The double-quote characters were 'seen' when used inside the s///.   When I changed the statement to:

$text=~s/\x{0095}/\x{017E}/g;
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your code worked.   Note that if you are displaying the output in a console window it won't look like what you want.   To 'see' the correct output (small cap Z with caron) I had to start up Word, ask for encoded text, then specify UTF-8 coding. (whew)