As organisations work overtime to improve their customers’ experience in today’s highly technological world, it is easy to forget that digital is merely a means to an end. The raison d’être of top-performing brands had always revolved around establishing an emotive connection with customers. But how can we give customers exactly what they want, when they want it, whilst simultaneously humanising the gap between digital actions and our heartstrings?
We intuitively understand that genuine customer experience is an affair of the heart. Much like the friends we love to spend time with, we want to hang out with a brand that is trustworthy, empathetic, generous, and shares our values and concern for others. We are attracted to brands that take care of us and of what matters for us, not someone who only ever calls to ask for favours. At the core, this is why SAP Customer Experience APJ built the Heart Matters campaign. Pinned on one fundamental question: what kind of customer experience (CX) would outlast any crisis and thrive in the future? They believe it is the kind of CX that comes from the heart, from companies that have a greater purpose and focus on things beyond profit and loss—things like people, the planet, and prosperity.
At the heart of this initiative is research; they wanted to hear directly from the mouth of the customers, and they engaged their Qualtrics research team to conduct the survey. The main objective is to find out about what consumers expect from the brands they buy from, and more importantly, if the experiences they have had, meet their expectations. In total, they surveyed close to 6,000 consumers across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region to find out more about what people care about, mainly how their views of brands correlate with their spending, as well as what matters most when it comes to customer experience. Questions were posed to customers across a range of age groups in Australia, Singapore, Japan, South Korea (Korea), India, Malaysia, and Thailand.
Depending on the country, respondents were asked questions on a total of six different industries, including supermarkets, telecommunication providers, hotels and entertainment, and consumer goods retailers dealing with fashion, electronics, and furniture. The campaign was launched on 5 May 2021, in a record time of just twelve weeks compared to the six-month minimum required to build an integrated, multi-touch campaign as such. It has garnered close to 100 media coverage across APAC and an impressive amount of pipeline to the business. The campaign is still running and full results are expected to come through by the end of this year.
For this effort, SAP Customer Experience APJ received the “Singapore Brand Experience of the Year – Technology” award in the recently concluded Asian Experience Awards, presented by Asian Business Review. The awards programme recognises the ingenious initiatives of creative companies delivering meaningful brand experiences to their stakeholders in all industries in Asia.
The full Heart Matters report can be downloaded at https://sap.com/sea/heartmatters.
