customer engagement strategy to drive activation, engagement, and monetization when it comes to APAC consumers.

The State of Customer Engagement in APAC in 2022: 3 Key Takeaways

While examining customer engagement trends and shifts, our survey identified three key areas of focus for customer engagement in the APAC region. Let’s take a look:

1. Retention is essential—and it’s importance is only growing

With the kind of economic instability we’re facing today, brands are investing more of their marketing budget in retaining existing customers versus trying to acquire new ones. With high acquisition costs and challenging macroeconomic conditions, customer retention has become a more attractive strategy: Research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% can increase profits by 25% or more.

2. Data management remains a big challenge

There’s two parts to this challenge:

1. Brands have too much data
2. Brands often don’t know what to do with the data they have

When companies lack a thoughtful data management strategy, they often find they cannot gather or act on real-time insights and then struggle to turn them into revenue-driving consumer experiences. This was seen in our research—68% of APAC brands said they collected excessive data, with many not sure how to utilize it effectively.

When asked specifically about data challenges, APAC brands’ ranked their top challenges as:

• Working with internal data scientists/business intelligence teams who don’t understand marketing priorities: 41%
• Data quality: 38%
• Lack of data skills among marketing talent: 38%

3. Siloed teams are a barrier to progress

APAC organizations need to break down silos and collaborate more effectively if they are to deliver consistent customer experiences and drive stronger business results. Customer engagement today is an interdisciplinary sport and those who make a point of thoughtfully combining marketing know-how with technical expertise will be better positioned to succeed.

Like we’ve seen above, many marketers lack data skills, complicating their work in today’s data-driven customer engagement landscape. To improve business outcomes, there is a growing need for marketers to build closer relationships with their data counterparts to better test, experiment, and evolve customer experiences.

To learn more about top-performing brands and their customer engagement programs, download the full 2023 Global Customer Engagement Review. Our report also dives into the performance of five top-performing brands across industries, including Hugosave and KFC Philippines.

Methodology

Decision-Maker Survey

Conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Braze, this survey gathered insights from 1,500 VP+ marketing decision-makers across 14 global markets to uncover year-over-year changes, new trends, and the impact of customer engagement on revenue.

Markets covered: Australia, France, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Spain, South Korea, Sweden, Thailand, UAE/Dubai, the UK, and the USA.

Braze Customer Data

For this analysis, Braze pulled anonymized and aggregated behavioral data from 100+ Braze customers across our US, APAC, and EU clusters to analyze app activity, message engagement, and purchasing trends by industry. The APAC statistics discussed herein span January 1, 2022 to December 31, 2022. The raw data has been cleaned using volume and company count checks so that no one brand or group of brands is over-represented. For all purchase- and messaging-related stats, only brands tracking the relevant information have been included so as not to skew the analysis. All uplift figures greater than 100% are rounded to the nearest decimal point, and all uplift figures below 100% are rounded to the nearest whole percent. When comparing two rounded numbers, percent change metrics are calculated as the difference between the two numbers after rounding.