Predictions on Asia Pacific in 2022

Disruptions make bold decisions neccessary

Disruption has ensued since the advent of the digital era — but it expanded in intensity and range starting in 2020. Meanwhile, customers and employees are seeking more: smooth cross-channel experiences, convenience, reassurance, and adherence to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ideals. Asia Pacific

The list keeps expanding, as does the litany of hard realities that threaten progress: the epidemic, supply chain interruptions, and the “Great Resignation.” As a result, the necessity to act quickly and intelligently in the moment has never been so vital.

To fight the rising trend of entropy that has affected employees and customers, corporate leaders in Asia Pacific (APAC) will continue to embrace managed, improvement in 2022 — implementing future match up technology strategies like cloud-native approaches to strengthen business agility and ushering in a new phase of regionally aligned, hybrid work strategies. But this will not be enough for accomplishment. Leading APAC firms will establish the groundwork for winning on the next battlefields: creating customer confidence and fighting climate change.

2022 is a year to be bold. The old ways of doing things no longer function. The future is obtainable. Leading organizations will use the crucibles of 2020 and 2021 to carve a route to an agile, creative, and resilient tomorrow.

Consumers perceive the world to be entirely digital

Since the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers have significantly increased their technology uptake and usage. According to Forrester research, 66% of Chinese customers say they are purchasing more items online than they would ordinarily. Even consumers who were previously considered digital skeptics expect to continue their online habits as a result of the pandemic.

As a result, customers have higher expectations for how smoothly digital interactions will happen. Consumers expect companies to double down on developing a strong and sustainable digital customer experience, even if they’re willing to forgive them for dealing with pandemic-related inconveniences. Given that the pandemic began almost two years ago, it’s not unexpected that customers assume businesses should have figured out how to deal with pandemic-related disruption by now.

Technology executives make the transition from digital to human-centered technology advancements

Attempts at “digital transformation” have come and gone. Digital transformation was named as a major measure to handle business model change by one out of every four APAC companies in 2021. In 2022, that percentage will be less than 15%. That isn’t to say that the technology advancements inspired by pandemics will slow down.

Firms are being forced to seek new ways to demonstrate business value in crowded marketplaces due to ongoing digital sameness and diminishing returns on IT investments. Leading companies will unleash their employees’ creativity by surrounding them with sophisticated technology like automation and prediction engines that focus on outcomes rather than simply financial returns.

This change will usher in a new era of transformation characterized by human-centered technology efforts that create a strong link between the customer and employee experience, promote competitive advantage, and result in a 3% to 5% net productivity increase. To drastically improve their organization’s creative and inventive potential, 10% of technology leaders will prioritize strategic alliances and innovation practices at three times the pace of their competition by 2022. Asia Pacific

APAC is on the verge of becoming a digital society

Digital identification, digital money, and data interoperability are the three cornerstones of a digital society that PAC countries are leading the world in adopting. Aadhaar, myGovID, and Singpass are among the digital identity options available in many APAC countries. In terms of central bank digital currency rollouts, the region leads the world: The digital yuan is used by more than 20 million Chinese consumers, and experiments in the retail and wholesale industries are planned in Australia, India, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea.

Government data frameworks that are interoperable and integrated, such as the Singapore-Australia Digital Economy Agreement and the India-Singapore Payment Link, are still in their infancy and so fragmented. Nonetheless, tech innovators should look for ways to combine these three pillars to create and offer differentiated skills that will help them provide superior client experiences.

Trust has become a critical corporate requirement

Concerns about public health, cybersecurity, data privacy, and sustainability have caused a worldwide trust crisis. As a result, businesses and governments will rely on trust to show their commitment to consumer relationships. Financial services will be the first to respond in APAC.

People’s financial well-being and faith in financial institutions are a subject of systemic economic risk, as previous crises have shown. Four to six financial services pioneers will begin measuring and codifying trust in 2022, as NatWest Group does with its net trust score tied to business KPIs like as client deposits.

