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Customer experience (CX) is the convergence of three elements – human, process, and increasingly, technology. With 100% of customers clamoring for self-service options — be it for setting up demos or answering product questions — it’s no wonder that ‘improving customer experience’ has catapulted to the top three automation goals of marketers everywhere.
As more and more touch points between businesses and customers are established, the expectation to provide a seamless customer experience across channels has turned into a necessity. And automation is the way to go for businesses that want to design, create and constantly reinvent superior buyer journeys. Let’s dig into the big questions:
Customer experience automation (CXA) refers to delegating routine CX tasks to specialized software instead of staff. It automates workflows so that the data gathered from a customer is analyzed and interpreted to have tailor-made interactions with each individual customer.
CXA uses AI to automate conversations, whether customer or company-initiated, for the entire customer lifecycle including marketing, selling, and servicing.
Whether you have ten customers, or ten thousand, keeping track of their individual preferences, addressing their individual concerns, and meeting their individual expectations is integral to how they perceive you. And CXA does more than just change customer perception.
In 2022, businesses across sectors witnessed a 19% drop (the biggest ever) in customer experience quality. Problems like rising costs and staff shortages, the two major contributors to deteriorating CX, can be addressed by automating parts of the CX journey to service customer expectations without wrecking bottom lines.
Here are the key benefits of customer experience automation to consider:
There are multiple ways to integrate CXA in your business. Whether you’re a bootstrapped team looking to manage growing customer demands or a large organization that wants to streamline your customer service process, this list has something for you.
1. Use welcome screens to greet new users and collect customer data
It might seem counterproductive to waste effort on a screen users will probably look at only once, but a welcome screen is the first glimpse they have of your product. It’s also your most important data collection point, because it’s where the processes of lead generation and segmentation begin. That in turn determines the personalized workflow you’ll have to create for that user.
A university website, for example, might be accessed by prospective students, enrolled students, or faculty. A welcome screen that collects this data from a visitor can then guide them to the relevant pages depending on their intent.
Khan Academy’s welcome screen uses simple buttons to segment users at the time of sign-up.
Design a welcome screen that aligns with your brand and target demographic. A more tech-savvy, younger demographic might respond better to an interactive game tutorial whereas older audiences may need to be offered sample content (like videos) along with the additional assurance of chat support.
2. Use pre-defined checklists to prompt users to complete key actions
A user onboarding checklist is a set of pre-defined tasks that users have to complete to use or understand your product effectively. It breaks down complex processes and converts them into manageable goals. Your users are more likely to be motivated to stay on track instead of stumbling from feature to feature and getting frustrated.
Hive, a project management software, combines their checklist with a task-based game. It doubles up as a user manual, minus the snooze factor. Detailed task lists like this one improve user adoption by encouraging them to try out different features.
Despite a rapid increase in the number of channels available for business-customer interaction, emails remain as popular as ever and are the preferred channel of communication for 74% of customers.
A true omnichannel CX cannot be complete without automated, personalized emails that speak to the customers’ needs and interests.
For instance, at Hunter, email automation is used to intimate users about updates that are important to them. When a customer uses the Domain Search tool to find valid emails from specific domains, they’re met with a screen like this.
But if the address of the person they wished to contact isn’t available in the database at the moment, the search might come up empty. When an email they were looking for is added to the database, an automated email with personalized content gets triggered and sent to them. Like this one here.
Merge tags can help you personalize an email beyond just first names. You can also use automated emails to up-sell and cross-sell, for customer education when new features are added, and to get customer feedback.
4. Use artificial intelligence and automatically create onboarding videos to guide users
Not every sale equals a purchase. If you don’t make it easy for users to use your product, you’ll soon have disgruntled users lining up for refunds. The solution? Onboarding videos.
Cintas, a corporate uniform manufacturer, uses this video to explain their process to new clients.
AI-generated videos means you don’t have to worry about cameras, lighting, retakes, and editing. And they don’t put people to sleep the way user manuals do.
Simple screen capture videos with voiceovers that explain how to start using your product keep users from feeling overwhelmed. If you want something more elaborate, platforms like Steve.ai and Synthesia let you convert text to speech and use talking heads in your videos. They have customizable templates and transitions to speed up the process of video creation.
You can make videos to walk new and existing users through
5. Use chatbots (in-app resource center and offer self-service support on-demand)
Most users that approach customer support on live chat don’t just want an answer to their query, they want it now. 96% said they wouldn’t wait longer than five minutes for a response, with 49% only willing to wait one minute before dropping the conversation.
You can have the most efficient customer service team in the world and still not be able to match these expectations. And unlike your customer service team, these problems and queries don’t clock out at 5 PM.
In addition, chatbots are a fantastic resource for proactive customer service. Here, you identify and respond to issues before a customer feels the need to reach out. This can give a significant boost to overall customer satisfaction.
A live chat feature powered by a chatbot that understands natural language can build more positive customer experiences. Comm100’s chatbots have no-code builders, and are easily customizable. They quickly resolve low-touch customer inquiries about things like order status and payment options, leaving only non-standard questions to be answered by human staff.
Tangerine, one of Comm100’s customers, had as many as 91% of its live chats resolved by the bot. The chatbot can also be customized to include FAQ page links related to the search terms, thus enabling stranded users to find answers using online knowledge portals.
6. Customer feedback automation
Stasis is not conducive to growth. Great products are created through constant improvement, for which customer feedback is vital. CXA collects customer feedback at various touch points, and reports the highlights back to you.
In-site surveys, CSAT emails, pop-up Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, etc. can all be used to gather feedback. You can set behavioral triggers in your chatbot to conduct pop-up surveys. These are best executed on the basis of a single score, with the option to give a detailed answer later, like QuickBooks, an accounting software provider, does here.
Create workflows to prompt users to leave a review after they share positive feedback, or take remedial steps if they’ve had a less than satisfactory experience. Use their inputs to refine your product further and stay ahead of the curve. You can customize your chatbot to offer special discounts or coupons, or the opportunity to beta-test new features to promoters (users that rate your product 9 or 10).
7. Automatically route support tickets
When a customer has a query that needs to be resolved by a specific department or agent, a ticket is generated and routed (sent) to them. Without automation, tickets have to be manually assigned to an agent based on their skills. Manual routing is error-prone and time-consuming, and leads to delays and frustration on both ends of the customer support channel.
But a standardized process with rules for the sorting of tickets on the basis of source, urgency, status, agent, etc., reduces response times and brings about greater customer satisfaction.
Comm100’s ticketing feature can be integrated with its chatbot to automatically raise and route support tickets. You can also create canned responses for agents based on their specializations to cut down response times further. Since the data from online as well as offline messages is available to the agent, grievance redressal becomes more efficient.
We hope that this blog has helped you to understand what customer experience automation is, and how it can transform your organization. Personalization’s grip on redefining customer experience remains unchallenged. And automating it is every business’ best bet at maintaining CX quality without burning a hole in their pockets. By implementing CXA in your business, you can eliminate redundancies from business processes, remove information silos, and ensure more efficiency in customer support channels.
Use this guide to transform your customer experience strategy and differentiate yourself from competitors by putting the spotlight back where it has always belonged — on the customer.
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