How to Use Automation within Customer Experience
Last updated on September 30, 2024
Nowadays companies tend to automate as many processes as they can. Tasks or activities that were typically managed by humans are now delegated to bots or to other cool technologies. Usually, the tasks that organizations automate are considered to be manual and repetitive.
Within customer experience management there are many manual and repetitive activities that have the potential to be automated. Workflows can be set up for different activities with a tailored logic around what you want to happen next when something specific occurs.
In this article, we will explain why you should automate activities within customer experience management, and we share some cool real-life examples of customer experience automation.
Why automate?
The great benefit of automation is that you can make better use of your resources and reduce the risk of human errors that typically occur when tasks are manual and repetitive. Automation enables your employees to focus on tasks that humans are better at – work that requires human intelligence.
For example, sales automation software can help your sales team ensure that all inbound sales leads are recorded, meaning that no opportunities are missed and your ability to scale your efforts is much greater. Your team can instead focus on improving their sales pitch which is a much better use of their time.
Source: Process.st
Process.st, a process management software says that 60% of all occupations have at least 30% of activities that are automatable – processing and collecting data are activities that have the highest automation potential.
Why automate Customer Experience Management?
As mentioned above, there are several benefits that come with automation, and for customer experience management this is no exception.
Customer experience is something that many consider to be “fluffy” and hard to manage. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to create structured processes for managing CX in a scalable manner.
Automating specific customer experience management tasks makes it possible to create structured processes and will help you manage your CX program. It becomes easier to identify bottlenecks and to share information, and creating accountability in your teams is consequently much more straightforward.
With automation, you can also make sure that your employees have time to focus on the most important activities. It’s important to automate customer support by ensuring that tasks like generating standard follow-up emails or tickets for notifying Customer Support of follow-up requirements are consistently automated. By doing so, you can be confident that you are systematically setting the wheels in motion to ensure that you are closing the loop with your customers. Your employees can then focus on solving customer problems rather than performing time-consuming administrative tasks.
5 Examples of Automation within Customer Experience Management
With a customer experience tool like Lumoa you can easily set up automated workflows for many customer experience management activities. Lumoa can be connected to thousands of apps, either directly with simple HTTP posts or using multiple integration platforms.
Here are five great suggestions for using automation to enhance any Customer Experience Management program:
1. Closing the inner loop with the help of automation
If you are measuring NPS or any other customer experience metric, you can easily set up a workflow that triggers a specific action depending on the score that your customer gives you.
For example, if your customer gave you an NPS score of 0-6 (detractor) and requested that you contact them, you can ensure that a ticket is automatically created in your CRM or Contact Centre platform. You can do the same for any other CX metric that you are using e.g. CSAT, CES or any linear scale. If you are using a 5-star rating you could create a ticket to contact each of the customers who rate you 1 or 2 stars.
Huel uses this type of automation on a daily basis within their customer experience management program. There are not many companies as focused on customer experience as Huel, and that probably explains why they are growing so quickly! Huel collects customer feedback in real time with Lumoa. If a customer gives them an NPS score of 6 or below there will be a ticket automatically generated in Zendesk. This happens in real time, so they are able to act fast and ensure that problems are taken care of straight away, improving the customer experience and increasing retention.
As Emilija Siaulyte, Lead Customer Experience Executive at Huel, said: “Integrating Lumoa with Zendesk was effortless and now we are certain that we can take care of problems as they arise to improve retention.”
You can also have automated notifications for passive and promoter feedback as well, or for neutral and positive feedback when you use different CX metrics. The sky is the limit!
Recommended reading:
Customer feedback loop: What is it and how to close it
2. Improve the effectiveness of your sales processes
You can automate the collection and analysis of customer feedback, aligning it with other relevant data e.g. data related to revenue, invoices or your sales CRM. By utilizing Lumoa’s CX management solution you are empowered to understand the relationship between your customer experience and the activities of your sales team.
You can ask prospective customers to rate the sales process after a call, meeting or offer. Since the feedback is received in real time, your sales team can act immediately if you have dissatisfied prospects, or the feedback can be used to better equip your team for the next meeting or call. Adjusting or adapting your sales initiatives based on customer feedback can be the difference between winning or losing a deal.
You can also measure the relationship between customer experience and other functions within the organization other than sales, such as customer success, customer service and marketing. Or how customer experience is impacted during specific projects. You can even get feedback for specific agents in a customer care team, sales team or individual doctors that work in a specific Heath Centre and use this to decide upon training initiatives and help share best practices.
3. Integrating customer experience data with CRM data
Revenue growth happens when a great customer experience increases customer loyalty. Happy, loyal customers are extremely valuable! Statistics show it can be five times more expensive to find a new customer than to keep a current one. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%, while the probability of selling to an existing satisfied customer is 60-70% (Marketing Metrics).
Therefore, it is wise to create an automated workflow so that the contact information in your CRM system, e.g. Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics, is automatically updated when you get customer feedback. This way, it is much easier for your sales and customer success teams to understand where there is higher potential for upsell. Pro tip… make sure your privacy policy covers you for that and that you have marketing consent.
4. Aligning real-time CX data with business intelligence data
It’s not unusual for organizations to have several different CRM, ERP, and accounting systems in use. It’s also common to use embedded Business Intelligence systems displaying data that has been automatically exported from these other platforms. From the BI platform, it can be easier to interpret the data and find relationships between different metrics across the organization.
With Lumoa, it’s also possible to automate the sending of customer feedback data in real-time to business intelligence systems like Microsoft Power BI or similar. The feedback that is sent to the BI system can be categorized and analyzed first in software like Lumoa and then sent as enriched data to a BI system of choice.
5. Automatic alerts of bug detection or system failure in real-time
Another great case of customer experience automation is that you can detect bugs or other system failures in real time. For example, alerts can be created and sent directly to the product team or developer team if certain features or bugs are mentioned in the customer feedback. With a tool like Lumoa, where you receive feedback in real time, it’s possible to react and fix the issues immediately before they cause damage to your business.
