December 13, 2024
by Monika Manickam / December 13, 2024
You walk into a store, and every staff member knows exactly what you need, understands your preferences, and delivers the perfect solution.
This is what customer experience automation (CXA) helps companies deliver. From automating mundane tasks to delivering hyper-personalized interactions, it bridges the communication gap between customers and businesses.
But how does CXA actually help your business? And how can it significantly reduce costs while driving growth? Let’s get these questions answered!
CXA operates at the intersection between what brands aim to communicate and what customers wish to receive. Simply put, it automates the interactions brands have with customers by taking a personalized, AI-driven strategy.
Here’s an important distinction: CXA isn’t the same as customer service.
By automating repetitive tasks, CXA relieves customer service representatives of tedious, time-consuming responsibilities. It allows them to focus on more complex customer needs.
Four components make up the business strategy behind CXA. They include
CXA integrates various tools and strategies to streamline customer interactions while optimizing operational workflows. The two integral aspects of these are conversational automation and low-code/no-code (LC/NC) workflow automation.
Conversational automation is communication-centric. It personalizes any stakeholder-facing interaction to increase efficiency with minimal human intervention. Its use cases can vary from marketing, sales, and human resource management to customer service.
Predominantly, a CX automation platform uses artificial intelligence to craft human-like conversations using natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLMs), and generative AI.
Source: Twixor
Some prominent features of conversational automation include:
LC/NC workflow automation is the process of performing business operations with little to no coding expertise. This makes business process management more inclusive and accessible to organizations, irrespective of their coding knowledge.
Here are some prominent features of an LC/NC workflow automation platform.
Most CXA platforms have an easy-to-design module through which you may create customer journeys, call APIs for third-party integrations, and swiftly build and deploy applications.
Source: Twixor
This involves collecting digital documents from multiple sources, creating a centralized knowledge base, and lastly, distributing the documents. It also ensures that no duplicate versions of the original source are created unless necessary. Indexing is also essential for maintaining a well-organized document repository since it allows quick retrieval.
Source: Twixor
BPM optimizes business processes to enhance operational efficiency and workplace productivity. For instance, a software development team with ad hoc processes can benefit from a BPM strategy. This would aid them in creating an efficient project workflow, assigning responsibilities to all team members involved, and drafting smart, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) projects and individual goals.
Source: Twixor
With a task management platform, tasks are generated by low-code workflows for specific users or groups. Each task has a unique reference ID for further analysis. These tasks are then segregated based on priority and status, with email notifications sent to stakeholders as needed.
Source: Twixor
CXA improves operational efficiency by optimizing customer service functions and effectively managing high query volumes. Here’s how:
Source: Twixor
It was expected that in 2024, chatbots will save businesses 2.5 billion hours and $8 billion. Overall, investing in customer experience automation can increase leads by up to 110%, sales win rates by 92%, and overall sales efficiency by 109%.
CXA delivers cost reductions in three primary areas:
Effectively reducing costs while maintaining high-quality operations is a priority for many organizations. Below are some specific use cases demonstrating how CXA achieves this balance.
CXA uses AI to supplement the day-to-day operations of current workers. These tasks include scheduling meetings, answering common HR or access-related questions from employees, and more.
Additionally, CXA can help organizations uncover customer preferences and voices that agents can reference when helping customers. Agents may not have to ask repetitive questions or toggle between systems to find information manually.
Source: Twixor
Cart abandonment on e-commerce sites happens when a customer does not check out the items they added. This may happen because of poor website loading speed or navigation, finding a better price elsewhere, or simply because they changed their minds. CXA tackles this by tracking an individual’s user behavior and sending personalized reminders to help potential customers complete their purchase process.
What’s more, virtual assistants can help send messages on time. Overall, this ensures a consistent increase in revenue and employee productivity in the long run.
Source: Twixor
A highly efficient customer experience strategy involves personalizing communication efforts. Manually sending personalized messages is time-consuming and expensive. CXA optimizes this process by using AI to design and deliver personalized communication efficiently. Businesses benefit from cost-effective personalized marketing strategies, while customers enjoy relevant and tailored interactions.
Source: Twixor
As discussed, CXA has revolutionized the way businesses handle customer interactions. However, CXA's success is dependent on strategy and execution.
Crafting a CXA plan for a business needs to align with its core objectives. This involves developing use cases, specific pain points, and bottlenecks in the customer journey. Deeply understanding current customer journeys and ongoing upgrades is essential to ensure that a CXA plan succeeds in boosting customer satisfaction and scaling revenue streams.
CXA offers versatile applications across different business functions. Here are some:
Conversational AI, or conversational automation is great for enhancing an organization’s sales and customer service processes. Often, the content of an organizations’s website, or social media platforms is extensive, which can overwhelm the users. Virtual assistants integrate into your website, or social media platforms to deliver information that a user asks for.
For example, a user can simply type or voice record their query into the chat, and the virtual assistant will provide an accurate, prompt response. The objective is to take the user through a hassle-free purchase process and ensure they convert in the end. Furthermore, this empowers users to revisit your virtual assistant whenever they require a service.
Note: Virtual assistants are often referred to as enterprise chatbots as well.
