Uncover the key trends shaping customer service in Asia with Yew Hwee Ng, SVP of Asia at Zendesk, in our insightful interview.
In the face of an ever-evolving business environment, delivering exceptional customer service has become a formidable challenge for organizations across the region. With diverse cultural nuances, language barriers, and soaring customer expectations, companies are grappling to find effective solutions.
Fortunately, Zendesk has emerged as a game-changer in the industry, offering innovative approaches that address these complexities head-on. Through their state-of-the-art technologies and strategic frameworks, Zendesk enables companies to forge enduring customer relationships, fostering loyalty and driving sustainable growth.
In this interview, we will have the privilege of tapping into Yew Hwee Ng’s extensive expertise as we explore the unique challenges faced in the Asian market.
Kindly brief us about yourself and your role as the SVP of Asia at Zendesk.
I have over 30 years of experience working with some of the leading global technology brands, helping businesses navigate the complexities of digital adoption in Asia Pacific to drive long-term growth. That’s why I’m such a big advocate for the power of digital transformation. Having had the privilege of leading teams across markets in Asia, I’ve witnessed the transformative power of technology in a region as diverse as ours.
In my current role as Senior Vice President, of Asia at Zendesk, I serve as a partner to our customers and teams in finding the right solutions that help businesses unlock the potential of exceptional, intelligent CX. I want to help them realize the value of investing in technology that powers deeper, more connected, and personalized experiences for customers and employees.
Please share your source of inspiration for exploring various facets of technology.
There are many different things that inspire me to explore how technology changes the way we live, work and play. One of them is through daily interaction with my friends within the CX industry and expert colleagues. This sense of community really helps especially because we live in a region that places great emphasis on CX. As a consumer myself, I treat every interaction I have with brands as a learning opportunity to explore the intersection of CX and technology.
Additionally, research houses and analysts also often share thought-provoking insights into innovation and technology and their potential for businesses. I find great satisfaction in helping organizations make real changes using CX and creating value for their customers. There is still work to be done, but I love being a part of it.
Please brief our audience about Zendesk and give us an overview of its standout solutions.
We believe every company should have easy access to solutions that can help them grow their business, regardless of their size. That’s why Zendesk offers customer service solutions that work out of the box to make it as easy as possible to set up and maintain, without the need for massive budgets or specialized developer skills.
For instance, we have a suite of easy-to-adopt solutions, catering to the various needs of customers. This includes powerful messaging tools with a proactive approach and personalized conversational experience, a unified agent workspace with omnichannel capabilities to empower service teams to provide exceptional CX support with ease, as well as AI tools that ease workloads and scale teams. These tools, including third-party ones, seamlessly integrate into our open platform to enhance collaboration and create real value by simplifying the process while enabling agility.
Zendesk recently published a CX trends report, what according to you is the difference between a proactive vs reactive CX strategy?
When customers reach out, they want immediate support, and they want these interactions to be easy – whether it’s with a human or an AI chatbot. In fact, according to our latest CX Trends report, 79% of Singaporean consumers expect to engage with someone immediately when contacting a company, and they expect to be able to get in touch within a few clicks or taps.
The concept is around meeting customer expectations – they expect us to create value for them by being more proactive and intuitive given today’s environment and technological advancements. What this value means to them varies – it could be being efficient in assisting them, helping them discover something new, or making suggestions on what may suit them.
A reactive approach to CX is one where the customer is always the one taking the first step but a company that adopts a proactive CX strategy doesn’t sit there and wait for the customer to reach out or flag a problem. They are one step ahead and already considering different ways to minimize the customers’ need to initiate a conversation by eliminating friction or root cause. For instance, businesses can easily provide proactive support such as automated self-service based on user behavior and interaction history, or even automatically inform customers of delays in product delivery and scheduled maintenance.
How can AI play a role in enhancing a holistic CX strategy?
