Firms across Asia Pacific are actively leveraging digital experience (DX) agencies to design, build, and manage digital customer experiences (CX). But to fully access these benefits, you need to carefully select from a diverse set of providers that vary by size, functionality, geography, and industry focus.

Your options include agencies, consultancies, and tech providers that can all handle many tasks, from CX strategy through to design, implementation, and operations for web, marketing, commerce, and digital products and services.

In “The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Agencies In Asia Pacific, Q4 2018,” we identified the 13 most significant service providers in the Asia Pacific market: Accenture, Deloitte, Digitas, EPAM, EY, IBM iX, Isobar, Ogilvy, PwC, SapientRazorfish, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), ThoughtWorks, and VML.

Our evaluation consisted of a comprehensive set of criteria, detailed analysis, and interviews with 39 customers who use these agencies daily. While these agencies vary in their stakeholder focus, skills portfolio, and regional capabilities, the best ones excel at co-innovation and at marrying business, technology, and creative skills.

When evaluating providers, consider that the best digital agencies:

  • Become strategic advisors and co-innovation partners that extend your team. From all our interviews, the happiest customers viewed their agency as a partner in their success. Seek out great execution partners that can also help you understand and implement an outside-in perspective to break down internal silos, better leverage customer insights, and instill an agile culture. In Asia Pacific, we see a clear distinction between agencies that excel at generating unique creative ideas and those that excel at realizing those ideas. Interestingly, no agency in the region currently excels at both.
  • Provide reliable and resilient DX operational capabilities. Companies, especially those with just a handful of digital resources spread across the region, struggle to sustainably staff their digital marketing and commerce teams with the right blend of local knowledge and digital know-how. The best DX agencies help you build and run marketing and commerce operations that deliver relevant experiences across the region.
  • Put DX initiatives into a broader business context. DX initiatives typically require a deeper understanding of customers’ needs, an operating model overhaul to shift customers to online channels, or a wholesale transformation of your firm’s business model. The best DX agencies probe beyond the surface of a request, pushing you to identify your underlying challenges and stakeholders. They then leverage a flexible engagement model, assembling the right mix of capabilities based on your maturity level and business objectives.

Use “The Forrester Wave™: Digital Experience Agencies In Asia Pacific, Q4 2018” to see where service providers sit relative to your own company strategy, resources, road map, and long-term vision.

If you’re a Forrester client, you can read the Wave report here and the preceding Now Tech report here. If you’re interested in learning more about the findings from this Wave, set up an inquiry with inquiry@forrester.com.