Some companies will go above and beyond to protect trust, such as the Veritas initiative, which is led by the Monetary Authority of Singapore and includes a group of 25 financial services and technology companies. It lays out principles for the ethical use of AI in credit risk scoring and customer marketing. Companies who neglect the trust requirement will lose 10% to 40% of their clients, beginning with those who are hesitant to forgive companies that have broken their trust.

B2B marketers are putting more money into technology, but the outcomes are mixed

70 percent of marketers will embrace a “always on” digital engagement approach in 2022, indicating that persistent digital interaction will become the norm. The stakes are high: three times as many B2B buyers (17%) indicated that shown expertise throughout the purchasing process was the most important driver of purchase decision, well ahead of the sales rep’s connection (5%) or customer references (6%).

Marketing executives will resort to “smarter” (more autonomous and automated) solutions with complicated tech stacks to accomplish their always-on aspirations. In 2022, marketing technology’s share of the marketing expenditure will rise to 25% from 19% now. Asia Pacific

However, due to a lack of buyer understanding, 75% of attempts to generate automated, personalized interaction will fall short of ROI targets. Only 10% of B2B companies would define KPIs to quantify the value provided for customers throughout the purchasing process by 2022. To achieve personalization objectives, B2B marketing professionals must include customer centricity into their planning and execution processes.

Extreme invention is fueled by automation fabric

Automation is moving out of the back office and into the front office to become a powerful facilitator of new business and operational models. Advanced automation programs will demolish — not just outperform — the competition. To get there, businesses need to design an automation fabric — a framework for building, orchestrating, and governing a hybrid workforce of human and digital employees — that connects AI-based and classic automation components, as well as a proactive innovation program.

Amazon and Unilever, for example, have long-running, persistent automation efforts to unleash innovation and gain a significant competitive edge – not only to save money on process execution. Expect a significant number of organizations to embrace an automation fabric as automation technologies such as robotic process automation, integration platform as a service (iPaaS), and digital process automation/low code converge on the supply side, allowing them to develop innovation culture, create business models, bring new products and services to market, or rethink their customer experience. Asia Pacific

The future of employment in APAC seems to be different (compared with the rest of the world)

Workplaces are progressively reopened as the epidemic stabilizes and vaccination rates climb. In 2022, Forrester predicts that 70% of major companies would use some type of remote work. However, regional pressures will drive more than 60% of APAC companies to plan to bring the great majority of employees back to work full-time.

Only 32% of employees in the region’s big manufacturing industry, for example, can work anywhere. Outsourcing organizations with purpose-built, secure campuses and high-availability facilities, on the other hand, cannot deliver the same quality of service in distant places with inadequate infrastructure. Employees, unions, and regulators will fight contact center operators that insist on monitoring employees who work from home. Furthermore, according to Forrester research, 65 percent of APAC information professionals are ready to return to work, with high-density extended-family living likely contributing to this trend: During COVID-19, 58 percent of workers report they are less productive working from home, compared to 46 percent overall.

As a result, businesses in the APAC area need a region-specific anywhere-work strategy that balances employee expectations with the reality of hybrid work models.

The cloud native movement is gaining traction

In light of the pandemic-fueled digital acceleration, the scale requirement will be reformed as enterprises reach new rates of cloud scale. Developers indicated greater use of containers (33 percent to 42 percent) and serverless (26 percent to 32 percent) at their organizations in 2021, indicating a rise in global cloud-native adoption.

Rather of embracing cloud solutions just for new workloads, some APAC companies will choose container-based, microservice-oriented designs with distributed capabilities in hybrid and multicloud settings. They’ll employ service mesh to support microservices, which will help them boost their business agility. They’ll also rely on cloud-native platforms to drive technological advancements. Asia Pacific

These companies will expedite corporate modernisation and develop future-fit technology strategies by adopting a cloud-native strategy. However, in comparison to other countries, this change will be sluggish, and it will be confined to companies who commit to modernizing their methods, such as infrastructure as code, DevOps automation, and composition over customization. As their cloud-first initiatives fail, companies who do not embrace cloud-native tactics will experience minimal gains.