Julio Hernandez, Global Lead CEE, KPMG International, explained: “In a world of mass marketing and mass production, consumers still want to feel unique and have an emotional connection with brands they engage with. Organisations that play to this and move beyond the consumer to the individual, will win out. The research’s leading organisations are delivering exceptional experiences across the customer lifecycle and building emotional connections as part of each customer journey.”

Key findings

The findings were based on 84.066 consumers in 20 countries, regions and jurisdictions, providing feedback on 2075 cross-sector brands.

· Personalisation drives customer loyalty - leading in 18 of the 20 markets surveyed: Australia, Austria, Brazil, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, UK and USA.

· Consistency is key - The quality of customer experiences is improving worldwide. All countries researched in 2018 have seen an uplift in their overall CEE score this year.

· Local leaders are outperforming - The CEE score for the highest ranking brand in each market is an average of 12% higher than its respective market average.

· 3 dominant sectors - First place ranking positions are occupied by three sectors: Financial Services, Travel & Hotels and Retail.

· Empathy appears to be the most challenging Pillar - On average, performance is lower than across the remaining five Pillars.

Hall of Fame Brands and Integrity

The leading brands in each market were chosen by customers for their performance against the KPMG Six Pillars^TM of Customer Experience. The 2019 Hall of Fame shows new entrants as well as traditional, longer established brands.

The research also found that integrity drives customer advocacy in 14 out of 20 markets researched. This is perhaps unsurprising, as the report’s findings come at a time when scepticism around customer data is high, following a series of largescale data breaches across the globe in recent years. Consumers are concerned about trusting organisations and in particular what they do with their data. However, brands that are efficiently handling data are delighting their customers by reducing Time & Effort, showing more Empathy and demonstrating Integrity across the layers of their organisation. Companies with a strong sense of purpose (be it environmental, social or a dedication to the needs of a particular group of customers) enjoy greater customer loyalty as they are seen as authentic and as a result, have meaning in the lives of their customers.

KPMG in Cyprus Customer Advisory team

KPMG in Cyprus has an experienced Customer Advisory team offering services and support to organisations of various industries who want to improve customer experience, increase customer loyalty, design customer strategy and many more.

“We have helped different clients from the financial services, retail and TLT sectors to become customer-centric by bringing an outside-in perspective to help them understand what customers are expecting and how to define relevant and meaningful experiences for them”, said Antonis Bargilly, Board Member and Head of Strategy, Customer and Operations Services at KPMG in Cyprus. “Worth mentioning are 2 innovative tools we have developed locally: the KPMG “Snapwalker”, a mobile application which helps our clients to gather feedback from their customers in order to improve customer experience and the KPMG “Customer Intelligence Platform”, a platform which uses advanced algorithms to understand customer behaviour and help businesses make informed decisions.”

To access the full report, please visit the following link:

KPMG Global CEE 2019