Customer experience can be a powerful differentiator for brands and is likely to become increasingly important in Asia Pacific where companies are finding it harder to compete on products and price alone, according to a senior Asia Pacific Pizza Hut executive.

Troy Barnes, chief customer officer/APAC for Pizza Hut, noted recently in a fireside chat at CX APAC Online 2020, that customer experience (CX) “adoption and expansion across a whole range of industries has been accelerated tremendously” in the region.

And, he added, he expects that APAC will soon see a lot more activity in this space than in other parts of the world, as brands find traditional approaches of engaging and acquiring customers around products and services becoming less effective.

One issue is that brands are still often trying to connect in ways that are not relevant, he noted – and that can lead to a loss of trust among consumers. “Once that trust is gone, it’s very hard to get it back,” said Barnes.

Instead, he said, CX-centric companies should be able to use pieces of information that customers are willing to give you, to try – in relevant ways and in a timely fashion – to reengage them and better offer them products and services that might be more suited to their needs and that meet their interests.

“Over time, what I’ve seen, and what I’ve noticed, is that customers trust you more, because the way you re-engage them is more relevant,” he explained. (For seven CX tips, read WARC’s report: To build sustainable CX, think big, start small, and don’t rip off Amazon.)

A related consideration is internal relevance: customer-first culture must be first relevant to the business, Barnes stressed.

He reported that he often sees organisations copying Amazon’s tagline of ‘Customer Obsession’ or following Spotify’s business model about agile teams and how to do things differently.

“Avoid taking another organisation's tagline,” he said. “That’s one I see a lot – especially in CX awards, or on some organisation’s front page – and I think, ‘That’s someone else’s tagline’.”

This all amounts to inauthenticity, with obvious problems for the company in the long run. “You run the risk of emulating a culture that is never going to be the culture in your organisation,” Barnes said. “You really have to make this your own.”

Sourced from WARC

Sourced from WARC