28 NOVEMBER 2024, India – Affinidi, a leading data and identity management company, has released ‘Unlocking Customer Value as an Experience-Orchestrated (X-O) Business’, an IDC InfoBrief commissioned by Affinidi that explores the challenges that digital-native businesses (DNBs) are facing when driving meaningful data value exchange with customers, and the strategies that can help overcome them. Findings within the InfoBrief are based on the latest IDC Affinidi DNB 2024 Survey, which polled businesses in five countries – Singapore, India, Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), and North America.

Businesses worldwide are now facing even more pressure to deliver greater experiences. Commoditisation and similarity of products and services with competitors will have the most significant impact on how organisations deliver customer experiences over the next two years, according to IDC’s Future of Customer Experience Survey 2023. With the intensifying competitive landscape, the ability to offer hyper-personalised customer interactions has become a key differentiator and is very much expected by customers. To outpace these market disruptions, businesses must be digitally adaptive, agile, and resilient by elevating the level of customer experiences.

Asian Businesses Face Urgent Need to Hyper-Personalise Customer Experience, Catching Up to Western Counterparts

58% of the businesses surveyed seek to differentiate themselves by prioritising hyper-personalised products and services to deliver greater customer value. This level of personalisation goes beyond the previous field-level personalisation seen in the market, which is no longer sufficient to act on customer needs and deliver a proactive CX in real time. At present, companies in mature markets such as North America and ANZ are already prioritising hyper-personalised products and services due to heightened competition, ranking this their highest business priority.

Meanwhile, Asian businesses, more specifically in Singapore and India, are placing priority on profitable growth instead, with personalisation as their lowest business priority. Nonetheless, as hyper-personalisation is becoming increasingly essential in customer acquisition and retention, serving as a key tenet of profitable growth, Asian companies will similarly be shifting more attention towards value outcomes through personalisation.

According to IDC’s prediction, Asian companies will focus more on value outcomes in the coming years, and personalisation will become their top priority to combat the intense competition. By 2027, to differentiate and drive loyalty, 30% of Asian organisations will undergo structural and technological changes to deliver value outcomes, shifting focus from providing experiences to value parity.

Navigating the Privacy-Personalisation Dilemma

While more organisations are casting the spotlight on the importance of harnessing the true power of their customer data to elevate experiences, there remains a striking gap. The same survey shows that only 33% of businesses can anticipate their customers’ needs and drive value-centric, highly personalised services.

This can be highly attributable to the hurdles in data collection, where 56% of businesses highlighted that data collection and management forms the main challenge. Such figures are set against a backdrop where cyberattacks and data breaches are on the rise and harder to prevent. End-users are becoming more cautious of the data they share with companies; only when a business has earned the customers’ trust do they then feel comfortable enough to share more data.

Customers face a dilemma: the desire to get personalised experiences — essentially, value; while at the same time, discerning how much data they should share to achieve such a goal. Thus, businesses must navigate the fine line between delivering tailored experiences and proving they can protect customers’ personal data.

While there are existing data protection regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Bill in India, and Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) in Singapore, 59% of businesses surveyed indicated that they still struggle with security concerns from customers during the registration process.

Embarking on the X-O Business Journey – Data is Core

In order for businesses to effectively leverage experience as a competitive differentiator, they must transform into experience-orchestrated (X-O) businesses, with data as the linchpin for success. An X-O business can effectively leverage all aspects of its organisation, spanning processes, applications, and channels, to create a meaningful value exchange through data between its internal and external stakeholders.

To become X-O, businesses must not only be transparent with data collection practices in order to collect data and earn customer trust, but also – upon collection of data – have the ability to share it through a high level of system integration and interoperability to unlock the power of the acquired data. Key pillars to unlocking customer value in becoming an X-O business include focusing on:

• Connections across people, systems, applications, data, and processes. Such integration begins with a single customer view (data layer), which will power analytics and insights, and cross-functional collaboration.
• Culture that embraces AI and focuses on outcomes, not just outputs.
• Intelligence is data interpreted in context. Building and maintaining trust is the biggest obstacle in leveraging AI. Without trust, this intelligence pillar will crumble.
• Actions through engaging with stakeholders – customers, suppliers, partners, and employees – via active listening and bringing together relevant data into an active portfolio of insights.

 As such, businesses need to evaluate their current maturity across these key pillars, identify gaps in the current experiences being delivered, and link their next steps to executable actions, to ensure performance is matching stakeholders’ expectations.

The era of AI everywhere has further accelerated customers’ expectations; survey results highlight that keeping up with changing customer demands is the biggest challenge for businesses to overcome when delivering customer value. To particularly compete in today’s world, businesses must strive to adopt X-O practices to effectively outpace their competition.

Recognising this, however, only 10% of businesses surveyed across India, Singapore, ANZ, and North America have reached the most advanced stage in their journey toward becoming an X-O business. This is primarily due to the lack of a unified customer view; to meaningfully engage customers, businesses must be able to unlock — through a unified customer view — the value of customer data sprawled across siloed data sources and applications in the enterprise. The key challenges of a unified customer view include:

• Data Fragmentation: Many businesses struggle to unify customer data stored in disparate systems, which hinders their ability to offer truly personalised experiences.
• Evolving Data Privacy Regulations: With countries implementing more stringent privacy laws, companies face increasing complexity in managing data across different jurisdictions.
• Scalability: Inability to keep up with data maintenance and security demands as business scales, attributable to lack of real-time customer data as individuals may not feel comfortable to share personal information with organisations, due to minimal trust.

Embracing Holistic Identity For X-O Business Transformation

To address these challenges and become an X-O business, organisations must adopt holistic identity management solutions, which provide a secure, trust-based, privacy-first approach to data collection and management. This includes identity verification, seamless onboarding, secure communication, and consent management services. Affinidi’s Holistic Identity framework enables companies worldwide to manage customer data across multiple platforms, allowing for seamless integration while ensuring that privacy is protected. As data privacy regulations become more stringent, businesses need solutions that simplify compliance while maintaining customer trust and data security.

By leveraging Affinidi’s product offerings, businesses can effectively manage customers’ consent preferences, enhance levels of personalisation, improve identity resolution and trust for transactions requiring authentication, communicate securely, and boost operational efficiency and business growth. These solutions ensure compliance with regional data protection regulations while empowering customers with greater control over their data – making it possible for businesses to deliver personalised experiences without compromising privacy, security, and trust. Affinidi’s approach enables businesses to break down data silos, integrate and translate them into greater insights from multiple sources, and deliver secure, seamless and enhanced customer experiences.

“Turning X-O will be pivotal for businesses to stay competitive in today’s digital landscape. It is no longer about just acquiring data, but also knowing how best to utilise it to cater to customers’ needs and preferences. HI provides the scalability and flexibility businesses need to meet growing personalisation demands, while ensuring their customers feel secure, valued, and in control of their personal information –fostering long-term customer loyalty and reducing data-related risks,” said Glenn Gore, CEO of Affinidi.