Data Will Be At The Heart Of APAC Business Opportunity, But For Many, It’s Still A Learning Curve

Digital transformation is occurring at an unprecedented rate, and it’s easy to understand why; according to IDC, 65 per cent of APAC GDP will be digitalized by 2022. That will account for $US1.2 trillion in spending.

What this means is that for businesses, 80 per cent of new revenue growth is going to come from digital offerings going forward. Digital transformation is complex, but the reason for it is simple: companies that don’t participate in this newly digitalized economy are going to be left far behind.

“Last year, Southeast Asia welcomed 40 million users who are coming online for the first time. Now, 70 percent of the population in the region have access to the internet, and they are trying new services they have never tried before two years back,” Chee Koon Foong, Optimizely Director of Sales, South-East Asia, said, in an exclusive interview with IDG. “They’re going to continue to use these services after the pandemic is over.”

However, for many businesses, capitalizing on this opportunity requires new investments, a new platform, and being able to engage with customers like never before. This is a challenge that, for many of them, they’re playing catch-up with those already in the market, and they’ll need a proven partner and platform to assist with achieving that.

“The narrative right now is that the sale is coming to us with a set of questions on how Optimizely can help them to provide hyper-personalization across all channels, how to run effective A/B testing to determine if a green button works better than a yellow button, and how to have a better conversion with the Add to Cart,” Foong said.

“These rapidly transforming companies don’t expect us just to provide the best-in-class tools, which we are, but they’re also looking to leverage our experience on how we have succeeded with so many other major brands globally. They know that it takes time and resources, to figure out what works and what doesn’t, and they want to get there quickly.”

Data Is At The Heart Of Transformation

Meanwhile, as Nicola Ayan, Optimizely Director, Technology and Growth in Asia Pacific and Japan, noted in the same interview, many organisations are still looking at transformation independently of data, and that’s a losing strategy. “Many organisations still have a culture of asking the highest paid person in the room for direction, taking their input and using that as the basis of a redesign,” Ayan said.

“So, what happens is they test and go live, and nine months in, they realise that, the conversions have not gone up, and if anything, it probably has gone worse. “Without the data-driven approach, organisations are not able to identify which areas work and which ones don’t, and struggle to drive sales and realise cost savings.”

The desire to help customers understand this was what drove Optimizely’s own recent transformation and growth as a company. As Ayan highlighted, it was already a leader in the content management space, but in understanding that it needed to add further value to that core offering, it has made several recent expansions and acquisitions, including:

• Idio (now Optimizely Content Intelligence and Recommendations), that uses individual data points to deliver 1:1 content recommendations to end users as well as help drive content strategy by guiding editors what topics to write next.
• Zaius (now Optimizely Data Platform), which helps organisations take a data-driven and machine learning-enhanced approach to decision making and provides a single view of the customer across all touchpoints (content, commerce, email, ads, data warehouse)
• Optimizely Web Experimentation, often playing a central part in the growth story of the business enabling the team to become more disciplined and focused with the way they do experiments to ultimately drive growth
• Optimizely Full Stack, which provides organisations more control in the delivery of customer experiences using feature flagging as well as the ability to experiment across the entire stack, including websites, mobile apps, chatbots, API’s, etc.

The sum of these solutions is Optimizely’s ability to deliver to the full potential of transformation and digitalization, Ayan claimed. “If you have 5000 customers, you should have 5000 customer experiences,” she said.

Of course, being able to deliver this level of expertise and customer experience also relies on understanding the local market and environment, and so, Ayan added, Optimizely is growing rapidly to better service its customers. “We’ve also invested in people in the region, including hiring a dedicated Partner Manager,” she said.

“We have an ambitious goal of onboarding 16 partners in the next six months in South-East Asia,” Ayan added. With organisations in all sectors, across the APAC region, being so committed to transformation and finding new digital revenue opportunities, those partners that can engage deeply on data are in the healthiest position of all.

For more information on the Optimizely solution suite, or to discuss its partner program, click here.