Having great products or services to sell is no longer sufficient for businesses to be appealing to customers and keep them coming back. A great customer experience has become a must. Studies say that the biggest hindrance to this is time. This is where customer experience automation helps. For, it helps deliver the right experience to the right person at the right time.
What is customer experience automation?
The customer experience (CX) refers to the total of a consumer’s feelings and perceptions about a brand resulting from his/her interactions with it through various touchpoints. These may include communications through channels such as its website, social media account, customer service, etc.
Customer experience automation is the use of technology and systems in place of humans to improve customer experience. This can be via improving efficiency, incorporating value-added features, cutting down the response times, etc.
What are the benefits of customer experience automation?
Here is a list of the benefits your business would enjoy by automating customer experience.
- Reducing costs related to manual labor
- Improving the quality of service
- Providing round-the-clock customer support or service
- Improving time and efficiency
- Improving customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Enabling staff to concentrate on core business activities
- Allowing scalability
- Boosting customer retention
- Increase revenue
4 Pillars of Customer Experience Automation
Customer experience automation heavily relies on the following 4 factors.
- Orchestration: Orchestration involves integrating all of your existing software to make them smarter and add value to the entire ecosystem.
- Segmentation: Segmentation involves grouping customers based on their online behavior, preferences, interests, and more to target messages for the right audience.
- Personalization: Personalization involves relying on data from the entire customer lifecycle to select the right content, delivery channel, and send time for each customer, irrespective of your business’ size.
- Automation: Automation involves employing tools and systems to accomplish different tasks. This minimizes or eliminates human effort.
3 Ways to automate your customer experience
Leveraging automation is an effective way to enhance the overall customer experience. Here are 3 things you can do to automate your CX.
Generate customized content
Content marketing is important for every business. However, blasting emails or blogs to all of your audiences alike doesn’t bring the desired results. So, go for creating targeted content to get the job done. Start by grouping your customers and potential customers based on their online activities and interests. Then deliver appropriate and customized content to each segment.
Just automate this process. For instance, if you own an e-store selling apparel, set your marketing automation software to determine the groups of the audience that will be interested in men’s collections, women’s clothing, formal wear, etc. On this basis, it should send out emails to the concerned group of the latest arrivals in their section of interest.
Integrate CX data with CRM data
Estimates say that acquiring a new customer costs 5 times more than retaining an existing one. Further, the chance of existing customers buying from you is much more than that of new prospects. This is why businesses should work on increasing their customer loyalty by ensuring a great CX.
Create an automated workflow to automatically update the contact info of customers in your CRM software as soon as you get feedback from them. This will help your customer service and sales teams to understand the exact requirement of each customer. This will prevent customers from getting frustrated over repeating their issues to each customer rep. This also opens up opportunities for upselling.
Deliver an outstanding shopping experience
The customer experience that your e-store delivers determines the number of returning customers and sales made. You should be able to provide real-time updates on product availability to your customers and inventory management to the backend. This will facilitate customers with a great CX and your procurement team to promptly replenish your inventory.
By automating this process, you can avoid customer frustration resulting from seeing items they are looking for being out of stock, which eventually can lead to their churn.
Summary:
Businesses today need to deliver an exceptional customer experience. Not delivering the right experience to the right person at the right time hinders this. This is where customer experience automation can help. Customer experience automation is the use of technology and systems in place of humans to improve customer experience.
Customer experience automation can lower expenses, improve quality of service, provide 24×7 customer support, enhance time and efficiency, improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, allow better focusing on core business activities, facilitate scalability, and boost customer retention. Customer experience automation heavily relies on orchestration, segmentation, personalization, and automation.
You can automate your customer experience in many ways. The top three of those have been discussed in this blog.
- Generating customized email and blog content for each customer on the basis of their online activities and interests. This will keep them engaged with your content more.
- Integrating CX data with CRM data to update the details of customers in your CRM software as soon you get their feedback. This will help prevent customer frustration resulting from repeating their information to each customer rep.
- Delivering an outstanding shopping experience by providingreal-time updates on product availability to your customers and inventory management to the backend. This will help avoid customer churn resulting from seeing the item they are looking for being listed as “out of stock”.
So, automate the above to ensure a great customer experience!
Author Bio
Shivani Goyal:
Shivani is a content writer at NotifyVisitors, which provides customer engagement software that allows marketers to plan, coordinate, manage, and measure their marketing campaigns performance.
