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Customer Experience Automation

Customer Experience is now more essential than ever. Today’s customers demand not only functional products, but also exceptional brand experiences, and modern businesses must do everything in their power to make their customers’ experience as memorable and seamless as possible. As we’ll see in this article, Customer Experience Automation is one way to do that.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of CX. Just to put things in context before we move to the meat of the matter, let’s look at some statistics:

• 77% of brands believe CX is a key competitive differentiator (IDC). 
• 74% of consumers are likely to buy based on experiences alone (Forbes / Arm Treasure Data)
• Research by American Express found that 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better experience.
• According to a study by The Temkin Group, companies earning $1 billion annually can expect to earn, on average, an additional $700 million within 3 years of investing in customer experience.
• A study by Oracle reveals that 89% of customers have walked away from a brand due to poor CX.
• Over 4 out of 5 consumers would leave a brand they love after three or fewer instances of poor CX, and about 1 in 5 would after only one instance. (Emplifi)
• 9 out of 10 customers won’t purchase again from a company after three or even less poor customer service interactions (Customerthink).
• US businesses lose $35.3 billion annually in customer churn caused by avoidable CX issues (CallMiner)

Once you consider these facts, it’s easy to understand why so many companies across industries are looking at ways to improve their Customer Experience. Customer Experience Automation has been one of the most popular approaches to do so; in this article, we’ll explain everything there is to know about CX Automation, from why it is so important to how you can best implement it in your business.

But let’s start with the basics. What exactly is Customer Experience Automation?

What is Customer Experience Automation?

We can define Customer Experience Automation as any type of technology aimed at automating operational processes related to the improvement, creation, maintenance, and management of a consistent brand experience. Different tools might pursue different goals; however, when taken as a general concept or as a sum of the main tools leveraged by businesses, we can pinpoint the following as core benefits of Customer Experience Automation:

• Ability to offer 24/7 support to your customers.
• Minimised costs, more agile operations and less man-hours spent on menial or repetitive tasks.
• More personalised interactions, along with an increase of the quality of a brands’ presence in customers’ lives.
• Increased Customer Satisfaction derived from the quality of brand-customer interactions, as well as strong customer relationships and further brand expansion through word of mouth.
• Better Customer Sentiment Information; you can automate features like customer feedback gathering, customer sentiment measuring, CSat surveys, and more.

The definition sketched above might seem like a rather broad one: however, if this is so it’s because CX is a very broad terrain, and Customer Experience automation can thus take many different forms.

At its core, Customer Experience Automation is all about delegating routine and repetitive duties on software tools so that employees can focus their skills on higher-value tasks; but these duties might serve different purposes within a company, and tools might have little to do with each other or be based on different principles. Some Customer Experience Automation tools might be based on AI while others might not; some might automate feedback recollection, while others could be focused on customer service interactions, and so on.

For this reason, what we will do in this article is to go through the most effective tools and strategies for Customer Experience Automation that are most likely to deliver tangible, significant results. Let’s get to it.

Best Customer Experience Automation Tools and Strategies

AI Chatbots

According to a study by Userlike, 60% of customers prefer speaking to a live agent rather than a chatbot. This is mostly due to their concerns that the chatbot might be unable to accurately understand their problems.

However, the right chatbot can yield exceptional results. According to a Gartner 2023 study, The resolution rates of chatbots for customer queries related to orders and purchases reached 52%, while for returns or cancellations, it stood at 48%. Considering the early stage of chatbot AI development, but also the rapid advancements we’re witnessing in the field right now, these rates are projected to skyrocket in the upcoming years.

What’s more; the more advanced the AI powering a chatbot, the more detailed and domain-specific the queries it will be able to reply accurately and quickly.

Our Athena AI Conversational Bot, for example, is especially trained to address customer service queries with unmatched levels of precision and sophistication. Its intelligent algorithms enable it to learn continuously from a variety of data sources, from FAQs to email archives, previous chat transcripts, or your own website, ensuring it can always give customers the responses they need.

Automated emails

Automated emails are another simple yet powerful Customer Experience Automation resource that often increases engagement and facilitates your brand’s presence in your customers’ lives. Even if these are templated, they don’t need to feel canned; you can customise them as much as you need to and use them for different purposes, like:

• Sending vouchers and offers to loyal customers.
• Emails curated for new customers or subscribers to get introduced to your brand, catalogue, or offers.
• Transactional emails with password reminders, order confirmations, account activity updates, and so on.
• Abandoned cart emails for customers who add items to their carts but don’t complete the purchase. You can also add bespoke product recommendations that might complement or suit their needs better than their previous selection.

With Flow, our workflow automation tool, you can automate all your email routines with ease and send your customers personalised information, providing them with an experience that will suit their needs, preferences, and trajectory as customers of your brand. Flows allow you to automate all communications with your customers, to capture, transfer, and leverage customer information, and to build seamless, personalised, automated customer journeys.

Automated Customer Sentiment Measuring

Deploying automated customer satisfaction surveys can provide businesses with valuable insights into their Customer Experience strategies as a whole, measuring customer sentiment, and identifying strengths and weaknesses, all the while saving time and resources. 

This automated process facilitates quick analysis of survey data, enabling data-driven decision-making and efficient resolution of customer issues. By automating customer satisfaction surveys, which you can also do with our Flow tool, businesses can actively monitor and improve the customer experience, leading to long-term loyalty and satisfaction.

But surveys are not the only way you can measure customer sentiment. You can also use AI tools, like AI Sentiment Analysis, to read your customers’ emotions in their conversations with customer service agents and gather invaluable information about what your customers care about and what pain points they are encountering.

Two other AI tools you can use for this purpose are Keyphrase Analysis and Entity Recognition, which will spot the most common words, phrases, or entities (like products or prices) mentioned by your customers when they communicate with your brand on social media or customer service channels. These insights will be incredibly useful to find out about your customers preferences, demands and expectations.

Automated Notifications

Another way to automate a simple but effective Customer Experience strategy is to deploy personalised notification routines. If you have a brand app, you can send them notifications there; but if you don’t you can use instant messaging apps, like WhatsApp, or SMS messages.

Notifications can be used to remind customers about products that might suit their needs based on past conversations with customer service, to keep them updated about the status of their orders, or to inform them about new promotions they might find interesting. 

Workflow Automation

Human customer service that treats each customer on a personal level is another key requirement of optimal Customer Experience. You must make every customer feel heard; customer service agents should be able to address each customer with all the pertinent knowledge that their case may require, and to solve their queries in a swift and seamless way.

That might sound utopian, but it’s far from it. Today, workflow automation makes it possible for your customer service teams to achieve levels of efficiency that you might have thought impossible just a few years ago. Flow, our customer service workflow automation tool, allows you to design and automate entire customer journeys from scratch, linking any touchpoints with whatever rules suit your business and customers’ needs best. 

With Flow, you can also implement AI Athena into your workflows to sort and direct queries by skill required, topic, or priority, with features like Keyphrase Analysis or Speech Recognition. You can also route routine queries to our Chatbot, allowing your agents to focus on high-value interactions.

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