What is customer experience automation? How to implement CXA

What is customer experience automation (CXA)?

Customer Experience Automation (CXA) refers to the use of technology to manage, personalize, and optimize the interactions between a business and its customers across various touchpoints and channels. This approach leverages data analysis, artificial intelligence, and automated systems to deliver a tailored and seamless customer experience, aiming to increase satisfaction, loyalty, and value. CXA encompasses the entire customer journey, from initial awareness and acquisition through to support and retention, facilitating timely and relevant engagements without necessitating manual intervention at every step.

From AI chatbots and notifications for B2B customer engagement, to in-app calls and automated dialer software for enhanced communication, many tools facilitate CXA. Increasing levels of automation make jobs easier and faster, thereby enabling humans to focus on more complex, creative, or strategic tasks.

The foundation of CXA: A great customer experience

Customers’ expectations evolve with the methods of operating businesses. Thanks to rapidly developing technology, consumers often have high expectations when it comes to the customer experience. In fact, a recent survey found that 86% of respondents will leave a brand they were once loyal to after only two to three bad customer service experiences. Consumers also expect fast response times and personalized experiences; that's why 88% of online shoppers are more likely to continue shopping on a retailer website that offers a personalized experience. For companies to retain their customers, a great customer experience isn't just important, it’s critical to their very survival.

With traditional customer service methods, it can be tough to keep track of responses and relevant data, and getting back to customers in due time becomes increasingly difficult with scale. Team members can quickly become overwhelmed, and consumers can become frustrated.

Customer experience automation is used by businesses to help them deliver an excellent customer experience by helping them strike the right balance between quality and speed.

Let's run through a quick scenario to better illustrate the differences:

Traditional customer service

Customer A has a question about a product return. They reach out via email with their question and wait for a response.

On the other end, the customer service team is scrambling to respond to the many emails coming in.

In the time it takes them to get to this email, Customer X has begun feeling frustrated. By the time they receive a response, they've already decided to opt for a business that offers a better customer experience.

Customer experience automation

Customer B has a question about a product return. They jump onto the company website and ask their question to the online smart assistant.

This AI-powered chatbot provides a response within seconds, with a link to a relevant FAQ page to ensure that Customer B has all the information they need. The customer leaves the interaction feeling satisfied.

As you can see, these are two very different experiences. These examples give you a glimpse of how different CXA is from traditional customer service methods and how it can transform the customer experience.

It’s clear that customer experience automation involves a drastically different experience than traditional customer experiences. What are some components of CXA that you should consider?

The components of customer experience automation

CXA is a broad concept and includes a lot of different specific programs and processes. Here are the main components of a successful customer experience automation program.

Orchestration

Your customers don’t just interact with your brand on a single platform. Orchestration ensures that your customer experience is aligned across all channels, regardless of whether your clients are using your website, contacting you via social media, or interacting with your marketing materials.

When you’re setting up your CXA, you’ll be able to let it integrate a range of different departments—from sales to marketing to customer support—ensuring that your customer experience is orchestrated effectively and customers get the help they need at the right time and through the preferred channels.

Segmentation

To provide your clients with a personalized experience, you’ll have to divide them into different segments according to their needs. Dividing your customers into subgroups such as interests, demographics, or habits enables efficient targeting on the part of businesses and value-driven interactions on the part of customers. CXA can help you automatically analyze customer data to segment your customer base effectively.

Personalization

Once you’ve sorted your customer base into different segments, the next part of your CXA strategy will be to create a personalized experience for your customers. You can do this through AI chatbots or automated emails based on where the user is at in the customer journey, offeirng a personal touch without having your employees hand-craft and sign off on every message.

Automation

The final key component of CXA is obvious: automation. The primary purpose of CXA is to automate as many customer experience processes as possible. We recommend analyzing customer data and using it to inform automated communication strategies.

Now let’s talk about the benefits of customer experience automation.

Why automate the customer experience? 7 benefits of customer experience automation

How exactly can you use CXA to benefit your business?

1. Save time and costs with customer experience automation

From the day you buy your first domain name to hitting triple-digit employees, running a business involves making investments. Is your site going to crown the top of every search results page? Is your new hire going to take their department or program to the next level? You never know how much your investments will pay off, so it’s always good to cut costs where possible.

