6 Effective Ideas to Improve Customer Experience with Automation

Customer Experience is an area which has almost entirely digitized, making it a perfect candidate for automation. Most customer experience-related activities include the processing and collection of data, which McKinsey have highlighted as top activities with highest automation potential, at 69% and 64% respectively.

What is CX Automation?

Customer Experience (CX) automation refers to delegating predictable and repetitive tasks from white-collar workers to specialized software. Automating customer experience tasks involves the definition of a task, understanding the required input, output and method for processing data.

Customer experience in the digital space, such as for e-commerce, finance, or other online service providers, typically requires customers to self-serve a variety of activities, such as completing forms, registering for a service, payments, and requesting support. A self-service model means that the services must be available on-demand, meaning that the availability of human operators should not be relied upon or necessary.

CX Automation has so far been held back by the difficulty of stringing together multiple processes into a single end-to-end workflow. For example, digital forms have been around for many years, but their functionality comes to an abrupt end when the gathered data populates a spreadsheet and stays dormant until a person starts interpreting it. The challenge automation software has been addressing is creating a flow of data. Workflow automation is enabling customers to gather form data, have the inputs pushed into a customer satisfaction tool, which can continuously track metrics, and then send email notifications to management when a metric falls below a threshold.

Reasons More Companies Are Automating Customer Experience Management

Now that customer experience automation is a technically feasible exercise, businesses worldwide are employing it to achieve benefits such as:

• Dealing with large volumes of requests without reliance on a limited workforce
• Repositioning customer experience staff to other value-adding activities rather than repetitive low-value tasks
• Processing customer requests in seconds rather than hours, days, or weeks

Automating a single task can provide tangible benefits. For example, Forrester identified that the benefits of automating customer onboarding included a 90% faster onboarding time, 10% higher margin per customer, 5% incremental customer acquisition, and 2 fewer FTEs per booking center.

6 Ways to Use Automation That Improve The Customer Experience

Achieving a fully automated customer experience is a process which will likely take a long time to define. However, we’ve seen how many benefits a business can gain with a single automated process. On your journey to a fully automated customer experience, we recommend implementing the following processes, which are typically low-hanging fruit for most businesses.

1. Automate Customer Feedback (Satisfaction Surveys, NPS, CSAT)

Asking customers to provide upon the completion of a service is a great way of keeping a pulse upon the quality of services you are offering and the experience they had. The forms can either be delivered via email, such that the customer can complete them when available, or the feedback can be requested via a pop-up screen. If you choose to request feedback via pop-up, we recommend asking for a single and simple metric, such as asking for a rating on a scale from 0 to 10, and then offering the option to provide further feedback.

Pros

• Customers can provide feedback while their experience is still fresh in their mind, rather than being contacted via telephone days later
• Providing experience is simple and straightforward, which may only entail providing a few ratings
• Forms can be highly customized to be specific to the service
• Results can be instantly pushed into live tracking tools

Cons

• Giving feedback may seem impersonal, where users may not translate their emotions as well in writing as they would verbally
• It can be easy for customers to ignore any feedback requests

Tools such as Grohawk and Retently have developed platforms that allow you to gather feedback from your customers and measure scores such as NPS and CSAT across long time frames.

2. Automate Customer E-mails (From Personalized Onboarding to Check-Ins)

You can automate emails to customers via a variety of platforms to send batch emails to subscription lists. These platforms enable you to create different categories and track how subscribers have interacted with previous emails to send more personalized messages at a large scale. Similarly, you can use automated emails to distribute vouchers and offers. 

Pros

• Send batch emails to whole subscriber lists without duplicating effort
• Create schedule-based email campaigns for consistent engagement

Cons

• Templated emails may feel slightly impersonal
• Sending too many emails may actually lower the level of engagement

Leading tools in this area include Mailchimp and Sendgrid, who have developed a user-friendly method of creating subscriber lists and sending templated emails as defined by a wide range of parameters, such as categories, scheduled releases, and long-term campaigns.

3. Automate The Customer Service Process (From ChatBots to Auto-Generated Customer Help-Desk Tickets)

Customer service has typically entailed agents to interact with clients to provide support, answer questions and solve queries. A first attempt at automating this type of support was automated phone service, where some predetermined answers try to answer common customer questions without the need of a human agent.