Conversational automation can handle seamless interactions, such as vendor management, invoice processing, payment tracking, and more. Suppliers receive some frequently asked questions on a day-to-day basis, such as:
There are many more variations of such FAQs. Most often, these questions are manually handled by humans; however, they can get repetitive and time-consuming over time. A virtual assistant becomes an intelligent alternative that can help answer these queries quickly.
Conversational automation can also be used as a HR or IT helpdesk for an organization. The virtual assistant can answer common HR questions, such as, health insurance queries, leave policy queries, and more. Additionally, it can also answer IT-related questions, such as access management, laptop setup, and more.
The HR and IT team can focus on more strategic, and complex tasks that require one-on-one engagement, rather than spending their time answering frequently asked questions.
In a nutshell, conversational automation can be used in any situation where a user asks a question that can be sourced from a knowledge base. Use cases span across a multitude of business interactions, and not just limited to prospects, customers, suppliers, or employees – it depends on how you use it.
Integrating CXA into your operations requires thoughtful planning to maximize its impact. Here are some best practices to guide you:
While CXA offers transformative benefits, its integration and implementation come with challenges that businesses must address proactively. Here are some common challenges and ways to overcome them.
In some cases, businesses may use too many automation processes, resulting in a lack of human touch in customer conversations. Interactions can become monotonous, robotic, and uninteresting. This is why it is imperative to introduce hyper-personalization to your strategy by analyzing customer data or audience categorization.
Teams may not be comfortable changing their existing processes to adapt to new technology because of job loss or unawareness. For this reason, upper management must be involved in open and clear communication with all employees. Proper training schedules and regular check-ins or discussions must be set in place to ensure there is no room for confusion.
In some cases, older systems may not be compatible with the new technology stack. Connect with CXA vendors that are compatible with both modern and legacy systems. Ensure that API calls or third-party connectors can be used to bridge CXA platforms with your backend systems.
As CXA technology evolves, businesses can look forward to groundbreaking advancements that will redefine customer engagement. Let’s take a look at some key developments on the horizon:
While it is important to use enterprise AI chatbots for your CX, it is also imperative to measure and re-optimize. Is your strategy providing a steadily increasing ROI? Is your strategy increasing engagement levels from your intended user base? These are some of the questions you need to answer when measuring your chatbot automation strategy.
Measuring the success of CXA initiatives is essential to ensure they meet business objectives and improve customer experiences. By tracking the right metrics, organizations can identify strengths, uncover areas for improvement, and refine their strategies for maximum impact.
Here are some key performance indicators to monitor.
Source: Twixor
The most fundamental part of CXA is to improve customers’ experience of working with you. Measuring CSAT is pretty straightforward. Once your project is executed, you send surveys to your customers to understand if expectations are being met.
For reference, on a scale of one to five, an average score between five and five is a high CSAT score. On a scale of one to ten, an average score between eight and ten is a high CSAT score. The market standard ranges between 75% and 85%.
This predominantly measures CXA in sales processes. It oversees how many customer interactions lead to a product purchase. An ideal CR for e-commerce is 2.5% to 3%. The overall average B2B lead conversion rate typically ranges between 1% and 5%, depending on the sector and channel.
Your CX automation strategy should reduce your time reverting to a user query, minimizing human representatives from answering most queries. AHT is often measured by the amount of time required to resolve a customer issue. The market standard for a live representative is around six minutes. The standard for an enterprise AI chatbot assistant is much lower, with an AHT reduction from eleven minutes to just two.
SCR measures how many conversations are fully handled by the automated enterprise chatbot system without any human intervention. This gives you an understanding of how efficient your customer experience automation is. The market standard for an optimal self-support completion rate can go upto 85%. The higher your SCR is, the better.
FCR measures the percentage of queries resolved in the first interaction with a CX-automated digital assistant. It is considered best for most queries to get resolved by the AI chatbot within the first interaction. Eventually, FCR ensures a reduced operational cost and higher CSAT scores. An optimal first contact resolution rate is between 70% and 75%.
NPS measures customer loyalty by using feedback surveys. A CX automation platform can help with amplifying overall CSAT scores, which eventually increases NPS. After filling out your NPS form, your customers are either detractors or promoters. Detractors are customers who have rated you from zero to six, and promoters are customers who have rated you a nine or ten.
Using the right technologies for monitoring and evaluation is essential to maximizing the benefits of CXA. These tools provide actionable insights, ensure seamless operations, and help refine strategies for improved customer interactions. Here are some key technologies that support effective CXA monitoring.
Customer experience automation is redefining how businesses and end users interact. By using an AI-powered CXA tool, businesses can mark the grey area between what businesses want to communicate and what users want to hear.
What’s exciting about CXA is its scalability and versatility. From answering a customer's query in real time to simplifying supplier communications or supporting internal teams, the potential is vast and industry-agnostic.
So, whether you’re just starting out or looking to optimize your existing CXA efforts, now’s the time to take the leap. The opportunities are immense, and the rewards – enhanced satisfaction, loyalty, and operational efficiency – speak for themselves.
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Edited by Monishka Agrawal
Monika Manickam is a B2B content marketer passionate about data-driven content strategy. She holds a Master's in data and communication from the National University of Singapore. Monika uses data analytics to craft compelling content that resonates with target audiences.
Great customer experience (CX) always drives revenue.
You can’t improve if you don’t measure.
Close your eyes and think about all the notifications, updates, calls, and messages you and...
Great customer experience (CX) always drives revenue.
You can’t improve if you don’t measure.