With an ever-changing and crowded social media landscape today, businesses could struggle to build a seamless omni-channel experience for their customers.

Threads, BeReal, and Bondee are some examples of modern platforms that rapidly emerged but waned in popularity just as quickly. Finding the perfect cross-cutting platform is even harder considering that region-specific channels like Douyin and Xiaohongshu are mainly popular in China and less so in other countries.

AIA, which has a presence in 18 Asia Pacific markets, has experience navigating the omni-channel landscape. The insurance provider is more than 100 years old but has evolved its customer engagement strategies to stay relevant. Three years ago, AIA embarked on another ambitious transformation journey via its Technology, Digital and Analytics (TDA) programme.

The learnings from the TDA journey unearthed valuable advice for businesses keen to overcome the omni-channel complexity – which is to build an experience that meets the customer where they want to be.

Expanding the perspective

The first principle to meeting the customer is to be digitally led. This means moving beyond a one or two-platform mindset and considering every platform where the customer could be. An elevated multi-channel experience is formed when businesses expand their perspective and curate a powerful ecosystem that plays to each platform’s strengths.

Social media is one scalable way to connect meaningfully with customers, making it a go-to platform for any business keen to uplift its omni-channel strategy. Better yet, social media’s scope of interactions is ever-expanding with the rise of super-apps in countries like Indonesia, South Korea, and China.

AIA China noticed this trend, where super app WeChat is used by everyone to chat, order food, make payments, and play video games, among other features. Although social-focused platforms like Xiaohongshu might seem a more popular choice to ground an omni-channel strategy, a digitally-led approach expanded AIA’s perspective and led to a WeChat integration with the AIA+ Super App, bringing two super apps together via an approach called One Experience.

Having WeChat in One Experience helped AIA build an integrated service ecosystem that harnesses the combined interactive experiences and user traffic of two super-apps. Customers have easier access to the AIA+ app to make service requests, submit claims, and even check their health and well-being.

Also Read: Unlocking growth and retention: Harnessing the power of omnichannel communication strategies

Through gamification, users can receive content relevant to their needs. One Experience contributed to 4.2 million users, 200,000 daily active users, and an average 4.5 rating on the app store for the AIA+ Super App (by December 2022), which is a testament to the success of this approach.

Putting the customers’ needs first

Meeting the customer means choosing platforms that meet their needs and not banking on trendy platforms. Using a platform with millions of users can achieve high reach for your business but lack customer relevance. Instead, a platform that offers convenience and relevant content will create long-term value by consistently bringing them back to your product.

Ideally, a chosen platform should be able to deliver personalised content that can reliably meet customers’ needs. This requires a setup where data analytics and customer experiences come together to ensure different audiences using the same application receive personalised content.

In Thailand, AIA’s super app, ALive, is using data analytics to provide an enhanced level of personalisation. Research into customer demographics and psychographics identified young couples and families as key customer segments, while physical, emotional, and financial issues were identified as their biggest areas of dissatisfaction.

The app was developed with relevant, personalised content to meet their needs. ALive is an example of an omni-channel experience that is personalised and effectively sustains interest from the customer, and it’s now been extended to more customer segments.

Another angle is to match the customer’s lifestyle and communication preferences to the platform available to them. Mobile platforms like WhatsApp are increasingly popular in industries like retail, banking, and insurance as businesses cater to individuals who want instant messaging while on the go.

In Indonesia, AIA customers can use ANYA to effortlessly tap into automated insurance offerings via WhatsApp, which is the most popular social media channel in Indonesia. According to a 2022 study by Kantar, seven out of ten Indonesians prefer business messaging services as compared to using a phone or email.

Also Read: Is omnichannel commerce a fairy tale for SMEs in Singapore?

Capitalising on this behaviour, AIA allowed customers to seamlessly access vital information and initiate self-service features like filing claims and modifying payment preferences on the app. Similarly, in the Philippines, BPI AIA Pamilya Protect uses Facebook Messenger to offer customers a simple and intuitive process of covering pre-qualification, purchasing, payment, and submitting e-contracts.

The new frontier for omnichannel experiences

Technology is rapidly changing, which further complicates the landscape but also creates new opportunities. Businesses must stay tuned to new technologies to test, learn, and discover innovative ways of meeting the customer.

The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a technology for businesses to take note of as it can transform the intelligence of the omni-channel ecosystem and create hyper-personalised customer-facing content.

AIA is exploring more Generative AI use cases in the next phase of its transformation journey. Today, AI already powers AIA’s social media prospecting tool (SIM), which generates customer-facing content across different platforms for agents to craft more personalised customer messages.

AI-powered personalised marketing helped AIA’s agents deliver more than US$280 million in annualised new premiums through digitally generated customer sales in 2022 and could potentially be boosted with the adoption of new Generative AI models.

Meeting the customer

Existing platforms are evolving, and new ones will emerge. Against this landscape, businesses can overcome the modern omni-channel crowd, uncertainty, and confusion by adopting a customer-centric and digitally-driven approach while embracing innovation.

By following these principles, businesses will be guided by the right perspectives and motivations, giving them the confidence to build experiences that meet customers on any channel they choose, with personalised value at every stage of their journey or lifecycle.

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