However, this approach can often be frustrating for customers who would prefer talking to a human agent such that they can explain in natural language what their issue is. Here is where chatbots have an inherent advantage. Most of today’s chatbots are AI-powered and can understand natural language, either providing direct answers to customers, linking to resources, processing basic tasks such as password resets, or connecting to human agents.

 Pros

• Chatbots are available 24/7 to provide first line support
• In instances where human agents are not available to provide additional support, chatbots can automatically generate service desk tickets and populating them with relevant information
• Chatbots can deal with large number of concurrent requests without wait times
• Some first line support tasks such as password resets can be completed much quicker than with support from human agents

Cons

• AI-powered chatbots are only as good as the underlying machine learning models, having some limitations in terms of comprehension
• In instances where customers do not have a good understanding of the issues they are facing, self-service chatbots may not be able to help diagnose the problem.

Hubspot and ServiceNow allow you to create automated chatbots using no-code builders. Users can also integrate with ticket management systems to automatically create and populate tickets to be reviewed by the customer support teams.

4. Automate your Low-Touch Onboarding Processes

Onboarding is a process ripe for automation, where customers can be walked, step-by-step, through the registration and setup process. For example, once the customer creates an account, they can receive a welcome email message, be walked-through the product setup, call out any features with speech bubbles, provide any necessary documents, and be guided by interactive walk-throughs.

 Pros

• Onboarding time is expedited, as customers can be be guided through the registration and tutorial processes

Cons

• Some customers may not have the adequate level of knowledge or expertise to correctly complete the onboarding by themselves

Customer onboarding is typically a subset of a wider set of features within an automation platform. In this case, tools such as Kofax or Workfusion are able to help you create workflows which support and guide new users through onboarding.

5. Automate Customer Segmentation and Priority 

Customers can be categorized into different segments to maximize engagement and provide a more personalized experience. Segmentation can be started as early as the onboarding process, where the registration form can ask for details such as industry and job role.

You can also put customers into different buckets depending on priority by creating a matrix. You can plot value against risk to identify high-value high-risks, high-value low risks, low-value high risk, and low-value low-risk. For each of those, you can identify accounts which need to be expanded, maintained or retained, and approach the relationships accordingly.

 Pros

• Realtime distribution of customers between segments of interest
• Provide a more personalized experience
• Identify accounts with growth potential and retain customers at risk of leaving

Cons

• Some customers, depending on their behavior or type of business, may fall through the cracks, such that they get wrongly assigned to segments and get messages or offers which do not apply to their business.

Custify is a customer success software which is able to help you segment and prioritize customers based on a range of parameters and tags.

6. Automate Notifications For Customers At-Risk of Churning

To identify customers at risk of churning, you need to be tracking specific behaviours, such as users not signing into their accounts, tracking login frequency, email engagement levels, purchase and billing history, or intent to unsubscribe from newsletters by navigating to the unsubscribe page.

It is important to understand that churning is not a binary element, but rather a spectrum. On one end, we can place customers who are heavily dissatisfied with the service and want to terminate their subscription, and on the other end we can place customers who are not actively using the platform despite now having any challenges with it. You can assign different severity levels to the churn intent to prevent customers with low churn intent from slipping further toward the high churn risk.

 Pros

• Monitor churn intent to encourage engagement before leaving
• Automatically generate discount codes or vouchers to stimulate engagement
• Notify account managers of any drops in levels of engagement or intent of leaving

Cons

• Some automation workflows may not take into consideration other types of detail, such as changes in customer terms, product decommissioning, or other nuances that do not directly translate into a lower level of interest from the customer

A great tool that can help you monitor user behaviour is Hotjar, which generates heatmaps depending on where website visitors interact with your webpage. Once you have determined the behaviours you are looking for, such as declining purchasing history, you can integrate with other applications in your stack to either automatically offer discount codes for next purchases, or notify account managers so that they are aware of the change in the customer’s orders.

Our platform prioritizes Customer Experience By Giving Companies The Automation Workflows That They Need

An automation platform whose extensive capabilities can help you automate customer experience processes with an easy-to-understand visual workflow editor. With a comprehensive integrations portfolio, you can use our platform to connect to your CRM, marketing, sales and data analysis platforms and create end-to-end workflows. You can capture and categorize events by user to define extensive customer profiles and understand how to better nurture relationships, identify opportunities and address at-risk customers before they churn.