Since 2018, Forrester has been tracking how Singaporean customers rate their experience with some of the biggest brands in banking and auto and home insurance. This year’s Singapore Customer Experience Index (CX Index™) study reveals several important findings:
- CX quality among Singapore’s banks slightly dipped. The overall quality of banking experiences has slightly dropped since 2022, with the industry-average CX score sliding from 62.0 to 61.3 points on our 100-point scale. Brand-level CX scores were distributed across the “Poor” and “OK” categories. Our analysis also showed that negative CX perceptions outnumbered positive ones, as 49% of banking customers rated their experiences as poor or very poor, compared to 36% who rated their experiences as good or excellent.
- CX quality among Singapore’s auto and home insurers remained flat. Compared to last year, the industry-average CX score for home and auto insurance companies nudged up by a single decimal point, to 61.9. The brand-level CX scores were concentrated in the “OK” category. But the individual-level (customer) CX scores showed a notable gap between negative and positive CX perceptions, with 50% of insurance customers rating their experiences as poor or very poor compared to 35% who rated their experiences as good or excellent.
- Citibank and AIG topped the CX rankings in their respective industries. The two American brands captured the lead position in our CX rankings this year, with Citibank (CX score of 64.5) and AIG (CX score of 64.2) outmatching their peers in their respective industries. While both firms enjoy a relatively small statistical advantage over their peers (i.e., a 0.7–1.7 point advantage over the second-ranked brand), both firms attributed their ongoing success in large part to significant investments they made last year in voice-of-the-customer (VoC) programs and customer engagement that helped to inform their CX improvement initiatives.
- Hybrid CX outperformed both digital-only and physical-only CX. Hybrid experiences (i.e., when customers choose to interact with their providers using both digital and physical channels) were more positively rated than exclusively digital or physical experiences in both the banking and auto and home insurance sectors. In insurance, for example, hybrid CX received a score of 65.8 points, compared to 59.4 points for digital and 59.9 points for physical CX. In banking, hybrid CX received a score of 63.1 points, compared to 61 points for digital and 58.5 points for physical CX.
- Emotions outweigh ease and effectiveness in relation to loyalty. The way customers feel after interacting with their bank or insurer is much more impactful to their sense of loyalty to a brand than either the ease or the effectiveness of the underlying interactions. As our data showed, customers who feel positive after their experience are substantially more inclined to remain as a customer of a brand (i.e., retention), to purchase additional products from that brand (i.e., enrichment), and to refer friends or family members to that brand (i.e., advocacy).
Originally published on Forrester.
