Only 10% of Businesses Are Ready to Become Experience-Orchestrated, Highlighting Lack of Personalisation

Affinidi, a Singapore-based 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 IDC Affinidi DNB 2024 Survey, which polled businesses in five countries—Singapore, India, Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), and North America.

Key findings:

• Commoditisation and similarity of products and services with competitors will have the most significant impact on how businesses deliver customer experiences over the next two years.
• Businesses who are looking to hyper-personalise their products as a competitive differentiator are facing several obstacles in addressing the privacy-personalisation dilemma, with 56% of them highlighting data collection and management to be a key challenge.
• To truly enhance customer experiences through more personalised insights, they must transform into experience-orchestrated (X-O) businesses for meaningful data value exchange with customers.

Asian Businesses Face Urgent Need to Hyper-Personalise Customer Experience

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.

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.

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. 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. While there are existing data protection regulations, 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. Key pillars to unlocking customer value include:

• Connections across people, systems, applications, data, and processes, beginning with a single customer view (data layer)
• Culture that embraces AI and focuses on outcomes, not just outputs
• Intelligence — data interpreted in context, where building and maintaining trust is the biggest obstacle in leveraging AI
• Actions through engaging with stakeholders via active listening and bringing together relevant data into an active portfolio of insights

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 the value of customer data sprawled across siloed data sources and applications in the enterprise.

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. 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.

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.

“Holistic Identity 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.

Affinidi is leading a global movement to return data ownership to individuals through its Holistic Identity concept, and in turn, enabling businesses to become X-O minded with the tools and technology they need to stay competitive.

About Affinidi

Affinidi is a data and identity management company founded by Temasek in 2020 that aims to revolutionise data ownership for good through its Holistic Identity concept. Globally anchored in Singapore and supported by strategic hubs in Berlin, Ukraine, and Bangalore, Affinidi seeks to empower individuals, and enrich developers and businesses through its consent-driven and privacy-preserving solutions, rooted in trust and security.

Source: IDC InfoBrief commissioned by Affinidi, ‘Unlocking Customer Value as an Experience-Orchestrated (X-O) Business’, Doc #AP242492IB, September 2024