India – Sokrati, dentsu India’s digital media agency, has partnered with experimentation platform VWO to boost client conversions through advanced A/B testing and personalised digital strategies.
This collaboration combines VWO’s expertise in user experience optimisation with Sokrati’s strength in data-driven growth strategies, empowering Indian brands to deliver more engaging, personalised, and high-performing digital experiences.
The partnership between Sokrati and VWO combines their strengths to offer clients comprehensive benefits. By integrating VWO’s optimisation platform with Sokrati’s expertise in media and technology, the collaboration enhances web and app experiences, leading to higher engagement and improved conversion rates that boost ROI. Both companies emphasise a data-driven approach, enabling brands to gain insights into customer behaviour and make real-time adjustments for measurable outcomes.
This alliance bridges media strategies and technology-driven optimisation, providing brands with seamless ways to enhance customer engagement and conversions. Through targeted campaigns and optimised experiences, businesses can achieve greater profitability and sustainable growth. Leveraging advanced optimisation tools and strategic media transformation, this partnership helps brands maintain a competitive edge in the dynamic digital landscape.
The alliance extends beyond Sokrati to the wider dentsu India clientele, integrating media strategies with technology-driven optimisation for seamless customer engagement and enhanced profitability. Clients within the dentsu network will benefit from targeted campaigns and optimised digital experiences that drive stronger performance and business growth.
Commenting on the partnership, Sparsh Gupta, CEO of VWO, said, “Sokrati’s expertise aligns perfectly with our mission of helping brands leverage data-driven insights to enhance customer journeys. With this partnership, we look forward to empowering Indian brands to create more impactful digital experiences that scale conversions and drive growth for them.”
Nilesh Gohil, CEO of Sokrati, added, “This partnership is a game changer for India’s top brands. By combining our strengths with VWO’s cutting-edge technology, we are setting a new benchmark for digital experience optimization. Brands will not only maximise conversions but also build sustainable growth engines that drive long-term success. This is a pivotal moment for reshaping how digital journeys are crafted and how businesses thrive in an increasingly competitive landscape.”
Organisations across Southeast Asia are risking US$144b in revenue because of poor customer service, with consumers across the region increasingly cutting spending after receiving a poor experience.
This finding from Qualtrics XM Institute highlights the significant business value of great customer experience (CX). At a time when brands find themselves under pressure to drive greater business impact in challenging market environments, delivering a superior CX is one of the most impactful, sustainable, and efficient ways to achieve this. And within this context, the role and value of digital channels and e-commerce platforms cannot be overstated.
Consumers are ever more digital
Consumers continue to conduct more brand interactions through digital channels. For example, in the last year 56% of consumers in Singapore opened a bank account on their mobile phone – up from 48% a year previously; in healthcare 42% of people used a telemedicine service in the last 12 months, up from 35%; and 26% of superapp users say they use one every day, up from 22%.
Great digital support also has an outsized impact on consumer loyalty, with consumers more likely to return when they get great digital support compared to in-person. The challenge for brands, however, is consumers are less likely to be satisfied by their digital customer support experience compared to human support.
As brands, consumers, marketing and CX teams increasingly adopt and mature their e-commerce platforms and digital capabilities, organisations that invest in improving the services, support, and experiences delivered through them are well placed to pull ahead of the competition, unlocking greater customer retention, satisfaction, brand awareness, and ultimately revenue.
5 steps to e-commerce success and impact
Forge partnerships with digital stakeholders
For marketing and CX teams looking to drive improvements across e-commerce platforms, a critical step is identifying and getting to know potential partners across the business – such as web and app development teams, digital marketing, UX/UI, data analysts, product managers, and IT. Understanding the internal digital landscape highlights collaboration opportunities, generates organisational alignment and support, helps define roles and responsibilities, and enables faster-decision making to accelerate progress and business impact.
One of the most successful ways we see CX and marketing teams partner with digital teams to improve the performance of e-commerce platforms is when they begin their collaboration with a focused use case, such as high cart abandonment. As part of this collaboration, the teams combine CX insights from surveys, reviews, and support conversations with operational data, such as web analytics, and customer segmentation, to understand the issue, outline recommended next best steps to resolve it, and demonstrate the business impact to garner greater support in broadening the project scope.
Map the customer journey and understand their behaviours
To improve CX across digital channels and e-commerce platforms, brands need to understand consumer behaviours for these types of offerings, and their preferences when using them. For example, research shows the majority of consumers in Singapore prefer to speak with a representative directly when purchasing a TV compared to online or mobile. In contrast, when booking a flight the preference is to self-serve using a digital channel.
