A Short Guide to Customer Experience Automation Technology

In today’s cut-throat competitive business environment, having an excellent product or providing an excellent service won’t be enough. Customer experience, which means how your customers feel moving through the sales funnel, now plays a more important role than ever.    

The good customer experience (CX) today is an important factor that drives successful B2B companies. 

The challenge with customer experience is that it’s hard to scale. As a business improves, providing a personalized customer experience is a difficult thing to do, and most companies risk losing their valuable customers after just one unsatisfactory experience.  

That is where automated customer experience becomes a very important part of a business strategy. Automating and digitalizing customer experience and customer experience workflows and processes can help develop a steadfast client base, lessen churn, and make more productivity all throughout an organization. 

What Does Automated Customer Experience Mean?  

Automated customer experience or call, customer experience automation (CXA), permits organizations to develop and scale via automating one-on-one client correspondences and making them repeatable. 

These are basically personalized yet efficient interactions that can impact every part of a customer’s buying lifecycle, starting from the first touch to the completion of the purchase to ongoing customer support. 

To adopt an automated customer experience model, companies must first identify important repeatable tasks throughout the customer lifecycle that can cause bottlenecks, frustrations, or delays.   

The next thing they must do is create applications to help solve them. CXA can turn slow, hard-to-scale tasks and human errors into positive interactions that will help customers find solutions quickly and feel engaged.  

Why Today There’s a Need for CXA? 

Today, customer experience is becoming a differentiating factor for business consumers. And this is what makes CXA even more crucial for B2B organizations, having a versatile automation strategy set up can give a critical competitive advantage. 

According to Salesforce’s State of Connected Customer Study, 85% of B2B purchasers put a similar emphasis on client engagement as on product quality when they are evaluating a company.  

The same survey found that digital engagement of customers, which has accelerated in the last two years, has now reached a tipping point. Moving forward, 58% of consumers today plan to do their shopping online. 80% of B2B consumers expect to conduct their business online.   

The 80% lines up with Gartner’s Future of Sales Study, which estimates that 80% of B2B interactions will happen through advanced channels by 2025. The study additionally predicts that 60% of B2-B deals companies will shift from experience-and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling, they will merge their sales processes, applications, data, and analytics into a single operational practice.  

You don't need to stand by till 2025 to see the impacts, however. The shift is already here. To be in competition and retain their loyal customers, B2B companies will have to take advantage of new data, analytics, and automation opportunities.    

How Automation Improves Customer Experience?  

Traditionally, it has been very difficult to personalize and automate the B2B purchasing cycle, because of its added complexity. Generally, B2B buyers have a longer decision-making process, run through numerous stakeholders, and have more specific needs.   

All these challenges can lead to lower customer experience scores, especially when compared to those of B2C businesses.  

CXA on the other hand can help businesses make improvements in each of those areas. For example, according to Active Campaign's CXA Impact Report, 44% of organizations that depend on client service automation invested more energy drawing in with clients, on account of the time saved by automation. That personal attention that businesses have given to customers will lead to a better customer experience, turning them into repeat customers.  

Adding automation to your website or service will remove barriers and friction and will speed up the customer lifecycle.  The value that customers expect – efficiency, expertise, and knowledgeable service, need to go beyond attractive website designs.  

Automation will ultimately help customers enjoy their experience with your business or brand.  

What Benefits Does Customer Experience Automation Provide?  

There are numerous benefits of improving CXA and these benefits can even translate to big numbers for brands. According to Active Campaign’s CXA Impact Report, there are significant improvements in revenue-generating metrics for B2B businesses using customer experience automation.   

Brands that have been surveyed using CXA have reported that customer leads have increased by 110%, deal win rates by 92%, and sales effectiveness by 109% over the previous year.  

CXA can even open new opportunities for B2B brands in a few key areas. For instance, it can increase the speed of transactions and improve customer support.  

According to Harvard Business Review research, it has been found that past product quality, B2B brands with high net promoter scores positioned well among clients for responsiveness, expertise, and decreased hassles.  

In addition to this, brands having good scores in these areas showed high customer loyalty, with 43% of customers being highly likely to buy again.   

These numbers show that B2-B brands can build a better customer experience that generates more sales and reduces churn. This can help brands develop long-lasting relationships and a loyal customer base.  

In addition to this, customers can benefit from CXA by getting quicker responses to their queries and solutions to their problems. Automation can even help to remove some of the information silos troubling many B2B organizations by unifying data and removing delays getting to it.  

How B2B Organizations can Embrace CXA  

Tending to client care needs through CXA can help your business stand out from other businesses. Instead of making customers wait for a long time on hold, AI-powered chatbots will engage with them to answer their queries.  

With chatbots helping customers by answering their low-level queries, customers can quickly move to the next stage of their purchasing cycle.  This provides your support team with much free time to focus on more personalized engagement with customers who are facing high-level problems.   

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are additionally being incorporated into CXA or Customer Experience Software. These tools can be trained to smooth out documents and quickly identify major problem areas.       

For example, for collecting customer feedback for B2B brands, AI-based tools can scan and pick out normal issues for the sales or development group to survey and get to the next level. 

The Workflow process is another important area where improvement can be made, which can later translate into an improved customer experience. With Robotic Process Automation, organizations can automatically move data between various channels, which will help eliminate gaps and communicate across departments while quickly providing accurate information to customers.  

Few Examples of CX Automation Tools  

Some of the common examples of CX automation tools include:  

Customer-telephony integration (CTI): CTI is generally used by businesses and call centers to automate the routing of phone calls to the right department.  

Website Chatbots: Website chatbots generally use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to engage with customers or sales leads.  

Self-Checkout: Self-Checkout is another CX automation tool that is generally used by some retailers.  

Online Banking Apps: Online banking apps are being used by users to deposit a check without visiting a physical branch.  

Hospitality Apps: Hospitality apps are those apps that allow users to check into or confirm reservations.   

Conclusion  

If you are going to drive customer engagement and retain customer loyalty, then it is important to have consistency within your customer support experiences.  

It is clear that automation plays an important role in delivering consistency for business, especially for those businesses that are multifaceted and are looking forward to expanding.  

So, to overcome the difficulties present, it is important to leverage automation software.