Customer Experience Automation (CXA) 101 - everything you need to get started

Thanks to automation, many tasks that were once quite time-consuming can today be automated for better and more efficient results.

This is the truth for any field, and customer experience is included. Many tasks and stages of a customer experience can now be automated, helping overwhelmed teams catch a breath and provide customers with a more engaging and well-thought experience.

When developed and implemented correctly, customer experience automation can help your teams provide an outstanding customer experience with better and faster results.

To help you get started with Customer Experience Automation (CXA), this article will talk about the concept's:

• Definition
• Importance
• Best Practices
• Necessary Steps to Completion

Let's get to it. 👩🏽‍💻

What is Customer Experience Automation (CXA)?

Customer Experience Automation, at its core, is the usage of AI-powered technology to provide support to your clients where they need a certain kind of human interaction to get through the process. Its primary goal is to completely reduce or eliminate human involvement in the assistance processes delivered to customers at their request.

It's basically too good to be true - it enables you to save time, money, and effort that otherwise would be spent on repetitive tasks like replying to simple questions on chat or email, tracking support tickets, and so on. It helps greatly to boost customer engagement and offer personalized experiences to your customers; automated chatbots and emails are the most common examples of it.

With them, you can automate numerous customer interactions and enable your employees to save time for other productive responsibilities.

But that's the main subject of another heading:

How does automation improve customer experience?

Here's a simple question to begin with.

What happens when you offer your customers a valuable and satisfactory experience? They buy more from you, stick around longer, and talk about you more often and enthusiastically.

And automating your customer experience allows you to achieve just that.

1- Automation enables more efficient customer interactions

Regarding the customer experience you provide, communication is the number one game-changer. Automated chatbots and emails allow you to offer a faster and more straightforward way of communication. After all, there's a logical reason why customers increasingly prefer chatbots - they provide quick answers and reduce the burden on your customer service team.

2- Automation provides insightful customer feedback

When the requesting and replying to feedback processes become automated, it becomes easier to dodge errors -because there are fewer- and act with greater consistency since customers are now provided with an easy way to offer their feedback, and they feel more encouraged than ever to do so.

Your business can benefit incredibly from this ocean of data and rapidly build review volume to increase ratings and boost rankings.

3- Automation helps you create relevant ads and drive revenue as a result

Content marketing automation aims to automate every process involved in content creation that is costly and time-consuming. Thanks to it, you can standardize and reuse your content for optimal results.

Several platforms provide great examples. Google Ads, for example, uses dynamic search and demonstrates ads based on search queries and specific behaviors; this enables you to offer to-the-point offers to your top leads, drive revenue, and provide a relevant service that manages to connect people and their needs.

4 Companies That Perfectly Automate Their Customer Experience

1- Trello

We already said that one of the most common practices of exceptional Customer Experience Automation is automated emails.

There is a simple reason for this - it's almost psychically impossible to remember to email every new prospect with a to-do list. If you tried, you'd instantly see that it's highly likely to miss a few emails along the way, and you're also spending a lot of time connecting new information with new customers.

With the help of automation, you can easily send emails days after the customer becomes a member. Trello provides a great example of this.

By separating their product journey into a series of engaging onboarding emails, Trello makes sure the customers are feeling encouraged to keep on experiencing the product. They do not feel overwhelmed by work and task completion since everything happens with baby steps and guidance.

2- Strava

Another way to implement automated emails that makes them even better is personalization. Strava, a running app, sends out customized emails to set some things up when a user connects their device to their app. 

Based on user activity, the app sends out warning-like emails to remind the essentials; when you upload your first activity, you instantly get reminded to sync your heart rate monitor.

And as a way of more advanced automation, user-specific emails welcome you to the app and profoundly impact your performance. 

This kind of implementation also prevents customers from reaching out and talking to customer support teams for help - they DO NOT like to do that; plus, they're already provided with all the information they need in the first place. 

3- 24 Hour Tees 

24 Hour Tees, a small company in Nebraska, designs and sells T-shirts. With RingCentral's help, they have decided to go for automation and created automated text message campaigns with their CRM.

Customers can now text them about a purchase, or the brand can send automatic updates on their shirts, campaigns, discounts, and more - creating a perfect example of seamless integration and outstanding customer experience automation.

4- Stumptown Coffee

Stumptown Coffee had a quite complicated phone system that was experiencing errors often. With RingCentral and its easily-navigatable UI, they managed to make their customers' lives much easier. And their team members' as well. 

When automated customer service is being practiced, the notion of usability for your team becomes a big question. No matter how great this new technology is if your team is unable to make the most of it, it honestly becomes nothing.

Stumptown Coffee was aware of that, so they used RingCentral to help ease everyone's job with that seamless interface; such a move is great for team spirit, and high spirits among the team impact the customer's experience.

5 Steps to Complete CX Automation

To Automate the Customer Experience you provide, you need to create smoothly-working business processes and deliver a tiny bit of human touch without complete human involvement. 

Here are the steps to get started!

1- Don't be scary

For any successful support service or consistent customer experience, the human touch is still one of the most precious aspects. And automation must be used to help your team offer the best CX possible, not replace it completely.

Your customers will always need flexibility, empathy, and understanding while interacting with your product, and to provide them with what they need; you have to reduce the amount of work your team has on its shoulders. This way, you'll be able to satisfy your customers and offer them what they acquire from you.

Therefore, your first step is to make sure you use automation where it's needed and for the right purposes.

2- Skyrocket Your Knowledge Base Content

While automating your CX, another important thing to do is create a solid knowledge base content. It will help you - if improved on a regular basis- solve common issues and provide answers to your clients' FAQs. 

As mentioned earlier, automation, in that sense, will help you prevent your visitors from getting distracted and looking elsewhere for their answers with the help of tutorials, FAQ sections, infographics, screenshots, in-app guided tours, and more.

See how UserGuiding can help. 

These accessible and visually pleasing methods also work perfectly for the user onboarding stage since they create an engaging welcoming process.

3- Reach Out to Your Customers

For this entire customer journey stage, you need to create space for meaningful and valuable conversations. AI chatbots can help you achieve just that. 

Chatbots are able to reach out 24/7 to your customers, learning about their problems and directing them to the relevant teams and support agents; they also help you track customers who had contacted you earlier, create support tickets according to their past purchases and history, and follow them up!

4- Personalize Your Automation

Automated experiences are, for sure, far away from consisting of human touch. But this doesn't mean they need to be completely robotic. 

The personalization of automation processes will enable you to offer more personal, sincere, and relevant solutions to related issues. 

You need to pre-write responses and come up with numerous templates for various channels and make sure each one is customized with the name of the customer, their buying history, and other background details.

These personalized responses can give off that friendly vibe and help your customers associate nice feelings with your business.

5- Collect Feedback From Customers

Just like anything else, practice makes perfect.

Automation is a great way to improve Customer Experience, but naturally, running smoothly takes a lot of time. You always need numerous tests and continuous customer feedback to ensure everything's on track.

After you bring a resolution to your customer's problem, ask them about their experience with you; you can create in-app surveys for them to rate your services on a scale of 1-10 or simply want them to write comments about their opinions.

This way, you'll make your customers feel valued and appreciated; they will feel more than encouraged to engage with your services, let you know how they feel, and consequently impact improvements and enable you to provide better experiences with their valuable insights! A complete win-win. 

Final Thoughts

CX automation can help you change how your business works and create space for greater improvements when used correctly.

Today, I tried to inform you about the first baby steps to CX automation and showed you some real-life examples, tips, and advice. I hope you found them all useful; see you next time!