The customer experience should be the cornerstone of any company that sells goods and services.
That interaction is where all your hard work, planning, and infrastructure come together and create unique, personalized experiences for everyone that comes across your business.
And the statistics bear this out: 86% of customers will spend more money for a great customer experience. Here are several other interesting statistics about customer experience that show the thoroughness of its effectiveness.
This and many other reasons are why companies are focusing even more on their customer experience strategy. But today, this includes its fusion with automation, which comes with its own necessary development and implementation.
What is Customer Experience Automation?
Customer experience automation, or CXA, is a strategy involving tools and software to streamline and personalize every interaction between your company and potential or existing customers.
That means finding methods to guide customers from problem to solution as efficiently as possible. A customer journey with no detours, but still offers the scenic route.
How You Can Automate the Customer Experience
The following list will give you an overview of the steps and tools on how you can implement CXA practically within your business.
- Identify the problems in your existing customer lifecycle.
- Organize the existing customer engagement software and tools to locate any weaknesses and general areas of improvement.
- Plan your customer relationship management (CRM) strategy so that it can accommodate automation tools.
- Make sure your marketing team receives the same level of information regarding customers as your sales team. They will be pivotal in creating the content and email strategies that create the personal customer experience.
- And finally, embrace trial and error. Striking gold often takes multiple attempts, so use those opportunities for finding exactly how certain CXA strategies don’t work and adopt changes accordingly.
CXA will run through every level of your business because of its importance. Although many team members and leaders will have their own strategies to keep in mind, you will need to make sure everyone agrees and see that a great customer experience is the number one goal.
Improving Your Customer Experience
With the proliferation of social media interactions, rise in sales automation, and establishment of the home office, organization is key towards unifying your company around customer service.
Let’s look at some existing practices you might use and how you can improve them with an eye on CXA.
Personalization
We’ve all received emails and regular mail where everything except your name is copy-pasted. Some even come with your name in a different size or color than the rest, as if to show the personalization code itself.
It’s extremely important how your customers feel when they receive these messages from your company. So, take it seriously.
That means having sales reps and marketing team members on the same page regarding the content and tone of every piece of content. The email marketing campaign is one of the most efficient forms of automation, so make sure your customers believe they’re receiving personalized communications.
This road goes both ways. Customers can offer a lot of valuable feedback on the effectiveness of their journey, so be aware of their concerns and try to find ways of fixing your strategy with those in mind.
Customer Experience AI
One way of personalizing customer service is through artificial intelligence. Through machine learning, AI uses an intelligently derived and informed set of information that you can apply at any moment in the customer journey.
AI can pinpoint the needs and behaviors of each customer before the sales reps, and with sufficient email marketing implementation in place, can often work in real time while customers are browsing your site.
One example of this is the use of chatbots to guide, and even upsell, customers visiting your site automatically. Sometimes they can expect what the customers want or need before the customers themselves.
Marketing
The marketing team and strategy is the backbone of a personalized customer experience. They will create the content that will resonate with the customers and persuade them to buy your goods and services.
Regarding CXA, the marketing team becomes even more important. Especially when using AI tools that work instantaneously without the use of human interactions, having content readily available to send to customers is crucial.
For instance, automated services can respond when a buyer clicks on certain products or asks about services that have relevant content whichyou can share in return.
CXA Tools and Strategies
When businesses are looking to improve customer experiences, CRM software is an excellent choice for building relationships with customers.
More than anything, the purpose of CXA tools is to scale one-on-one customer interactions through automation and making them replicable.
Customers expect certain services from your company, no matter how small or large of a buyer they are, which must be translatable in a centralized strategy.
And at the heart of those interactions, great customer experience must shine.
Orchestration
One instance where CXA tools can grant sales reps the power to exceed their capacity is in orchestrating the channels in which interactions take place.
In short, that means two things. First, customers will have multiple platforms (your website, social media pages, email, etc.) in which to contact you. Solid CXA tools can automatically interact with them wherever they are.
And second, these tools offer a centralized platform where sales reps, marketers, and managers can all see what’s happening, which improves their ability at aiding the sales reps.
Segmentation
Another instance where CXA tools shine is segmenting customers as individual units rather than groups of collective interests.
Because of the massive amounts of data and specific number of interests and behaviors of each person differing from everyone else, it’s much better personalizing for the individual.
But isn’t that much more difficult to do if there’s more data to account for?
Not if you have the proper automation tools that organize that data into each-to-reach places with enough insight to make everyone’s job easier.
And that’s all done without human input. Set the filters and let the tools perform their tasks. While each of your employees are spending more time on the important tasks, CXA tools will be hard at work exceeding customer expectations.
Sales Enablement
One method to improve customer service indirectly is through sales enablement, or strategies that provide sales reps the best opportunities for selling your products and services.
The reason this helps the customer is that you free the sales rep from having to perform the daily tasks that distract them from dealing directly with customers. Therefore, customers will correctly feel they are being attended to more often and thoughtfully.
One of the most solid strategies for sales enablement is through CRM software, which provides sales reps with many important tools. Also, creating a formal sales enablement strategy can be quite effective.
Although it seems like it may add additional steps to an already extensive CXA strategy, sales enablement crosses boundaries in its application for your company and not just customer service.
Saving Money and Reducing Churn
Retaining customers is a well-known strategy for growing a business. The costs associated with retaining one customer is far fewer than those associated with finding a new customer.
One large part of this is customer data. This may take many resources and failed attempts to gain. However, you can supercharge your CXA strategy by having existing customer data on hand. Knowledge is power.
The best method for reducing churn is through excellent customer support. They want to be treated as distinct humans with personalized needs and behaviors, all of which is difficult to accommodate as the customer list builds up.
Therefore, if customer satisfaction is your number one goal towards reducing churn, CXA tools are your best friend.
Saving money can also take place on the team level, where workflows can become more streamlined. This will free up much of the sales reps’ time and money.
Conclusion
Remember to keep these in mind when designing a CXA strategy: organize your existing strategy and find any problems, take those problems to your team and get their opinions, look at all the tools and software that can ease those problems, and try your hand at several to see what works best in the end.
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