Innovation, customer experience help PH enterprises stand out

BUSINESSES in the Philippines are prioritizing the improvement of customer experience, employee experience and the attraction of new customers in a market shaped by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The regional study, “Digital, resilient, and experience-driven: How enterprises in Southeast Asia can prepare for the new economy,” revealed that enterprises in Southeast Asia are gaining steady momentum prioritizing growth and customer experiences.

However, they face significant challenges in the areas of talent attraction and retention, cloud adoption and gaining insights from data.

In the Philippines, large enterprises and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have also taken steps to improve experience management in their operations.

The study showed that companies’ top three primary strategic priorities over the next three years are improving customer experience (53 percent), improving employee experience (42 percent) and attracting new customers (36 percent).

SMEs and large enterprises in the country believe that customer experience can help them stand out from the rest of the pack. They seek to improve the experience of their customers, with two-thirds of enterprises seeing service excellence (42 percent), along with product excellence (18 percent) and innovation (nine percent) as their organization’s three primary sources of value and differentiation, the study said.

To achieve growth, Philippine enterprises started taking steps through digitalization and improved customer experience.

The study showed that they started soliciting and acting on the customer feedback (94 percent) and started improving customer data analytics (85 percent). They also started investing in user-friendly digital experiences (75 percent).

Oxford Economics and SAP surveyed 600 respondents across six Southeast Asian countries — Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand — including 400 from small and midsize enterprises with less than US$500 million revenue and 200 from larger organizations.

The survey was administered via a mix of computer-assisted telephone interviewing and online links between December 2020 and January 2021.

Respondents were senior executives (director and above) from a diverse range of industries including retail, financial services, manufacturing, high tech, wholesale distribution, engineering, construction, logistics and the public sector. /