CX across Asia Pacific
CX will remain in the spotlight for us during 2016. Find out what we've got in store for our customers over the coming months. 
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Coming off the back of a solid performance in 2014, we have a lot to be proud of here in the Asia Pacific with 6.3% growth on underlying revenue across the region. Australia and New Zealand did particularly well, with 5.5% and 6.5% YoY growth respectively – driven by strong online sales to new customers driven by solutions such as Lexis Advance and Practical Guidance as well as a carefully managed migration from print to online solutions. 

South East Asia and India achieved notable double-digit growth, securing results of 11.4% and 10.2% accordingly. The figures in North Asia and Greater China were more muted than we hoped for, registering 5.6% and 3.9% growth, however some lines performed well including local online which grew 17.3% in Greater China and 16.9% in North Asia. 

In summary, overall I think we should be very proud of our result in the APAC region, and I feel confident that we can look forward to another strong performance this year – following up 2015 with +6%/+$13.7M growth in 2016.

BA Executive Director, Mark Ellis, said: “As Myanmar signals to investors that it is open for business, it is essential that ILAM works to safeguard the independence of the legal profession and push for greater legal certainty. The association has an essential role to play towards developing Rule of Law and access to justice as the country works towards democratisation, ending impunity and achieving greater protection of human rights.” 

Veronica Rios, Head of Rule of Law and Emerging Markets for LexisNexis Asia Pacific, also attended the event and had the pleasure of meeting Daw Aung San Suu Kyi after the ceremony.

“What an honour it was to attend the ceremony and be in the presence of Aung San Suu Kyi who delivered the keynote address. She spoke of the role of ILAM in rebuilding the Rule of Law in Myanmar and urged practitioners to uphold professional standards and ethics in their practice. Afterwards when I met her, she thanked LexisNexis for the support and asked about our projects. I walked away in awe! It’s a great reminder of how our business is able to contribute in such a meaningful way through the work we do to uphold, promote and maintain the Rule of Law,” said Veronica. 

LexisNexis Sponsors ILAM Launch in Myanmar

On Tuesday, 19th January, 2016, LexisNexis sponsored the launch of the Independent Lawyers Association of Myanmar (ILAM). Held in the capital city of Naypyidaw, the inaugural ILAM meeting was opened by David W Rivkin, President of the International Bar Association (IBA) and Daw Aung San Suu Kyi – prominent human rights activist, humanitarian, Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Burmese Opposition politician and President of the National League of Democracy.

ILAM is the first national, independent professional organisation of lawyers in the country, and is the conclusion of a three year capacity building program by the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute (IBAHRI) in Myanmar. Since 2013, the IBAHRI has worked with Myanmar lawyers to establish a consensus of the need for an independent body to represent the legal profession nationally, and brought together a national steering committee to design ILAM.

The inauguration ceremony was hosted by the country’s Parliamentary Committee on Rule of Law and Tranquility and also the IBAHRI.

Australia fared quite well given that it introduced a new product to the NPS line up in 2015 (namely LN Red) and Affinity dragged the scores mid-year. Their score went from 2.3 to 4.6 YOY. China’s growth was very respectable, moving from 15.6 in 2014 to 17.6 in 2015.  

 South East Asia saw modest gains too, moving from 6.6 to 11.4 during the last 12 months. 

So where are we headed in 2016? This year we are aiming to record another 3% YoY growth by:

* Driving customer-centricity – through regional CX strategies and councils;

* Delivering high performance operations – via a variety of continuous improvement projects e.g. Project Longitude, Global Onboarding Project. 

* Leveraging ‘Voice of the Customer’ Results - by socializing insights and analytics among staff;

* Innovative Contact Resolution Tools – enabling customers to self-resolve problems e.g. online ‘Chat’ capability on our website; 

One of the key components of our Balanced Scorecard Framework is the customer, and last year we made steady progress in reaching our goal for greater customer-centricity across the business. 

