Customer Experience Automation: How to Get Started with CX Automation

If you want your business to succeed and flourish, you must provide an outstanding, unique, and exceptional customer experience (CX). According to research, 86% of consumers are ready to pay more for products and services for a better CX. The CX Automation also leads to better targeting, higher conversion of leads, and customer loyalty.

However, managing customer expectations can be expensive and time-consuming. It is not only about face-to-face customer dealing; customer experience today is required on multi-channel – social media, email, chatbots, websites, mobile apps, etc. It has become imperative to improve your business's automated customer experience data. It has been observed that:

• The number of consumers interacting with chatbots has doubled over the years
• 83% of consumers prefer messaging to contact customer service if an immediate response could be guaranteed, up from 76% in 2018.

Thus, it is time for a revolution in the customer experience, which will eventually lead to a successful business. This is where Customer Experience Automation comes into relevance. Here we will discuss the perks, benefits, and features of Customer Experience Automation and why it has become critical for your business to apply it.

What is Customer Experience?

Customer experience means everything for business. The best quality products and services fail if no one is buying them. Consumers today look at personalized customer experience. You must pay heed to consumer ratings and preferences as the difference between a 4.6 and 4.9 rating of your product can make all the difference.

Thanks to digitalization and the application of AI in several business technologies, companies today are automating all business processes. Humans traditionally managed activities are now automated using bots and other interesting technologies.

Related Read : Key Strategies to Boost Ecommerce Customer Experience

What is Customer Experience Automation? How it Works

Customer Experience Automation is all about:

1. Orchestration - Create the most sensible toolset for your business model, then orchestrate customized experiences. "Orchestration" means polishing your existing and empowering it by leveraging customer data.
2. Segmentation – It is best to segment shoppers by individuals. Customer Experience Automation tracks shopper preferences, persona, behavioral statistics, and many personalized attributes throughout the customer lifecycle, giving you the broadest possible data set for segmentation.
3. Personalization – Customer Experience Automation ensures delivering the best content, shipping times, and delivery channel for each customer, allowing you to create fully customized campaigns with minimal effort. It helps businesses replicate the personalized experience 1-1 for every customer, regardless of the size of your business.
4. Automation - Don't just relieve the pressure. Improve your client's entire strategy with AI. If you can give every customer the best possible experience while they sleep, that's like having an extra employee.
   
   With CXA, you can assist customers with common tasks, help them effectively communicate with your brand, and improve certain aspects of customer service, including faster response times, improved efficiency, or the integration of value-added features. This can enhance consumer engagement, drive customer loyalty, and improve the automated customer experience.

Customer Experience Automation improves every category of software

• Email advertising
• Extracting data from the entire customer lifecycle
• Operational efficiency
• Marketing automation
• Deliver a more personalized automated customer experience
• CRM
• Take sales out of silos and better align daily activities  
• Account management
• Connect emails, live chat, and SMS interactions

How Does Customer Experience Automation Work?

You must rely on professional services and elite Customer Experience Automation to leverage world-class customer service within your business.

Customer Journey Mapping

This technique helps to identify milestones, trigger personalized communications, analyze customer behavior, track each customer's progress, and identify where customers are encountering friction or not converting.

The mapping techniques help resolve problems, adapt to the transforming and trending market conditions, supervise improvements, and optimize the automated customer experience.

Customer Loyalty Tracking

Automation helps your business track interactions, customer activities on digital interfaces, and consumer electronic communications. It enables dashboards to measure customer engagement and identify effective communication tactics and areas for improvement.

Customer Communication Management

This essential feature helps streamline customer preferences, understanding communications, and delivering them through the customer's chosen channel. Use an automation platform to send the right message at the right time in the customer journey.

Customer Analytics

Automation introduces a high-impact CX Automation management through which you can measure the success of your customer journey map. It offers executive dashboards that compile powerful analytical tools to identify trends in both the customer base and the broader market so you can respond to the market demands for optimal impact.

Digital Experience Platform

Use automation to empower consumers with self-service features that reduce call center costs and improve customer satisfaction.

Why is Customer Experience Important?

CXA helps businesses in all industries to drive every key business metric. It helps organizations achieve their goals and bridges best-in-class toolsets, giving everyone a connected view of the customer.

• CXA for Marketing - Create highly personalized campaigns throughout the customer lifecycle.
• CXA for sales - Personalize communications based on complete visibility into what matters most to customers.
• CXA for customer service - improve messaging, forecast customer problems, and prioritize outreach based on the most important needs

About 54% say customer service automation has improved their delivery of automated customer experience as compared to just 43% in 2018.

