As a result of the investment in digital customer engagement, companies have boosted total revenues by an average of 64%, according to research from Twilio. The findings are from Twilio’s State of Customer Engagement Report, which reflects the findings from a survey of 3,450 business leaders and 4,500 consumers across 12 countries.
“The research clearly shows that companies that prioritise digital customer engagement reap the biggest rewards,” said Glenn Weinstein, chief customer officer at Twilio. “Personalisation is actually getting harder to deliver, with high customer expectations, changing technologies, and the diminishing value of third-party cookies. We’ve seen five fundamentals to overcoming these challenges: embrace digital, personalise every interaction, shift to first-party data, close the trust gap, and avoid engagement fatigue by increasing the quality of your interactions.”
Kristen Pimpini, Regional Vice President, ANZ, Twilio added, “Many Australian companies accelerated their digital customer engagement over the last two years, creating entirely new and innovative ways of connecting with and servicing customers. While the research highlights that those efforts have translated to strong wins, it also shows us that they are still some way off in meeting consumer expectations. Companies need to close the experience gap, respond to consumers’ expectations of flexibility and choice in how they interact with brands.”
Key Australian findings from the Twilio report include:
- 64% is the average top-line revenue increase among companies that invested in digital customer engagement over the past two years. For 15% of responding companies in Australia, revenues doubled after investing in digital customer engagement.
- B2C companies say that the past two years accelerated their digital transformation strategies by an average of 8 years, ahead of the global average of 6.5 years. 27% of Australian companies say they’ve leaped forward 10 to 14 years.
- Australia leads the way in APJ with the highest level of digital customer engagement (50%). Companies here predict that by 2025, over half (59%) of their customer engagement will be digital.
- 98% of B2C companies believe consumers trust their ability to protect data, but only 67% of consumers actually do trust these companies.
- 63% of Australian companies are more likely to invest in Customer Data Platform (CDP) to collect, analyse, connect or unify their first-party data.
- Gen Zs (46%) and Millennials (40%) are more than twice as likely as Baby Boomers to have experienced digital fatigue in the past 30 days.
- 37% of Australians surveyed would rather lose the internet for a day, go through airport security during a holiday or shave their head than reach out to a customer contact center.
- The report also provides insights and examples of world-class digital customer engagement from five different leading global organisations – Allianz Direct, Intuit, Nubank, The Trevor Project and Electrolux.
The report is based on two surveys conducted by Lawless Research in December 2021 and January 2022.