Developing Asia Pacific

The results for 'developing Asia Pacific' (Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia) companies are very different. The ranking is quite different and the actual scores are much lower than their European counterparts in most areas. The exceptions to this are the areas of Process, IT and, at a push, Analysis and Planning. It is interesting that developing Asia Pacific companies had their strongest focus in these areas, perhaps showing the strong cerebral and process-oriented nature of their business mentality. In fact, the overall balance of research results for this region (strong focus on Analysis and Planning, Process and Proposition; low focus on Customer Management Activity, Measurement and Customer Experience) suggests that Asia Pacific companies are prone to too much intellectualizing in Customer Management and not enough doing. However, it could also be argued that many companies are at a very early stage in the evolution of CRM, so what they are doing is thinking about what to do, and building their infrastructure.

The People ranking was low and the actual per cent score was very low in this area. An analysis of the research response indicates that the reasons for this clearly lie in the cultural roots in the region. The main issues for companies are:

The ability of the organization to react quickly to market changes (for example, decision making is a hierarchical process, with most ideas being originated or at least very heavily filtered at senior levels).
The need for senior leadership in customer management (for example, the customer experience cuts across different departments and functions and senior leadership is required to ensure cross-enterprise cooperation).
Empowerment (a command and control culture is very evident here).
Identification of competency gaps in customer management.
Incentives and rewards for achievement of targets.

The people area is a key issue for many companies in this region, but change is likely to be slow because organizational behaviour appears to be strongly embedded in the behavioural norms, or culture, of this region. We are already seeing evidence that western companies owning companies in this region will be the quickest to improve here. Local employees in this region increasingly want their local management to adopt western employment practices and motivational techniques. We did see one local credit card company that had taken steps to go against the norm of a blame culture and had specifically embedded within its marketing plan that there should be a no-blame culture. Not surprisingly, it was one of the better performers. Hiding behind traditional accepted cultural norms should not be accepted as a valid reason not to employ best customer management practices.

Day-to-day customer management activity needs significant improvement in almost all areas. As a small example, in terms of managing dissatisfaction, a blame culture still exists in this region. This affects the ability of an enterprise to learn where it is going wrong, where the service pressure points are and so on. Openness of enterprises, a no-blame culture and a willingness to learn are important facets of successful organizations. (Our analysis of high performing questions shows these factors to have a very high correlation with business performance ^[8].)

The Proposition score was also very low in this region. There is less of an obvious definition of what it means to be a customer of one company rather than that of another. This is reflected in much 'me too' marketing, an array of very similar products and similar customer service approaches. It is expected that society as a whole will begin to embrace change very quickly in this region, and companies that can be set up to react quickly to this will be able to gain a significant competitive advantage.