62% of customer experience interactions failed to be productive: report

A “wow” remains elusive from hard-to-please Singaporeans.

Singaporean customers remain unimpressed as only a third or 38% said they were able to accomplish their goals when interacting with brands whilst only 39% found their experiences emotionally positive, according to a report by market research company Forrester. Meanwhile, only 41% of customers found brands easy to interact with.

Overall, Singaporeans found the quality of customer experience (CX) in Singapore “poor” as the average remained flat at 55 points out of 100 since 2018.

"Our study has once again shown that Singaporeans maintain very high expectations and that it's hard to earn a 'wow' from them," said Tom Mouhsian, principal analyst at Forrester.

Forrester noted that brands in Singapore disappoint customers on the three dimensions: emotion, ease, and effectiveness. In particular, Mouhsian advised brands to focus on generating positive emotional feedback from their customers.

"Brands that want to move the needle on their CX quality should focus on emotion: How an experience makes customers feel has a bigger influence on their loyalty to a brand than effectiveness or ease in every industry,” he said.

The study employed a CX Index with a point scale: 0-50 is considered “very poor”; 50-60, “poor”; 60-70, “okay”; 70-80, “good”; and 80-100, “excellent.”

None of the industries’ average managed to break the “poor” scale. The multichannel banking industry continued to have the highest average score of 58.9, whilst the auto/home insurance industry and airline industry scored 55.8 and 55.1, respectively. For the second year in a row, the Singapore government remained at the bottom of the rankings, although the average rose to 52.2.

Amongst brands, Singapore Airlines achieved the highest score this year, breaking the “okay” mark and overtaking DBS and OCBC.

The survey polled 4,027 Singaporean adult customers across 16 brands in three industries and the government sector.