Keeping customers happy is more than just providing a great product or service. Consumers today make decisions based on how the experience of their customer journey makes them feel, and to succeed in today’s market, businesses need to start making those customers’ feelings a priority.
The larger a business gets, the more it will rely on automation. Automatic invoicing, social media scheduling, email drip campaigns–almost all areas of a business benefit from automating repetitive tasks. Customer experience is no exception.
In this article, we’ll go over the basics of customer experience automation; why it matters now, key challenges, and how you can get started.
What is customer experience automation?
Customer Experience Automation (CXA) is the use of technology to simplify, scale, and speed up customer interactions. It makes routine processes faster for customers and helps employees focus on creative tasks and higher-value problem solving.
By doing so, these actions can then be made faster, more autonomous for the user, and more scalable. The idea is to make the customer lifecycle as smooth as possible from a user's first touchpoint on your site, through to the purchase or use of your product or service, and continue into ongoing customer support.
Before you can automate the CX process, you need to identify which interactions within your customer’s journey may be causing bottlenecks or costing you or your customers valuable time.
Once you’ve defined which key areas you’d like to automate, you can go on to plan your CXA strategy and create applications which can convert slow, unscalable tasks into easily solvable, efficient, and engaging customer interactions.
The importance of customer experience now
In today’s competitive market, customers look for more than just a good price. To stand out amongst competitors, brands need to provide an experience that is easy, efficient, and ultimately gives the customer what they want as fast as they want.
This year alone, the Active Campaign's 2022 Customer Experience Automation Impact Study reported a 110% annual increase in new leads from businesses that use CXA. As well as a 94% increase in conversions, compared to the previous year.
B2C organizations in particular have seen a significant increase in engagement rates, reporting as high as 108% more engagement since implementing CXA, which in turn, has led to an increase in sales.
Take the eCommerce sector, for example, where the effect of automating customer experience is evident. CXA can help eCommerce businesses earn back lost income by increasing revenue from abandoned carts by up to 70%. What’s more, it also creates repeat customers and keeps them loyal, with over 78% of eCommerce businesses noting a high order value per customer.
Companies automating their customer experience reported that 50% of their annual revenue came from returning customers, which is 25% higher than the industry standard. However, CXA doesn’t only keep existing customers satisfied, it also helps gain new customers too. That's why for businesses who want to not just retain, but grow their customer base, CXA has never been as important as it is today.
The challenges of automating and scaling CX
One of the great things about (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning is that they are constantly reinventing how customers consume and experience. The challenge that this poses for businesses is that they must constantly be adapting their CX to meet customer’s ever-growing expectations
Therefore, scaling CX is far from a one-stop job, it’s an ongoing process. In fact, a significant part of successfully automating customer experience is being able to recognize this and adapt in line with these inevitable changes.
A second challenge is identifying which processes should be a priority to automate, and which not. To accurately answer this question, businesses must put themselves in their customers' shoes, and discover which parts of the customer journey are the most frustrating from a user perspective. Those interactions should be your business’s top priority. If you’re able to master this step, you can unlock effective automation for your business.
This also ties in with another challenge; being proactive rather than reactive when it comes to what to automate. This means being able to predict what customers are going to expect, and preempt how you can best solve their solutions, whilst simultaneously saving time and money. For example, enabling the booking and personalization of services directly within an automated sales chatbot, avoiding the necessity for a customer to leave the chat and the possibility of losing that sale in the process. This is not easy, and comes with time and from working with an expert in CX automation such as Hubtype.
Benefits of automating customer experience
Increase in revenue
For eCommerce businesses, CX automation can help to lower cart abandonment rates and boost sales recovery rates. When we take into account that over $4.6 of e-commerce sales are lost due to cart abandonment, according to Business Insider, it is clear to see just how much revenue there is to gain.
For example, with CX automation, you can send out messages to shoppers that remind them of the items that were in their cart, and urge them to complete their purchase. This automated reminder could be the difference between making the sale or not. Luckily, this potential for revenue increase doesn’t only apply to the eCommerce sector either. In fact, many industries are benefiting monetarily from CX automation including banking, insurance, hospitality, and more.
Build customer loyalty
Customer Experience automation allows for smoother interactions and quicker resolution times, regardless of where, or at which touchpoint, a customer is in their journey. For example, by helping customers find answers to their queries themselves via a conversational app, they avoid having to wait for a human agent, and this can significantly improve customer satisfaction rates. In act, 62% of consumers would rather not talk to a human at all when they only have a simple query.
Automation makes processes more reliable and consistent, which helps build trust. Being trustworthy in the eyes of your customers is a major factor in keeping them loyal to your business over your competitors’.
A loyal customer relationship is built and grown over time as a result of consistent positive experience, and high-quality customer service. By improving your CX with automation, your business will be better able to cultivate this type of positive customer relationship.
Improve NPS
Of course, keeping your customers happy and returning should be the primary objective for any business. But how can you convert satisfaction and loyalty into more new customers?
Happy customers can turn into brand advocates and increase NPS (Net Promoter Scores). This score is based on the likelihood of customers recommending your business to others, and with great CXA, you can increase this likelihood, in turn growing your client base.
For example, in a recent study by the Harvard Business Review, we see that the brands with the highest Net Promoter Scores were the ones that ranked best for customer experience in regards to responsiveness, amount of time saved, and decreased hassle, all of which are possible to ensure with CX automation.
Start automating CX
We know that customer experience automation isn’t an overnight task, but luckily, we have the right technology for the job. Hubtype’s conversational apps are built to address modern CX challenges, automate conversations meaningfully, and take customer experiences to the next level.
If you want to find out more about Hubtype’s technology, and the future of customer experience, you can book a demo with a conversational expert today.