Most customer engagements span multiple channels and departments; for e-commerce these often include account management, purchasing a product, resolving an issue, research, and getting a status update. Taking the time to understand the customer journey and behaviours for specific use cases ensures teams prioritise their investments and efforts in areas where they will have the greatest impact. Looking at digital CX in the context of a complete journey helps teams remove siloes that might otherwise hinder progress and impact, cultivate strategic alignment, and uncover unmet needs and opportunities.
Capture customer feedback in the moment
Early in the partnership between CX and marketing teams with digital, it’s important to establish a set of passive listening posts across all digital channels and e-commerce platforms – these should supplement the existing customer feedback programs CX and marketing teams traditionally manage, such as surveys. Common examples of passive listening posts include having a visible and easy-to-use always-on feedback button, or using modern AI-powered experience management technologies to analyse feedback shared by customers across social channels, online reviews, and through calls to the contact centre.
Giving customers the ability to share feedback in the moment helps uncover authentic, targeted, actionable insights and enables teams with real-time, focused insights to drive improvements when and where it matters most.
Use digital analytics to understand online consumer behaviours
Digital analytics help teams capture behavioural data from all site visitors, such as rage-clicking, mouse thrashing, and click-paths. This data is more objective and accurate than traditional feedback data – it reflects what people actually did rather than what they think they might do – and it can be captured continuously and in real time. All these benefits make digital behavioural insights critical for helping develop a dynamic understanding of digital journeys and pain points.
Take action on feedback when and where it matters
Using AI, CX and marketing teams can benefit from workflows that automatically route feedback to the right stakeholders to take action on. These automated workflows should integrate with the systems and processes stakeholders already use as part of their everyday role, such as Jira, Slack, or Salesforce, to ensure swift adoption. AI will also empower teams to instantly identify and support customers encountering difficulties online, such as using digital analytics data to flag customers that might not be able to find what they’re looking for, or advanced conversational analytics to escalate online chat conversations.
AI will help teams deeply understand the emotion, intent, and effort behind every engagement, and become more pro-active and predictive to resolve problems before they arise. The keys to optimising the impact of AI-powered workflows is identifying the initial triggers driving action – which can be metrics including CSAT, effort, satisfaction, digital analytics, or even key words – and ensuring ticketing notifications are routed to the correct teams.
AI accelerates and expands e-commerce impact
As organisations and consumers increasingly adopt and embrace AI, there are significant opportunities to drive improvements across every aspect of the customer experience, including digital and e-commerce.
Right now, organisations are focusing on where AI can have the greatest impact on their business – be it growth, productivity, or operational efficiencies. From these starting points we will see AI programs scale, and there will be a first-mover advantage for those leading the way. Organisations already using AI in their e-commerce and digital offerings – or about to begin – have a head start on the competition, and will be better positioned to deliver great CX in the moment, across every channel, and across every engagement.
This thought leadership is written by Eleanor O’Dwyer-Duggan, CX Solution Strategist, Southeast Asiaat Qualtrics
MARKETECH APAC is leading the conversation on the future of e-commerce marketing strategies this 2024 and beyond with the E-Commerce Marketing in Malaysia 2024 conference on July 25, 2024 at Sheraton Petaling Jaya and the E-Commerce Marketing in the Philippines 2024 conference on August 14, 2024 at Crowne Plaza Manila Galleria.Join us and become an integral part of a dynamic community committed to pushing the boundaries of innovation and fostering unparalleled growth in the e-commerce domain.
Sydney, Australia – Large businesses in Australia that collaborate internally between marketing and technology teams and align to business objectives gain productivity benefits of an average A$110 million per year, according to data from end-to-end digital experience software Sitecore, in its latest report with Deloitte Access Economics and Deloitte Digital.
Furthermore, the data suggests that collaboration between marketing and technology functions is critical to making the most of digital investments, where businesses leading the way in collaboration forecast an additional 11% revenue growth in the next year when collaboration is centred around customer needs.
Notably, the report warned that a major challenge to success was that bad projects require more management time to course correct, resulting in diversion from other business matters.
Sitecore’s survey found that 62% of business leaders who experienced negative impacts of technology investments saw this as a problem, with key challenges mentioned by survey respondents including integration difficulties, money wastage, and loss of innovation.
According to the report, the top two priorities for business leaders over the next five years are scaling existing digital solutions and broader digital transformation, which rank higher than traditionally important objectives like revenue generation and customer retention. Of the business leaders surveyed, 98% consider digital investment pivotal to business strategy.
