1. Dear Mark, Similar to the global consensus, building a customer-first culture remains the hardest challenge to overcome in CX in Asia. What are the trends, opportunities and challenges we are likely to expect in providing relevant experiences to the customers in a post COVID world?

Today, customer experience is overtaking price and product as the major brand differentiator, and that will certainly continue in a post-Covid world. Currently, 91% of companies have CX as one of or as their primary goal in their digital business transformation efforts, and 60% of CX budgets are expected to increase. As consumers continue to shift online and as their expectations around quality experiences dramatically increase, they are open to exploring new digital habits and increasing their usage of digital channels. But 65% of B2C and 75% of B2B companies report that they are lagging behind on their CX transformations.

So where are the opportunities for change? We see rapid change in new digital behaviour and adoption with higher expectations for effortless experiences. Hence there is a need for more intense CX transformation, with increasing efforts in launching new products and services at speed. This effort requires increased development agility to deliver modern and personalized customer experiences that are available on multiple digital channels.

Businesses face multiple challenges as they undertake CX transformation. Siloed customer data makes it almost impossible to harness all of a company’s data to deliver a consistent, high-quality customer experience. Linking CX to ROI can prove difficult, as many CX initiatives could take as long as 5-8 years to start delivering real value. Being able to act quickly on the data is critical. However, many times the insights are there, but they simply cannot be actioned fast enough to meet customer needs. We have also seen that organizations don’t have the digital transformation technology in place that allows them to pivot quickly, making many digital CX projects fall short of their original customer-first aspirations. Finally, a customer-first culture requires a fundamentally different approach to creating digital experiences and senior management buy-in is critical, because too many departments have too much invested in ‘business as usual’ to accommodate the necessary changes and the inflexibility of traditional approaches to application development further make change that much more difficult.

2. What is the value proposition for OutSystems in the Asian region? How do you believe it will impact the industries?

The OutSystems platform enables organizations of all sizes to build the software that makes the difference to their business - whether it’s for transforming customer experiences, delivering workplace innovation, automating processes, or modernizing core systems. OutSystems makes this possible by combining extraordinarily fast, visual, model-driven development with a modern platform built around AI, cloud, DevOps, and security. OutSystems helps customers in the Asian region rapidly build and deliver modern applications that scale, are secure, and are able to continuously change with the needs of the business.

3. The impact of the global coronavirus pandemic has had far-reaching consequences for brand loyalty and has placed customer retention on the line for businesses all over the world. Especially in the case of Asia, what can be done to overcome them?

Consumer expectations for great digital experiences were already on the rise, and the pandemic has only accelerated that need. The fact that many customers had to solely rely on digital channels during the pandemic has accelerated that trend even more. Consumers are changing the way they shop, and even shifting their brand loyalty based on the quality of their digital interactions with brands. This leads to an urgent need for all businesses to pursue modern digital solutions to deliver frictionless customer and partner experiences across multiple touchpoints.

We need to break with the past if we are to create an environment in which a customer-first culture can flourish. CIOs need to cultivate deeper partnerships between the CX team and IT. This is the critical foundation for fulfilling customer-first ambitions, simplifying operations, enhancing responsiveness, and allowing the two teams to collaborate on designing and delivering digital customer journeys and their supporting processes and data. Furthermore, companies need to invest in applications platforms that enable both faster development as well as flexibility so already built solutions can be rapidly evolved and updated as the customer trends and demands change.

4. How is OutSystems approaching low code as compared to the other competitors in the industry?

From its founding 20 years ago, OutSystems has focused on improving the speed and agility of the application development process. In fact, we started using visual, model-based development for our platform long before the term ‘low-code’ was even coined. What we’ve learned over the years of applying this approach is that enterprise customers need more than just rapid development capabilities when it comes to application platforms.

Tackling the challenges of building scalable, adaptable software head-on, OutSystems gives every organization the power to innovate through software. Using our platform, businesses of all sizes can develop, deploy and manage critical apps at speed—enabling them to respond to market opportunities and continuously deliver value through software-driven innovation.

OutSystems helps developers build serious applications quickly and efficiently. A visual, model-driven development environment with industry-leading AI-based assistance ensures apps are built-in days or weeks instead of months or years. But whatever IT teams build fast must also be built right. At the heart of the OutSystems platform are integrated tools and automation services that ensure modern, enterprise-grade, cloud-native applications are secure, resilient, manageable, and built to scale. OutSystems is also designed to manage change, enabling rapid innovation, and ultimately delivering modern applications that evolve as businesses and technologies do.

By fundamentally changing the way software is built, OutSystems is making it possible for every organization to compete, innovate and grow with the developers they already have.

Our focus is on helping customers succeed with their most challenging digital transformation initiatives.

5. Tell us about the session that you are going to host at the show and how you believe it will be instrumental in creating a comprehensive roadmap for those in attendance?

To make a customer-first culture a reality, there must be true collaboration between IT and CX to drive effective digital CX transformation with speed and agility. In this session, we will be talking about how to deliver secure customer and partner-facing applications that can be easily scaled, maintained, and updated. And we will show how these applications can be delivered, across multiple digital channels faster using the teams and skills already in house.

We will also talk about leveraging and unifying data and systems that work well with existing technology investments to create frictionless and consistent omnichannel customer journeys to reduce CaC, increase NPS, loyalty and retention.

Thank you, Mark Weaser. It was a pleasure speaking with you. We hope you enjoy your experience speaking at World CX Show!