AI can enhance a CX strategy in many different ways, but ultimately it aims to complement the human workforce to provide a higher level of convenience and efficiency for both customers and support agents. From a productivity standpoint, AI eliminates high-volume routine tasks so that agents can prioritize more complex and higher-value work. It can anticipate customer needs and potential issues by reviewing support data to identify common issues and, with the help of generative AI like ChatGPT, instantly create help center articles that address these issues.
Additionally, AI can help personalize the experience by analyzing customer data and interaction history to provide customized recommendations and give agents all the relevant context they need to provide seamless support. Not to mention, AI also helps to reduce human errors. When companies appropriately apply technology with the right level of CX strategy, we can find unique opportunities to improve the overall customer experience for all parties involved.
What are some of the key benefits of AI-powered CX strategy?
One of the most important benefits of an AI-powered CX strategy is that it delivers a greater personalized experience. Machine learning (ML) can add a predictive element to support analytics, which allows businesses to utilize data from previous customer service interactions to determine what the quantitative results may be in the future.
They can tap on these actionable insights to then improve their engagement with customers moving forward. This is crucial, as delivering personalized experiences helps customers get what they need faster and provides a better overall experience that encourages them to keep coming back. Consumers today are also open to businesses using the data they collected to personalize their experience, with 76% of Singapore consumers agreeing with this sentiment. Most importantly, AI is here to complement humans and improve efficiency by minimizing the manual work required to get things done.
In your opinion, how important is it to augment AI and ML in a way that they can be utilized to their fullest potential and not be a substitute for human skills?
It’s important to remember that AI/ML isn’t meant to replace humans but rather to make their jobs easier. Service agents are often bogged down with high ticket volumes and mundane tasks. With customer requests streaming in constantly, these already busy agents will need to spend extra time to categorize each problem manually to ensure it is being routed to the right destination for support. All the time spent completing mundane and repetitive tasks eventually amounts to hours that could be spent on higher-value tasks.
The human touch will remain an important element for CX, so businesses can leverage AI to automate such time-consuming tasks instead of replacing the entire service team with sentient bots. The idea is around the utilization of resources – AI/ML should enhance or optimize this by providing assistance so that the human may employ higher value work or identify areas of improvement, thereby improving the overall experience for customers, agents, and employees.
How important is it to leverage the power of AI in order to boost business performance?
The importance of AI cannot be understated, especially when it comes to improving business performance. In fact, our recent CX Trends report shows that more than half (57%) of organizations estimate a positive ROI on AI investments made for CX. Companies that are able to tap into AI will be able to enhance the customer experience at every stage of the buyer’s journey. They can scale their support capabilities and better utilize their human talent while improving service delivery because customers are able to get instantaneous responses around the clock.
What would be your valuable advice for budding entrepreneurs and industry professionals?
Don’t be afraid to take calculated risks and try new things. Have a growth mindset of testing and learning, rather than having a two-dimensional view of wins and failures. Surround yourself with good people who can spot your blind spots and broaden your worldview. And throughout your journey – especially as you climb in seniority – always treat the people around you well.
How will you scale Zendesk’s growth curve in 2023 and beyond?
As customer demands continuously evolve and businesses face challenging macroeconomic factors, we are focusing on staying ahead innovation-wise and catering to that change. Our priority is to do what we’ve always done – focus on our customers and their needs. This is done by creating value for them in terms of delivering better and greater experiences, so they can unlock the power of CX to drive long-term profitable growth. We will continue to explore the many facets of CX innovations and tools including AI to find ways to incorporate technology into various parts of the customer and agent journey and improve overall efficiency while delivering immersive experiences for all.
Yew Hwee Ng
SVP of Asia at Zendesk
Yew Hwee Ng, with extensive leadership experience in IBM and Adobe, oversees Zendesk’s growth in Asia. He understands the complexities of digital adoption and develops customized solutions for businesses at all stages of their growth journeys. As a strategic partner, he advocates for digital transformation to unlock exceptional customer experiences. Passionate about music and sports, Yew Hwee is also known to appreciate a good Bordeaux.
