KUALA LUMPUR, July 6 – Despite a rise in automated self-service, a live human agent continues to be a crucial component in the overall customer experience for many Malaysians, a study commissioned by global cloud communications platform, Infobip, has found.
In a recent press statement, Infobip said the study, carried out by Forrester Consulting, was to understand how human and automated engagement had evolved and whether the dominance of digital transformation had given rise to self-service and automated support or were customers still expecting real-time personalised services and interactions from live human agents.
The study was seen timely with close to 90 percent of the total Malaysian population being internet users now.
Titled “Redefining Human and Automated Engagement – How APAC Consumers Have Impacted The CX
Agenda”, the custom study involved 1,210 participants across mainland China, Hong Kong, Indonesia,
Japan, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
Forrester also examined customers’ preferred touchpoints across five-purchase stage journeys and analysed respondents’ preferred mode of engagement, their interaction with brands in the past 6 months and provided suggestions on strategic components that are essential to building a hybrid customer
experience infrastructure.
Despite the availability of chatbots and automated self-service support, many respondents indicated
that their most recent customer service experience involved interacting with a human agent for support
request.
Twenty-three percent of them have spoken with a human agent via live chat on its website/mobile application while 36% respondents have spoken with a human agent over the phone.
Narrowing to Malaysia, the level of customer experience (CX) by brands have been rated as moderate,
with a score of 3.8, below the APAC average of 3.9. Neighbouring countries like Indonesia (4.1) and
Thailand (4.2) registered a higher score in CX experience, while Singapore lags slightly at 3.7.
There is still a habitual reliance on live human support and Malaysians prefer to communicate with live human agent either through online live chat (45%), via social media (45%) or over the phone (43%).
Guray Ozturk, Business Development Director of Infobip Malaysia, shared that “while Malaysians prefer
a balanced form of engagement with brands when it comes to service support, be it through automated
service or speaking to a live human agent, it becomes essential for brands to first understand where
their audience are before investing the resource into either automated or a customer service support
team.
“Although WhatsApp is the most-used social media platform by 93.2% Malaysians, our whitepaper
released last year found that only 55% of companies use Facebook-owned WhatsApp Business to
manage customer support, while 46% of respondents cited that there is not enough digital support by
companies to effectively utilise available digital platforms. This indicates that brands will need to assess,
re-evaluate, and deploy a hybrid omnichannel CX solution capable of engaging customers anytime,
anywhere. This will also be a key driver to their revenue growth in the long run,” Guray added.
Infobip is a leading player in the provision of integrated messaging channels, tools and solutions for advanced customer engagement for its clients.
–WE