The Omnichannel Imperative

In association with Resulticks 

Omnichannel marketing has become a priority for companies tasked with attracting and retaining consumers who have more choice and higher expectations than ever. Like many aspects of commerce in the digital age, omnichannel is an area of tremendous opportunity that is often talked about but rarely done well. Embracing this discipline involves overcoming challenges and complexities that have prevented many businesses from realizing their true vision.

The Omnichannel Imperative, carried out in partnership with Resulticks, is based on an online survey of 345 enterprise businesses in Southeast Asia. It casts a light on the level of omnichannel readiness among enterprise organizations in the region, with a focus on what ‘leaders’ are doing differently from their ‘laggard’ peers.

Key findings from the report include: 

• The ability to deliver content and messaging in real time and across multiple channels, promises a step-change in the efficiency and effectiveness of customer engagement. When it comes to near-term marketing priorities, the top two focus areas for businesses are real-time marketing (65%) and omnichannel delivery and engagement (52%).
  
• Nearly a third (32%) of businesses surveyed strongly agree that they take an integrated approach to customer engagement across different channels, leveraging first, second and third-party customer data, with technology and processes to support this. Only 18% of companies in the region say they do not have such an approach.
• Securing a unified view of customer data and journeys is critical if brands are to deliver a consistent, high-level experience to individual customers across all touchpoints. Significantly more leaders report that they have a consolidated customer engagement database in place than do laggards, who are more likely to be grappling with disparate systems and datasets (92% vs. 82%).
  
• Asked about their main omnichannel challenges, respondents report that issues relating to data were very much prominent, including too much data to manage (39%), poor integration across systems (38%), incomplete customer data across all channels (35%), an inability to act on data in real time (30%), an inability to segment data effectively (29%) or a lack of analytics and/or insights (28%).
  
• Omnichannel leaders are significantly more likely than laggards to focus on personalization (63% vs. 45%) and a 360-degree customer view (62% vs. 46%).
  
• Technology and software limitations are the most commonly cited barrier to better omnichannel marketing, with around four in ten respondents (41%) regarding tech deficiencies as a key challenge. More than eight in ten (82%) companies identified as leaders are increasing omnichannel technology investment during 2019, compared to only 45% of laggards who intend to boost spending.
  
• Software vendors are failing to meet the expectations of Southeast Asia companies in terms of their platform capabilities. There is a particularly large gap between expectations and reality when it comes to enabling multichannel campaign orchestration. Nearly six in ten organizations (58%) say their expectations in this area remain unmet.
  

Infographics featuring selected charts from the survey are available for you to use in your presentations and reports.