How many robots do you have working for you today?
It’s a funny question when you put it that way. But what we’re getting at is: How many processes related to your customer experience (CX) have you automated, or enlisted AI, to handle?
If you’re here, the answer could be “not enough”… which is extremely common! Automation is a new, and ever-growing, realm of opportunities. And every brand out there grows to need these opportunities over time, as customer journeys diversify and become more difficult to optimize.
CX automation tools exist to empower your teams in an environment of brand growth and change, not replace them. So, think of these automation tools as an investment in team effort reallocation in the interest of enduring scalability—and we’ll give you the rundown on how to accomplish that in your CX.
What is Customer Experience Automation?
If we try to list every customer experience (CX) you have, and then think about how we can effectively optimize them all for individual consumer journeys…we’re going to have a problem.
You (and your team) only have so many hands, and so many hours in a day, and myriads of customer journeys.
Realistically, suppose we’re relying only on our manpower to analyze coffers of data and deliver relevant, timely experiences based on it. In that case, we’re going to be playing a lot of catch-up. And we want the opposite—to deliver experiences proactively, not reactively.
And this is why most (if not all) businesses need automated customer experiences. Simply put, CX automation employs AI to help you predict, catch, analyze, and respond to pivotal moments or changes in the customer journey in real time. Meanwhile, you and your team can work on moving mountains in more important arenas that require a human touch, like strategy.
That said, there are four steps you’ll need to take to ensure you get the most out of CX automation. Let’s take a brief look at each one.
Aggregate
First and foremost, you’ll need to collect data from across your customer journey all in one centralized hub. Most companies have a data platform of some kind. But in many cases, they’re only collecting one or a few kinds of data (for example, website data, or digital marketing data).
Effective data aggregation brings all of your data, cross-device, cross-channel, online, and offline, into one interface, so that you can evaluate (and then automate) the customer journey holistically.
Segment
Segmenting involves grouping your data into audiences of individuals who share similar traits so that you can serve different experiences that are more relevant to different segments.
For example, you may send a size and style guide newsletter for men’s jeans to men who have browsed pants categories, added items to the cart, and not completed checkout.
Or, if you have the proper tools, you can take segmenting a step further, build out single customer profiles, and automate experiences around individual journeys. Think of the example segment above. But imagine what alternate paths each of these individuals might take if you interacted with each of them along their journey before they abandoned the cart. (Using automation, of course.)
Orchestrate
Once you’ve been able to collect a breadth of data and segment it in the most effective ways, you’ll get to start orchestrating the customer journey. Orchestrating is a pivotal piece of automation. It helps you pinpoint places where CX automation can help you make the most difference in the journey as a whole.
When you orchestrate, you’ll be evaluating your customer journeys, finding areas of high friction, and designing more cohesive, seamless paths that better address and solve this friction.
For example, you might find that after the first few interactions with your brand, your male customers tend to lose interest altogether. So, you might orchestrate the rest of their journey by automating an email reach out to highlight products that male customers speak highly of and associated reviews.
Personalize
Relevance is key when you’re attempting to positively position your brand in front of customers. So, naturally, all brands should be continuously looking for ways to personalize their CX.
Orchestration is an excellent way to help you spot areas where personalization can enhance the customer journey. Knowing these opportunities, and using your CX automation to help you deliver personalized experiences in real-time, will help you iron out your journeys and get the most out of automation tools.
The Benefits of Customer Experience Automation
Truthfully, the purest benefit of CX automation is the ability to be present and respond to customer journeys at any time. If a customer needs questions answered after hours, a chatbot can help. If they abandon their cart after a midnight scroll-a-thon, automated emails can reengage. The list goes on.
But, aside from that overarching benefit, here are some additional reasons why brands should invest in CX automation:
- More satisfied customers: Faster response rates aided by chat automation, or serving highly relevant experiences when people need them, for example, is a direct line to happier customers.
- More loyal customers: The more happy customers you create, the higher the likelihood that they’ll return to your brand again, not just for your products, but for your superior experience.
- More effective personalization: Your automation systems are likely going to be able to interpret and respond to changes in individual customer journeys right away, helping deliver relevant, personalized experiences when they count.
- Revenue scale: Adding to our train of math, more happy customers, more loyal customers, and more customers who purchased because they received the right personalized message at the right time, all lead to increased revenue for your brand over time.
Less spent on operations: The more CX processes you can automate, the less time and cost you’ll need to allocate toward those processes. Inevitably, you’re saving money on mundane tasks and reallocating your team’s time toward more important tasks.
CX Automation Solutions
Now, we’ve dabbled in CX automation examples here and there. At this point, it’s probably clear that there are quite a few different ways you can use automation to your benefit. By association, you might also be aware that there are any number of solutions out there to meet these automation needs.