Lastly, the report recommends that business leaders should develop co-investment strategies to overcome budget barriers, remove organisational barriers to promote collaboration, align marketing and technology teams on business strategy and priorities, and create clear, structural accountability for shared focus areas.
Talking about the report, Joey Lim, president of Sitecore APAC and Japan, said, “Challenges to collaboration can make the case for further digital investment difficult and add to executive resistance to transformational initiatives. Sitecore’s commitment to offering choice through its leadership in both on-prem and SaaS digital experience software uniquely places it as a powerful collaborator when overcoming internal resistance by offering multiple solutions that merge marketing and technology.”
Meanwhile, Troy Outtram, partner at Deloitte Digital, added, “As brands continue to invest in their digital transformation, the benefits for teams that work in harmony are becoming more apparent, with ruthless alignment to business goals serving as the key to success for major projects.”
Australia – Cancer Australia, the lead cancer control agency for the Government of Australia, has worked with independent creative agency Paper Moose to launch an elevated digital experience for its landmark Australian Cancer Plan (The Plan) website.
The creative agency’s remit is to elevate the engagement for Cancer Australia’s ‘The Plan’, a 10-year national strategy to improve cancer care in the country. This included revising the complex information contained within the report to adhere to Web 3.0 standards and making it more consumable for all stakeholders across the cancer care journey.
Furthermore, the visual design of ‘The Plan’ also featured artwork created by Ngarrindjeri artist Jordan Lovegrove of Dreamtime Creative. Titled ‘Our Journeys’, the artwork symbolises the experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples with cancer and illustrates the exchange of information and engagement between Cancer Australia and these communities.
With their digital strategy, Paper Moose transformed ‘The Plan’ from a full static document to an accessible and adaptable digitally native format that will continue to develop as it rolls out.
A rigorous planning process made up of Indigenous Australian co-design and stakeholder consultation was undertaken to ensure that the digital ecosystem would benefit all relevant communities, especially the diverse population groups that have vested an interest in the success of ‘The Plan’.
Cancer Australia’s ‘The Plan’ is a transformative agenda that aims to improve the lives of all Australians affected by cancer and works to achieve equity through the acceleration of world-class cancer outcomes.
Brad Bennett, head of client success at Paper Moose, said, “We’re incredibly proud of our rad work supporting the Australian Cancer Plan. This has been a big effort by the digital team and the whole agency that will ultimately help improve cancer care for all Australians.”
Meanwhile, Claire Howlett, deputy CEO for Cancer Australia, praised Paper Moose for their work on developing the new website for The Plan.
She said, “For their exceptional understanding of our vision for a transformative platform and their invaluable partnership in creating an innovative digital experience for the Australian Cancer Plan. This collaborative effort will go a long way towards improving outcomes for all Australians affected by all cancer.”
Australia – Local football club Sydney FC has tapped content management system (CMS) company Storyblok to create digital experiences to boost fan engagement amongst its club and reignite their enthusiasm.
For this partnership, the football club worked closely with Herbert Digital, a Storyblok Certified Partner, to build a digital stadium experience with Storyblok in 4 months.
Along with being the main source of content for everything about Sydney FC, the website features an ‘Experience Selector’ that enables fans to pick the best seats for their circumstances and the atmosphere they want to enjoy.
Sydney FC only planned to use the website for the initial return to the stadium, but after seeing this success and experiencing how easy and cost-effective it is to manage content with Storyblok, they decided to continue using it as their primary membership hub.
Jeremy Butler, head of consumer business, marketing and content at Sydney FC, said, “We were under intense time pressure to create relevant content for the website. The intuitive design of Storyblok was effective in allowing our content team to approach the project with minimal training.”
He added, “We, as marketers, can independently change the content without having to involve developers. This, combined with the ability to view changes in real-time, allowed us to achieve our objective ahead of the deadline.”
Meanwhile, Dominik Angerer, co-Founder and CEO of Storyblok, said, “Great digital experiences generate excitement far beyond the devices that they live on. Sydney FC has been able to use compelling content to drive action by their fans, leading to record revenue and attendance. This is a winning strategy, both on and off the pitch.”
Australia – Marketing platform XRii has revealed details on how various sports clubs are utilising a mix of digital experiences and experiential marketing in order to drive resulst for their respective clubs. This comes at a time where interactivity and engagement have been prevalent through the rise of virtual venues and concerts enabled by AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) technology.
First off, the baseball league Perth Heat tapped XRii to develop a customised app, which facilitated a AU$50,000 cash giveaway, enabling data collection and rewarding users with in-app incentives. The seamless integration of XRii’s AR technology with digital campaigns and in-venue experiences led to noticeable results.