A whopping 66% of Gen Z, 59% of Millennials, and 47% of Gen X say service is improving with CXA.

Chatbots handled 64% of all issues for one retailer surveyed, resulting in a 13% faster first response time, avoiding the wait time waiting for an agent to become available.

1. A Positive Automated Customer Experience Improves CLV and Customer Loyalty

Research shows that how quickly their issue is resolved is directly related to how satisfied customers are with the support they receive. About 90% of customers said getting an immediate response was very important to them. Customers derive a better experience when they are given a solution within 5 minutes than with a company that takes 24 hours to get back to them.

Therefore, to improve the automated customer experience, you should focus on Consumer Lifetime Value, customer loyalty, and speed.

2. Increase in Conversion Rate

Figures show that, on average, 56% of companies are already using marketing automation, and more than 40% of B2B companies are planning on adopting automation technologies.

With marketing automation, you can do more in less time. Marketing automation also has a lot to offer in the field of CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization). This article shows you how to improve conversion rates by applying automation to:

• Email advertising
• Communication with the customer
• Main scores

Related Read: Customer Service Email Templates: Sample Templates to Copy

3. Improve Customer Satisfaction

Customer Experience Automation can help you streamline your business processes and build trust with your customers delivering a cohesive brand experience they'll want to tell their friends about.

You can make your customers happy by applying automation and enhancing consumer integration, segmentation, personalization, experience in chatbots, electronic forms, real-time updates, and real-time reports.

4. Increase in Referral & Reorder Rates

A completely manual configuration of customer service can make it difficult for businesses to manage spikes in customer requests and keep up with seasonal demand trends.

Automation greatly increases an agent's average productivity and can refine features such as website chatbots, predefined answers, and self-service options. Agents can answer much higher questions over the same period. This will make the consumers return for more if the first experience is impeccable.

How Does Automation Improve Customer Experience?

Customer experience automation has now become imperative in running any business. It helps improve customer experience in many ways, which are discussed below:

1. Automation Helps Treat Each Customer as Your Most Important Customer

Customer integration via email and personalization while answering customer questions via automation help desk or CRM helps improve the automated customer experience. Every consumer interaction is an opportunity to speak on behalf of your brand – to connect and deepen a relationship with the customer that builds loyalty.

This is why we need to increase, not avoid, our interactions in a digital space where we don't have as many opportunities to connect face-to-face.

2. Help With Customer Engagement and Loyalty

AI-powered chatbots have always taken care of customer retention by providing instant responses. Automation enables better and more efficient customer communication, which is key to the automated customer experience. Requests can also be prioritized based on urgency and severity.

3. Improves the First Time Resolution and First Response Rate

The modern CMS Help Desk has been useful for customers. Based on customer questions, agents can provide a resolution to customer queries immediately. Follow the most important statistics, such as the first response time and the median time, and divide it further through the channel and the subjects to see where you need to focus today.

It brings greater precision and relevance to your relationships by excluding non-business hours or filtering them for agent, brand, channel, or ticket tag. Help your team to form personal advice for each agent better.

4. Self-Service Automation Helps Your Business

Automation empowers your business with self-service functions, helping to avoid answering common questions. You need to understand why customers contact you.

CXA helps attract support requests through topics and actions to these intuitions to improve operations, processes, and policies. These reports give you a cumulative vision of the most common problems of your customers.

Read More: Customer Self-Service: Benefits, Best Practices & Examples

5. Help Generate Useful Opinions, Feedback, and Comments

Customer feedback is crucial for the growth of your business. If a customer complains about one operational field of your company, let's say shipping or high costs, you must immediately work with your respective internal teams and look for a solution. Automation helps you obtain customer reviews and comments on a large scale from usable customers.

By facilitating customers to provide their comments easily, companies benefit from a multitude of data and a list of visible improvements for customers. When the request and response process is automated via a reputation experience management platform (RMX), there are fewer errors and greater consistency. Businesses can quickly create a volume examination to increase grades and rankings in local research.

Ways to Improve Customer Experience through Automation

1. Indulge in Effective Communication by Implementing Multi-channel Customer Service

Multi-channel support enables your organization to thrive on various platforms. It further expands your brand reach and provides exceptional customer support on multiple applications. Richpanel customer service helpdesk can provide soft and efficient multi-channel support by automating all channels in one dashboard.

It offers a multi-channel experience through various channels like social media, other conversational channels like WhatsApp, voice-based inbound and outbound support, email, and websites, plus mobile applications.

