Human-centered design, CX to take over APAC

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Indian (and Southeast Asian) retailers and brands will buy their way into branded eCommerce to avoid losing market share to digital natives, and also to gain control over the experience of their customers. The trend has already begun in 2015, with Mahindra Group buying infant care product firm Babyoye, and Godrej acquiring online grocer ekstop to complement its offline food retail chain.

CIOs, CMOs, and Customer Experience leaders will rally to achieve customer-obsessed growth by adopting human-centered design and data analytics to deliver exceptional experiences, according to Forrester Research which unveiled its 2016 predictions for Asia Pacific business leaders.

Forrester is expecting to see a surge of digital innovation in Asia Pacific, especially in India, which will drive an explosion in the availability of SaaS-based business apps, fueling increased demand among enterprises. NASSCOM expects that there will be more than 11,000 digital startups in India by 2020. Of the startups in India, about 25 per cent of them target enterprise customers, and 60 per cent of these offer SaaS solutions across functions such as HR, finance, B2C marketing, supply chain, banking and payments, CRM etc.

On the other side, Human-centered design will become the Customer Experience (CX) practice of choice in 2016, with many Indian businesses already placing their customer at the center of their businesses and organizing their service design around them. Infosys is leading the charge, having indoctrinating over 28,000 of its staff on the fundamentals of the approach in the last 12 months.

As Forrester’s 2015 Customer Experience (CX) Index reports show, foreign-owned MNCs may enjoy a small lead in quality experience delivery. However, as firms in Asia Pacific are pressured by increasingly connected and empowered customers to provide better customer experience, there is an opportunity for local firms to employ the latest CX tools and methodologies to quickly gain ground and emerge as CX leaders.