Meanwhile, the popular sports organisation Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) also tapped the agency for various digital experiences. In 2022, it released FIFA+, an AR app that offers viewers immersive content via mobile devices to bring the action to fans wherever they are, which is sure to bring interaction to the current FIFA Women’s World Cup Australia & New Zealand.
In addition, the Major League Baseball (MLB) also releasedits immersive ‘MLB All-StAR Scavenger Hunt’ last July, bringing the game to life like never before. The first-of-its-kind MLB scavenger hunt engaged fans, earning participation and gaining valuable customer information that could be further used to personalise experiences.
Lastly, the National Football League (NFL) introduced an app with augmented reality (AR) features. Fans can use their cameras to create and share images, incorporating virtual helmets and eye black, on social media platforms. Moreover, it also collaborated with popular sandbox game Roblox to develop a series of virtual experiences.
According to Matthew Endresz, CEO and founder of XRii, the impact of the digital revolution goes beyond enhancing the quality and accessibility of live events. It is also reshaping the business landscape of sports and entertainment, generating new and innovative business models.
“The integration of technology has opened up a plethora of revenue streams, allowing for monetisation opportunities that were previously untapped. To truly capitalise on this exciting time and this massive opportunity, sports clubs must evolve. They have to ensure sports remain captivating for the next generation of fans whilst keeping the current state of sports fandom strong,” he said.
Singapore – Amidst a growing interest from consumers to experience more personalised campaigns for them, marketers in the Southeast Asia region are optimistic about the use of various digital experience media, including generative AI, on their line of work. This was according to the latest data from Adobe.
According to the data, nine in ten respondents believe generative AI will help increase their work volume (93%) and create better content (89%), enhance their creativity (92%), and help reach more of the right customers (88%).
Strong majorities also believe that generative AI will help better personalise customer experiences (93%), as well as in identifying new audiences and customer journeys (93%).
From the consumer perspective, nine in 10 SEA consumers expect to view products through virtual or augmented reality, and 86% want brands to provide new ways to engage in immersive and virtual worlds.
In response, SEA brands plan to respond with new and innovative digital experiences such as the ability to build virtual products and convert them into physical items (84%), VIP access to virtual influencers and celebrities (84%).
And while both brands and customers are excited for the future of digital experiences, the current economic environment is putting pressure on brands to up-level their customer experiences: Almost two-thirds (64%) of SEA consumers say their expectations are higher when economic conditions worsen. The sea of data and technology companies in the market today also resulted in over half of SEA consumers (58%) expecting more personalised experiences that are tailored to their unique likes and needs.
Simon Dale, vice president and managing director for SEA and Korea at Adobe, said, “As economic challenges intensify, customer expectations for always-on, personalised content will continue to grow. Marketers across SEA recognise this soaring demand, and as such are proactively embracing advanced technologies such as generative AI to maintain a competitive edge. Strategically investing in cutting-edge technologies to transform their brand interactions results in enhanced organisational efficiency and allows for exceptional customer experiences.”
Singapore – Publicis Groupe’s Digitas and Razorfish in Singapore have been appointed by SingHealth to revamp its websites and enhance the brand’s digital experience capabilities.
This revamp aims to improve SingHealth’s digital experience for its patients through its group of websites and enhance its digital web infrastructure to enable personalised user experiences.
Both agencies will work closely with SingHealth to deliver a comprehensive digital strategy supporting the organisation’s aim to provide holistic healthcare services to its patients.
Through the appointment, Digitas and Razorfish will be responsible for building a new parent website and migrating individual institution websites to the Adobe Experience Manager platform.
Moreover, both agencies ran this pitch in collaboration with Adobe Consulting Services, and the win strengthens their commitment and capabilities in the platform world. Digitas Singapore was also awarded the UX/UI project.
For Kathryn Ng, deputy group chief communications officer at SingHealth, they aim to create a more user friendly and personalised digital experience for their patients, caregivers and the public, and thus help make their healthcare journey more easier.
“We are also working to establish our websites as a rich medical information resource, and HealthXchange.sg, an even more engaging and interactive platform, to empower users to take charge of their health and stay well through the ages,” she said.
Meanwhile, Stefanie Liew, general manager at Digitas Singapore, commented, “We are thrilled to take on this important initiative for SingHealth and are dedicated to creating a digital experience that significantly improves patient care and positively impacts their healthcare journey.”
Lastly, Rakesh Bhandari, senior vice president at Razorfish, said, “Healthcare is shifting towards a more user-oriented design, and the combination of these elements has the power to create a seamless, intuitive, and elevated digital experience for SingHealth’s patients. We are excited to be part of this journey and leverage these elements to propel SingHealth forward.”