2. Start With Personalized Communication

Personalization and customization provide a unique, personalized customer experience and make a great first impression. It also helps set expectations about the nature and tone of their automated customer experience by continuing to engage with your brand. For example, you can create automated welcome messages.

Nothing can create an instant boost in engaging your content compared to triggered welcome emails. The main purpose of a welcome email is a personalized confirmation from your new customer. It's a great way to provide a unique and personalized customer experience and create a great first impression. You can also promote personalized offers based on the time your customers spend on specific content.

3. Automate Common or Repetitive Searches Through Self Service

Automation promotes self-service flows such as returns, exchanges, change of shipping address, etc. A self-service customer portal can resolve 40-60% of tickets without contacting an agent/support staff.

Richpanel allows your customers to solve their problems without the involvement of your customer service team. Building a self-service center is something every brand can benefit from. It can contain:

• Help documents
• FAQs and interview-based questions about your products
• Interactive presentations and workflows

Use a platform like Richpanel for fast-growing e-commerce brands that understand the importance of great customer support and aim to bring all support touchpoints together under one roof.

4. AI-Powered Chatbot to Provide 24/7 Service

Customer service managers are already impressed with chatbots. Chatbots were used by 1.4 billion people in 2021. About 64% of customer service managers said a chatbot could understand customer context. About 55% said chatbots correctly assess customer value in light of their transaction history and interactions with the business.

Chatbot features such as 24/7 availability and the ability to understand customer intentions make them great for:

• Answering customers with personalized answers.
• Containing detailed customer information to resolve issues faster.
• Chatbots also take advantage of machine learning capabilities.
• Chatbots can improve the automated customer experience and reduce service costs.
• Answer the frequently asked questions and reduces the cost of hiring more staff.
• Provide a more engaging experience.

Let's look at an example:

IBM's Robotic Process Automation enables IT teams to incorporate customer service chatbots to meet customer requests. The software can be programmed to generate programmed responses via virtual agents and minimal human intervention.

Additionally, machine learning capabilities allow the software to learn from past performance data to help employees prioritize handling daily demands.

5. Customer Ticket Routing & Assignment

Configure your operations to scale seamlessly by investing in smart workflows, smart routing, and assignment logic to minimize clutter while constantly scaling your order volume and customers. Richpanel is truly rich with everything this program offers. It combines all the platforms customers use to contact our business in one place.

Richpanel reduces the time it takes for agents to gather information and provides customers with self-service, thus increasing the number of incoming messages. By configuring their ticket routing and assignment feature, you can automatically assign customer requests or tickets based on priority, agent skills, channel, language, availability, etc.

While ticket routing is technically a behind-the-scenes process, it has a major impact on the customer experience. To rationalize the process, you must provide an intelligent classification based on AI and automation. The main advantages of the use of the classification engine powered by Richpanel include:

• Speed
• Accuracy
• Skill Assignment
• Scalability

With Richpanel, you don't have to triage requests manually. Instead, you define rules for your help desk system to follow. Automatically assign tickets to the right agent and support them with individual dashboards where they can log in and work on tickets assigned to them.

With automated warnings, you can keep your agents up to date by transmitting relevant information. You can send notifications for events such as a new ticket, a response to a ticket, resolution status, etc. Richpanel has everything connected by an elegant interface that makes customer support seamless.

6. Automation Can Trigger Customer Surveys.

Once the customer problem is resolved, automate the sending of surveys through channels such as live chat, email, and SMS. Richpanel has an advanced option to send CSAT surveys to customers. Richpanel smart bots trigger surveys to the right audience, at the right time, on the right channel to get the best response rates.

Validate the effectiveness of your automated customer experience by listening to the customers themselves. Send surveys that collect this information to channels of your choice and consolidate them into CSAT scores. Richpanel's smart robots trigger surveys to the right audience, at the right time, on the right channel to give you the best response rates. You can:

• Measure customer satisfaction with CSAT surveys
• Ask your customers to rate you using stars or emoticons
• You can enable the CSAT survey on all or some channels
• Include surveys in live chat and email
• Engage your customer through automation

Automation can be implemented to repeat the latest orders on the customer account and product recommendations that help engage the customer by giving the right suggestion or answers to customer questions. Automating customer engagement is critical for any business in the world.

Whether you have a large number of customers or deliver all over the world, it's a must. Customer engagement automation enables businesses to streamline workflows to increase operational efficiency and revenue.

7. Engage your Customer Through Automation

Automated customer experience engagement can be greatly enhanced by automating. Customer engagement is customer feedback (satisfaction surveys, NPS, CSAT), customer emails (From Custom Onboarding to Registration), etc.

