The mobile customer experience will fuel digital transformation in Asia Pacific

Forrester Research has unveiled its top 10 technology predictions for Asia Pacific in 2015, with expectations that mobile-powered customer experiences will fuel digital transformation in the region.

“In a world of ever increasing digital demands and shrinking budgets, CIOs need to be smarter with where they place their bets,” said Dane Anderson, Forrester Research’s vice-president, research director and region manager for Asia Pacific. “Successful CIOs in 2015 will improve collaboration with business leaders to craft superior customer experiences.”

For 2015, Forrester’s top 10 predictions and their implications are:

1. Digital transformation will drive technology spending growth of 4.9%

Seventy nine per cent of organisations consider improving the experiences of technology empowered customers as a high or critical priority for their business in 2015. While 57% of businesses across the region see the rising expectations of customers as the number one reason to spend more money on ICT purchases in 2015.

2. The majority of companies in Asia Pacific will be unprepared for digital disruption

Although powerhouses in China such as Alibaba and Haier Group are leading the regional charge to digital business success, many local and regional companies still don’t understand what it takes to build a digital business. Regional organisational inertia will be the biggest hurdle to digital transformation in 2015 and Forrester expects Asia Pacific organisations to be complacent to the growing wave of global digital business houses crashing in their backyards.

3. China will be the epicentre of digital innovation

Fuelled by its massive digital population, a lack of legacy approaches and well-funded digital behemoths, China is set to become the world’s largest e-commerce market by 2015, with market gains of $315.3 billion in online sales (B2C and C2C). China’s social media arena is also developing at lightning speed with 95% of metropolitan Chinese online adults using social media today.

4. ‘Digital India’ will encounter stubborn roadblocks

The Indian government’s $17 billion ambitious “Digital India” programme has the potential to be a game changer for the country. While Forrester applauds the Indian government’s programme to transform India to a digitally empowered knowledge economy, it predicts the programme will face key ground-level challenges in terms of infrastructure operations and standards and the lack of technology management involvement.

5. Mobile business will lag accelerated smartphone adoption

By the end of 2015, Forrester expects 36% of adults in Asia to own a smartphone – ownership ranges from a high of 86% in Singapore to 44% in China and a low of 23% in India. However, few companies will be ready to serve these technology empowered customers on their smartphones in their moments of need. Mobile will remain small in terms of spend – particularly advertising spend.

6. Organisations will move beyond rudimentary enterprise mobility

In 2015, Forrester expects to see a significant number of small, medium and large businesses across Asia Pacific begin to embrace hybrid tablet/laptop devices as a start of their enterprise mobility journey. A growing proportion of forward-thinking businesses in Asia Pacific will begin to examine their employees’ mobile moments and those who succeed will think customer mobility, not enterprise mobility.

7. Customer experience – bridge for CIO-CMO collaboration

In 2015, regional CMOs will become increasingly aware of their technology limitations and the drag the lack of proper planning on integration, application management, security and compliance will place on their marketing agility. At the same time, CIOs will shift focus from back-end IT systems to customer-facing business technology. The meeting point between these two forces will be customer experiences initiatives.

8. Asia will turn to mobile messaging apps for customer engagement

With more than one billion users combined on WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, Viber and WhatsApp, Forrester expects regional organisations to increasingly turn to mobile messaging apps for customer engagement. Forrester expects mobile messaging to begin siphoning ad spend away from Facebook, especially for price-sensitive businesses in Asia Pacific that increasingly question the platform’s effectiveness.

9. Apple Pay will dislodge the mobile payments gridlock

In 2014, Forrester’s prediction was the mobile payments landscape in Asia Pacific would remain riddled by fragmentation. This is expected to change in 2015 as Apple Pay’s technology will accelerate payments and enable new customer experiences. In particular, China and Australia will run ahead with Apple Pay on mobile.

10. Customer insights and big data analytics will sprawl

2015 will be the year of increased fragmentation for big data as reliance on analytics spreads within and across organisations. Spending on analytics will increase by at least 10% across the region, but a shrinking proportion of this will be visible to the IT budget. Marketing teams will take the lead to seek data-fuelled improvements in customer engagement.

The writer is Dane Anderson, vice president, research director and region manager for Asia Pacific, Forrester Research.

Other articles from The Futurist:

Still a touch ‘Mad’ but not for long
The death of traditional and digital marketing, by Rahul Asthana of Kimberly-Clark
Up, up and away with Millennials, by Rick Harvey Lam of Accor Luxury and Upscale Brands
Welcome to the ‘third age of travel’
The future(s) of B2B marketing

This article was from  Marketing Magazine’s special edition The Futurist, the January-February 2015 issue.

For the full issue, click here.

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