52% of businesses based in the APAC region believe in having a dedicated team for user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) research, according to a new industry report by UserTesting. This is a huge jump from 2020, when an earlier edition of the report recorded only 37% of businesses with an established UX/CX research team.

The UserTesting CX Industry Report, now in its ninth edition, attributes the shift to the pandemic, with 65% of executives saying that addressing market changes related to the pandemic is a top priority - up from 35% in the previous edition. And customer experience is one of the top investment areas (78%), echoing other research that has surfaced customer satisfaction as a major focus for APAC businesses this year.

However, the UserTesting report also found that many teams are lagging behind when it comes to gathering customer feedback. Over 25% of respondents either don't have access to a feedback platform or lack the training to gather feedback themselves; another quarter of respondents said that the teams that should be helping them to gather customer feedback are too busy with other tasks. 43% of respondents admitted that the teams responsible for gathering feedback face a time crunch.

Unsurprisingly, the UX/CX researchers themselves are overwhelmed and under-resourced. 56% say they don't have the capacity to take on new projects. This despite the fact that 60% of survey respondents are either expected, or outright required, to have a researcher involved in getting customer feedback for the design of new products or services, and that the frequency of organisations' conducting UX/CX research is increasing year on year.

What this adds up to is a demand for UX/CX research skills across the board - not necessarily specialised professionals, but people who are able to do the research themselves without involving the actual research team. Whether acquired through hiring or upskilling, it seems likely that organisations will be investing in these skills. And the researchers support the push, with 70% saying they would like to empower other people in their organisation to do research themselves.