The customer service process (from Chatbots to auto-generated customer support tickets). Customer engagement concerns low-touch onboarding processes, customer segmentation and prioritization, and notifications for customers at risk of churn.

Here are a few examples:

1. Thinx delivered consistent CX Automation despite its massive scale. Thinx halved tickets and improved CX by implementing self-service automation and a multi-channel mailbox.
2. Bumpboxx achieved this with Richpanel's flexible and intelligent self-service workflows that considered frequently asked customer questions, such as:

• Product FAQs
• Order tracking
• Allow returns and exchanges without contacting an agent in seconds.

With Richpanel, Bumpboxx has since been able to resolve their support questions in an average of 5 seconds!

Read More: How BumpBoxx resolves tickets in 5 Seconds!

Customer Experience Automation Platform and Use Cases

Richpanel is an extensive, user-friendly, affordable, and exceptional Customer Service CRM that delivers outstanding omnichannel customer support that leads to an awesome automated customer experience. Richpanel's live chat and customer service help desk make serving your customers easy and profitable.

Brands with an exceptional customer experience generate 5.7 times more sales than their competitors. Richpanel's advanced help desk delivers seamless, personalized performance, helping your customers find answers quickly with self-service and helping your support agents work efficiently and effectively, delivering the level of service their customers demand.

Use Cases:

1. Pawz resolved 70% of the inbound queries via Richpanel's self-service, letting customers solve 50% of their support tickets. This reduced your backlog of tickets by 50%, which further helped customers troubleshoot order tracking, changes, cancellations, exchanges, returns, and more.

As more animal lovers interacted with Pawz, they saw a sudden increase in their interactions with customer service. In 2020, incoming support requests went from 100 per day to over 1500 per day in just a few months.

Richpanel enabled the team to manage multiple channels from a single screen and solve repetitive questions with self-service. The biggest impact Richpanel has had with Pawz has been the ability to respond to our customers promptly on one screen.

The Pawz team has used Richpanel self-service to achieve outstanding results, with over 70% of their incoming queries resolved by customers. As Pawz has grown over the past two years, the need for client-agent interaction has diminished significantly.

PAWZ's Support Team and Richpanel's Customer Success Team analyzed the data and identified the most requested queries to create self-service flows that resolve those queries. Their obsession with consistently delivering a great automated customer experience helps them grow rapidly and monetize across all channels.

With Richpanel's agent dashboard, PAWZ brought all channels together in one place as a ticket and tagged them by source so agents could easily categorize them. Richpanel's self-service portal has helped its customers resolve most queries and escalate complex issues to their team. The team turned multiple conversations into orders with happy and satisfied customers, turning customer service into a revenue-generating division for Pawz.

Read More: Pawz resolved 70% of tickets through self-service

2. Alaska King Crab Co. - High volume of orders handled by customer service automation without hiring agents with:

55% - Automated Resolutions
9.5% - Conversations with earnings
90% - CSAT

After Covid-19, the Alaskan King Crab Co. team decided to overhaul their website experience. During this overhaul, they also looked closely at their customer service. They found that agents struggled to stay efficient while delivering consistent CX Automation in their confusing multi-tool setup on Zendesk.

Agents constantly switched between apps like Instagram, Facebook, Yotpo, Route Insurance, and Shopify. A flood of questions before and after the purchase had also overwhelmed the support team. This led them to consider expanding the size of their support team.

Alaskan King Crab Co didn't understand the endless possibilities of well-executed self-service until they saw Richpanel's full range of capabilities. Their experience with Zendesk led them to believe that self-service was the same as well-written FAQs.

Alaskan King Crab Co was then guided through the Richpanel induction process to:

1. Set up integrations (Shopify) and channels: Facebook, Instagram, and website
2. Zendesk data migration and ticket analysis to determine self-service options
3. CX Automation audit to optimize Alaskan King Crab Co's use of Richpanel on their channels
4. Self-service configuration

From the point of view of an agent, the Richpanel customer success team helps you enrich your consumer interactions by creating personalized data fields. Alaskan King Crab Co agents were also happy to create conceptions, save payments and trigger the profile of each client without leaving the Richpanel screen.

Read More: How Alaskan King Crab Co. Managed High Order Volumes

It is even more important than creating reports and dashboards to measure agents' efficiency and sales effects.

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The big advantage of Customer Experience Automation is the reduction of human error and making better use of resources. Customer Experience Automation enables the creation of structured processes and helps you manage your CX Automation program.

Your employees have time to focus on what matters most. Activities such as creating standard follow-up emails or tickets to notify customer support of a follow-up requirement should always be sent automatically. It helps you focus on solving customer problems.