That said, let’s look at some of the varying areas in which you can employ CX automation, and with what tools, to free up time, create more happy customers, and scale your brand.
Real-Time Customer Journey Analysis and Insights
Sifting through data and looking for trends probably isn’t how most of your teams want to spend their time.
Marketers, CX designers, and, yes, even analysts, can benefit from a “third eye” helping spot trends and anomalies among mountains of data from many customer journeys. And you need to get real-time visibility around these points of interest in your data to respond effectively with relevant customer experiences.
This is an arena that automation can help with. With AI journey analysis, you can set automation to work evaluating data across your consumer brand interactions and have it pinpoint anomalies when they happen.
An especially powerful automation tool, like Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, can also help you trace back the reasons that these anomalies occurred, and evaluate potential action plans that aim to respond to them.
Real-Time Customer Data Predictions
Marketing and sales, and plenty of other departments, always need more ways to get ahead of customers and leads. We want to know which customers are most worthwhile, which are getting ready to churn, and so on.
But because we’re not mind-readers, and because customers flow in and out constantly, this is another arena where brands can benefit from automation.
A CDP software with AI-enabled features, like propensity scoring, lead predictions, and customer churn predictions is a must. Not every CDP software, however, can provide you with these automated benefits in the same capacity.
You’ll need a CDP that can both manage large (and growing) datasets and one that’s still able to evaluate customer paths at the individual level and create predictions around them.
You’ll also need your CDP software to help analyze reasons for events like predicted churn—because you’ll need these reasons to improve your CX to meet them.
To gain access to all the automated benefits above and more, we recommend looking into Adobe’s Real-Time CDP.
Customer Service Automation
The most straightforward way you can automate your customer engagement is by implementing automation in customer service. Chatbots are normally hosted on your website or within your app and help resolve fast needs, or redirect more complex customer issues.
Rather than over-burdening your customer service team and imposing long response times on your customers, you can implement customer care automation to solve a large bulk of the simpler inquiries. Among some of the top general chatbot solutions are Intercom, OORT AI, and Claude AI.
You can also use customer service automation software to help bridge the high resistance today’s B2B consumers have toward contacting a sales rep, and allow them to naturally qualify themselves as leads. For this, you’ll need a B2B specialized chat solution with hefty generative AI capabilities, like Dynamic Chat within Adobe Marketo Engage.
Marketing Automation
A large part of your CX puzzle, undeniably, is your marketing strategy. This, by the way, can also be automated in a lot of ways to free up your marketers’ time for bigger needle-movers.
Marketing automation can assist with:
- Building predictive audiences and segments for use in your marketing campaigns.
- Building predictive email content to better personalize email campaigns.
- Nurturing leads using automated content.
- Identifying highest-value, best-fit prospects and personalizing content toward them.
Moreover, if your enterprise is growing, you’ll want to find a marketing automation solution that is flexible and quick to adapt to changes in strategy or setup, without limitations. You’ll also want a solution that can integrate with virtually anything in your tech stack, making it easier to create coordinated, cohesive CX campaigns across the board.
Adobe’s Marketo Engage excels at all of the above and then some, and is the ideal choice for businesses that want to scale, test, optimize, and achieve full CX maturity.
Real-Time Journey Optimization & Consumer Engagement
Now, for one of the largest puzzle pieces of CX as a whole—engagement where it counts across your varying customer journeys.
Inevitably, the best way to ensure the most relevant experiences for your customers is to treat them as individuals. This is hard to do manually when your customer count is high and the spray of touchpoints with your brand across each journey is vast. It’s impossible, actually…for a human. Thankfully, there’s a way to automate this, too.
The right CX automation platform for journey optimization should incorporate real-time, intelligent decision-making with the help of AI, to ensure you’re delivering the most relevant experiences cross-channel, and cross-tactic. For example, delivering nudges for virtual HIIT classes to a loyal HIIT class participant whose in-person attendance has suddenly dropped.
Moreover, your chosen solution should be able to integrate with the rest of your CX tech stack to help automate the delivery of these experiences. And few platforms have more possible integrations, in this respect, than Adobe Journey Optimizer.
Conclusion
The bottom line, where there’s a complex CX process, there’s likely a way to automate it to some degree. While our list of use cases and solutions isn’t exhaustive, it highlights what we’ve experienced are the largest pain points standing in the way of holistic, scalable CX.
But when you need to lighten the load on your team and improve efficiencies fast, we know that it can be difficult to select AI-enabled software that’s more complex and time-consuming to implement.
Before you opt for a quick short-term fix instead, drop us a line! Our teams of experts have streamlined Adobe software implementation for fast, painless integration—so you can get the most out of scalable automation faster.