Our Customer Net Promoter Score (NPS) increased by two points YoY across the APAC region, up from six to eight in 2015. This is a great achievement! Well done and congratulations to everyone involved in this outstanding effort. It’s up to each and every one of us to makes changes to the way we do things and continuously improve the customer experience.

Whilst nearly all countries made gains in 2015, the increase in the overall tally came largely from a stellar performance by New Zealand and India – up by 17.6 and 22.8 points respectively. New Zealand’s dream run was mainly off the back of the LNNZ platform, with 215 responses received in total – moving their score from -24.2 to -6.6 YoY.

India’s outstanding results came off the back of good gains in Print, recording 143 responses across the region. Tallying up 41.7 points, this is a massive improvement on the previous year at 18.9. 

During 2015, we continued to embed a strong culture of ‘continuous Improvement’ within the organisation. Employees are increasingly becoming empowered to change the way we do things across the business with initiatives such as the quarterly Eureka Day events and Six Sigma training program.

In total, 115 staff completed Yellow Belt training across the APAC region last year – with 36 from REPH APAC completing the course in November. To date, there have been 114 Yellow Belt projects completed since the program’s inception. Moreover, 16 employees have finished Green Belt training, with 2 projects closed recently.

Similarly, our Eureka Day program was very popular in 2015, with participants learning a variety of process innovation skills – including process mapping, RASCI charts and defining associated risks and benefits. At last glance, more than 600 processes have been uploaded to the ‘Process Hubs.’

Overall, our CI projects have delivered $2.8M in combined soft and hard savings to date! But that doesn’t mean we are stepping on the breaks in 2016. This year we are aiming for 15% accreditation across the business. In fact, just this month we held two more Yellow Belt classes in Chatswood with the participation of Australia and New Zealand.

Over the coming months, Six Sigma courses will also be held in Greater China, India and South East Asia.  Additionally, we will be running workshops to help empower teams through continuous improvement activities and our quarterly Eureka Day program will continue throughout the year –with our first event coming up on 1st March.  

We’ve made significant progress over the last few years, with many milestones and achievements on the board. But there’s still a lot of work to be done, and we’re ready for it. Bring it on!

At this month’s Leadership Conference in Auckland, our leaders took the opportunity to acknowledge and celebrate some of our key ‘People’ achievements from 2015 – with all our Asia businesses improving their EOS scores between 8 to 14 points year on year.

Similarly, our Editorial Operations team improved a staggering 21 points and New Lexis increased by a very impressive 20 points. New Zealand, Editorial Operations, New Lexis and India achieved our highest engagement scores overall – registering 65%, 62%, 58% and 56% respectively.

Employee engagement is very important to us all, and is one of the key metrics we track across the APAC region as part of the Balanced Scorecard framework. While we’ve made progress in recent years, we still have a long way to go – and the latest Employee Opinion Survey results reflect that. 

On a pleasing note, the data from 2015 indicates employees feel a genuine pride in our organisation and a sense of positivity about  the momentum we are creating as a business. So it’s good to hear we are heading in the right direction. 

This year, we aim to accelerate the momentum we’ve achieved to date and focus on key priorities – including empowering all employees to make decisions; championing diversity and inclusion; strengthening our culture of customer focus and innovation; and further growing the vast talent pool that is our employee base. We look forward to sharing our progress and success stories throughout the course of the year.

Congratulations to our award winners at the 2016 APAC Leadership Conference in Auckland! Several countries received Financial Awards for outstanding contributions during 2015, including New Zealand team who received the highest honour of ‘Exceptional Contribution’. While Australia, India and South East Asia were each recognised for ‘High Achievement.’

Five attendees were also presented with Excellence Awards for distinguished leadership and performance in their respective business units, including Jo Wade (New Lexis), Sanjay Singh (IND), Andy Boss (NZ), Amitabh Srivastava (SEA) and Bree Moody (AU). Well done everyone!