CXA streamlines various processes. As it cuts the amount of time your employees have to spend on offering the best customer experience, CXA will also boost your productivity: employees will be able to focus on the most creative and valuable work for your company.

2. Increase efficiency with CXA

To automate customer service, you need to bring in greater efficiency by letting machines handle the basics and freeing up agents for higher-level work. This reduces manual labor, which also improves accuracy. For example, auto-transcription and call recordings mean that reps don’t need to write notes during calls. In outbound call centers, auto dialers are more efficient than manual dialing.

3. Strengthen customer relationships

CXA isn’t just a cheaper way of providing customer experience. It will also improve those customer experiences, getting you more value for money.

By making the customer experience more effective, ensuring that queries are responded to more quickly, and easily creating personalized experiences, your customers’ relationships with your brand will strengthen its CXA.

4. Increase customer loyalty

Because CXA strengthens your customer relationships, you’ll find that it also increases customer loyalty. After all, customers are more likely to return to a company if they have a great customer experience. You can further increase the chances of happy, returning customers through customer loyalty programs.

5. Build consistent customer experiences

When your clients are receiving customer support by communicating with human agents, their experience will depend on the performance of the agent. It’s one of many places customer experiences could go wrong: maybe the agent isn’t properly trained, or they’re just having a bad day.

This is one of many places where CXA can reduce variation in your customer journeys, helping your whole organization get it right every time. Standardized messaging ensures that customers always receive accurate information, and that all messages are on-brand – including things like typefaces, colors, and any logos or images.

6. Collect customer data and obtain valuable insights

Customer data is invaluable if you want to run your business in a smart and strategic way. CXA will allow you to analyze data in real-time while data is integrated into every step of a CXA strategy. You can collect massive amounts of data, but only AI and automated systems can analyze it at scale.

7. Ensure scalability

If you have a large customer base, your staff doesn’t have time to craft individual responses to basic inquiries, nor to type out the same marketing message hundreds of times. CXA enables you to communicate with customers at scale. For example, chatbots can handle multiple inquiries simultaneously. Business messages sent in bulk allow you to inform every customer of amended opening hours.

Customer experience automation examples

CXA has all kinds of applications in business, from retail to banking to hospitality. It’s especially useful for customer communications, including sales, marketing, and customer support. For example, marketing automation includes personalized product suggestions (“people also bought”), hyper-relevant ads, and dynamic online content, all based on user behavior.

In email marketing, you can automate newsletters for subscribers and drip campaigns to entice new or lapsed customers. Think journey-based sequences with welcome messages, abandoned cart emails, upsells, order updates, and after-sale follow-ups. You can also use AI to automatically personalize these emails and determine the best times to send them.

Next, you can automatically add data to your CRM after customer interactions, including contact details and notes on preferences. Use the data to automatically personalize messages, and program the system to display relevant info on support agents’ screens during calls. Awareness of purchase history is also useful for account management.

Here are a couple of real-world examples where businesses have successfully implemented CXA.

US-based Fifth Third Bank used to gauge customer satisfaction with weekly surveys. However, advanced AI and speech analytics allowed the bank to gather deeper insights from customer interactions and identify common customer issues, leading to targeted solutions that reduced call volumes. By pinpointing and addressing repetitive queries, the bank optimized processes and reduced operational costs.

Hunter Douglas Inc., a global manufacturer of window coverings, needed to manage thousands of customer interactions from multiple channels. By automating the collection and reporting of data, the form was able to improve its responsiveness and make informed data-driven decisions.

The examples show how CXA has wide applicability across a variety of industries. Elsewhere, it can help supply chain and logistics firms reduce customer bottlenecks and simplify complex processes such as order fulfillment. In healthcare and recruitment businesses, automated appointment scheduling brings maximum efficiency.

8 ways to use customer experience automation: How to implement an automated customer experience

The benefits of CXA are clear – it’s the only way forward to cut costs and improve your customer experience. But how can you implement CXA? Here are some key tips.

1. Specify improvements you want to achieve

There’s no point in overhauling your customer experience if you don’t have a clear understanding of what you need to improve.

Complete internal audit checks for each aspect of your customer-facing operations—such as cost-effectiveness, customer satisfaction levels, and ease of use—so that you can prioritize the elements that need to be automated first.

