Despite growing economic uncertainty, 4 in 5 APAC retailers say they are confident in their ability to successfully implement their customer engagement strategy over the next 12 months. This is according to a new survey conducted by Twilio (NYSE: TWLO), the leading customer engagement platform that drives real-time personalised experiences for leading brands, at the National Retail Federation’s 2025 Retail’s Big Show Asia Pacific.
Yet, beneath this optimism lies a deeper challenge: customer loyalty is no longer a given. In today’s value-driven and price-sensitive environment, maintaining customer trust and loyalty (27%) has emerged as the top challenge faced by APAC retailers. This is ahead of responding to price-related dissatisfaction (23%) and managing communications around pricing or product availability (21%).
Placing bets on loyalty
Even as market conditions remain mixed, with 43% of retailers expecting both opportunities and headwinds, the most confident retailers are taking deliberate steps to win back their customers.
Loyalty and re-engagement (28%) was cited as the top area of untapped potential by confident retailers, signalling a resurgence of interest in loyalty programmes and personalised rewards as core growth strategies. Other areas of opportunity include product discovery (24%), and post-sale care (18%), as retailers look towards enhancing the entire customer journey.
This shift is also reflected in the tools these retailers are prioritising. Some 25% are investing in personalised offers and loyalty programmes, 27% are adopting conversational AI, and 22% are increasing human agent support. All these signal a broader push toward delivering more relevant, empathetic, and human-centred customer experiences across every touchpoint.
“Confidence is high in the region, which is fantastic. However, the brands that truly shine will be the ones that actually do something with that confidence,” commented Nicholas Kontopoulos, Vice President of Marketing, Asia Pacific & Japan at Twilio. “Customer loyalty is under pressure. Building resilience means responding to customers with empathy, relevance, and precision. And that begins with a data-driven, customer-first approach.”
Data-driven strategies power loyalty comeback
Across the region, leading APAC retailers are revamping their customer engagement playbooks with a sharper focus on loyalty and personalisation.
ZALORA is one such example. As a leading e-commerce fashion platform with over 55 million customers across Asia, ZALORA unified its customer data and enabled their teams with self-service capabilities, increasing the speed of campaign and experiment execution down from weeks to just minutes — and doubling conversion rates in the process.
Pomelo Fashion, a trend-focused retailer popular across Southeast Asia, elevated its customer experience by tailoring product discovery and recommendations for each shopper. This approach drove a 50% lift in product engagement and contributed to 15% revenue growth, reinforcing the value of contextual and individualised customer journeys.
Central Group, one of Thailand’s largest retail conglomerates, amplified the impact of its loyalty programme by integrating customer data across its online and offline ecosystems. With this unified view, it activated over 80 personalised, automated engagement use cases, resulting in a 10x increase in campaign revenue that was directly attributed to these efforts.
These examples showcase how forward-thinking brands are leaning into loyalty not just as a points programme, but as a broader strategy to drive relevance, trust and long-term value.
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