The Hong Kong Jockey Club (HKJC), despite being one of the organisations in Hong Kong with a long history, has its own digital experience roadmap laid out for its customers. As we learn from Chirag Desai, head of IT & digital channels solutions at HKJC, the club–founded in 1884–has moved from doing paper-based betting to more modern solutions such as online services and streamlined apps.
In an interview with MARKETECH APAC for its What’s NEXT Interview series in partnership with customer experience management company Sitecore, Desai notes that their digital changes correspond to the ever-changing preferences and wants of their customers. He also adds that these changes are done at the pace of what they think their customers want over course of time.
When asked about what advice he could give brands in starting their digital experience journey, he advised them to ‘start small, dream big’. For him, what’s important for a business is to pick a business case and start from there. In his own words, “don’t do technology for the sake of technology”.
“Find a very good business case or a problem, and fix that small problem with a small blast radius. Something that customers love [which] your business partners would say ‘you really solved our solution’,” he said.
When asked how cutting edge digital experience technologies aided them, Desai said, “Sitecore, both as an organisation and its products, have helped us to drive consolidation within our CMS footprint across the Club and build new digital experiences for our customers. Those new experiences are built with self service capability for users that drive the ability to update content quickly for the benefit of our customers across our Wagering & Non Wagering products.”
“The modular architecture of the platform also enables us to flex between on premise and cloud based components based on our very specific requirements. Sitecore will continue to be a key element of our Digital experience in the coming years and we look forward to working with them on this journey,” he added.
He also advises brands to not do all things at the same time, instead pick up a slice of the problem, build a stack of potential solutions and then move from there.
When asked about bigger plans for HKJC’s digital experience for its customers, Desai notes more seamless and optimised personalised experiences for its ever growing audience.
This interview was conducted in partnership with Sitecore. Sitecore is the leading provider of end-to-end digital experience software; its SaaS-enabled and composable platform empowers brands to deliver unforgettable customer interactions.
San Francisco, California – Global digital experience management platform Sitecore has announced the release of new component capabilities in its cloud-native modern CMS, the Experience Manager (XM) Cloud, which will empower brands to deliver seamless and personalised customer experiences across all digital touchpoints.
XM Cloud Components is a Front End as a Service (FEaaS) composer for marketers to create their brand’s digital style guide and build visual components. With this, components can be created from scratch or can be styled by importing existing HTML, and data sources can be mapped to components to enable dynamic and responsive components that may be reused across digital properties, saving time and creating brand consistency.
With XM Cloud Components, content authors, UX designers, and marketers can likewise work in parallel to speed up the process of creating on-brand digital experiences for their customers. It is fully integrated with XM Cloud Pages, which will create an end-to-end next-generation authoring experience.
“We’re thrilled to introduce this new component capability to our XM Cloud platform, designed to enable marketers, designers and developers to work in harmony,” said Dave O’Flanagan, chief product officer of Sitecore.
He added, “With the ability to compose on-brand, dynamic page components, brands can remain agile and responsive to customer needs in real-time, which is essential in today’s fast-paced digital landscape. Our modern SaaS-based DXP provides limitless opportunities for brands to plug and play new technologies such as ChatGPT, introducing a new level of flexibility to adapt and respond to technology innovations and the ever-changing customer needs.”
Commenting on their new journey with Sitecore, Amy Kolzow, VP of global digital marketing at Wolters Kluwer, said, “We are proud to provide a unified and modern online experience that brings dynamic thought leadership to our customers and showcases our vast product portfolio. When we embarked on our digital transformation journey, we found it challenging to create web experiences that cater for every marketer, regardless of how mature they were in their use of technology.”
She added, “It’s that balance we found with Sitecore that we couldn’t find elsewhere. Since beginning our partnership, we built 30,000 pages, and now we publish about 100 pages a day, all thanks to the drag-and-drop components capability.”
At DX Europe, the company also announced it has signed over twenty new customers to its XM Cloud platform since Sitecore Symposium, which took place in Chicago in October 2022.
In addition to XM Cloud Components, Sitecore also unveiled a number of other updates to its CX offerings, including improvements in Content Hub One’s user interface, preview capabilities, better content modelling, and developer experience, new AI capabilities for Sitecore Connect and Sitecore Search, as well as new automation and personalisation features for its email marketing solution Sitecore Send.
Hannah Grap, VP of corporate marketing at Sitecore also shared that their integration of Sitecore Search on Sitecore.com to revamp the search experience on their own website saw a 25% increase in click-through rate and doubled the amount of relevant content to its visitors within a month of implementation.
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