2. Segment your customer base and create detailed personas

As well as knowing which elements of your customer experience need to improve, you’ll need to know what your customer base wants from their experiences with you. To understand this, use data segmentation to build detailed personas for your most common demographics. This will allow you to tailor your CXA strategy to their needs.

3. Choose the right customer experience automation tools

Performing this sort of research will mean that when it comes to selecting automation tools, you’ll be as well-informed as possible. There are hundreds of different tools that you can use to automate your customer experience, from AI chatbot providers to automated email marketing tools. Hence, it’s vital that you’re able to find ones that suit your requirements.

How do you choose? Consider the size of your company and its customer base, as well as your customer demographics. Decide if you just want to use automation internally to streamline operations, or if you’ll implement customer-facing technology such as chatbots.

Once you have a few tools on your list, sign up for free trials and request demonstrations. That way, you can find out if the customer experience automation tools are right for your business before you part with any money.

4. Utilize customer data to customize interactions

Of course, those tools aren’t helpful without a healthy amount of data to plug into them. Small or newly established businesses won’t have much data to wrangle. But bigger and more mature companies might need to consider a cloud data warehouse migration to make it possible to collect and analyze that data in real time.

By making that information available to all their other apps and systems, companies can gain insight from data that would otherwise just be lying around in their system.

5. Map out customer journeys and design automated CXA workflows

The only way that your automated workflow will reflect the needs of your customers is by considering the journey that they go on, from their first interaction with your marketing materials to customer support after a purchase.

This will mean that you can ensure that every interaction your customer has with your brand is automated, including welcome screens, email sequences, and automated feedback bots. That way, customers can get all the support and onboarding they need without your employees having to attend to them.

6. Integrate with existing systems

It’s essential that you integrate any new automation tools with existing parts of your tech stack. Remember, the idea of CXA is to orchestrate a smoother customer journey—which means that siloed systems and information are not ideal. Inefficient integrations actually lead to a more fragmented, frustrating experience for customers and staff.

Successful automation depends on the ability to move data seamlessly between tools and channels. For example, support agents need to access customer information from the CRM during calls. Start by identifying such parts of the customer journey. Think about what data you want to collect, and how information should flow through the different systems.

7. Train your employees

Most business automation tools are designed to be simple and accessible so that those without technical knowledge can operate them. But you’ll still need to train your employees in the proper use of CXA tools and processes, using real-world scenarios.

It’s vital that employees know how everything works. Otherwise, there will be delays in serving customers, and everyone will be frustrated. Staff also need to understand why you’re asking them to use these tools, and you’ll get full buy-in if you make the training sessions fun and informative.

8. Implement robust data privacy and security measures

With the rise of measures such as GDPR, data privacy and cybersecurity have never been more important. And since CXA is dependent on customer data, it’s imperative that your privacy and security measures are robust.

This includes using multi-factor authentication, cloud storage, and regular user training. You should also make sure that your chatbots are secure while you can keep your customers safe on your website or social media channels.

Now that we know how to implement an automated customer experience, let’s talk about some best practices while doing so.

Top 5 best practices for customer experience automation

Here are our top tips for effective CXA implementation.

1. Decide what to automate

It’s important to remember that automation isn’t suitable for every single task, so spend some time deciding what you should automate and what you shouldn’t. Choose tasks that are simple and repeatable, so that you can design uncomplicated workflows. Prioritize the essentials—for instance, if there’s a common customer service issue, think about how automation could solve it.

2. Understand what customers want

Part of this decision will be based on what your customers want and need. Thanks to automated data gathering and advanced analytics, you can discover this, and deliver a service that’s relevant and effective. As well as personalized interactions and marketing content, you can make sure you communicate on consumers’ preferred channels.

How to get started with customer experience automation

Customer experience automation is an ideal way to streamline your operations and keep customers (and employees) happy. CXA has a huge number of potential applications, from automated email marketing to smart chatbots. No matter what industry you’re in, successful CXA can lead to increased loyalty and revenue.

Ready to take the first step in implementing CXA? Sendbird’s all-in-one customer communications platform helps you to build meaningful connections in a digital world. Our cutting-edge solutions include fully customizable AI chatbots alongside in-app voice and video calls, with personalized messaging and scaled notifications. It’s easy to integrate real-time communication into your app or website, for increased engagement and long-lasting customer relationships.

Ready to implement CXA in your business? Get in touch with us or request a demo. Our experts are always ready to help!