When you’re a founder, managing every customer touchpoint feels overwhelming. From sending marketing emails to fulfilling orders and responding to customer inquiries, you’re juggling countless tasks while trying to deliver personalized communications that build trust. But there’s good news: You don’t have to handle it all manually forever.
Customer experience automation (CXA) tools can transform how you connect with customers, handling routine interactions while you focus on growing your business. Learn about these applications and how Niel Hoyne, Google’s chief strategist for data and measurement, thinks about using tools like these to improve customer satisfaction.
What is customer experience automation?
Customer experience automation (CXA) uses technology and software tools to automate exchanges between businesses and consumers. CXA tools can send SMS text messages, deliver emails, and automate back-end data collection. CXA streamlines workflows and enables faster communication without requiring constant human input.
CXA applies to the entire customer journey, or the path a customer takes from considering a product to purchasing it. While marketing automation focuses on drawing customers into the sales pipeline, CXA encompasses those beginning, consideration stages as well as customer support and post-purchase communications. For example, an ecommerce business could use a CXA tool to ensure a positive delivery experience by automating shipping updates, letting customers know that their order is on track.
Customer experience automation vs. customer experience management
Customer experience management (CXM) addresses the entire customer lifecycle, or the entire relationship a customer has with a business. It involves mapping the complete customer journey and making strategic decisions to improve the customer experience. Customer experience automation, on the other hand, falls under the CXM umbrella and covers the day-to-day execution of customer support tasks. CXA helps implement the strategy and deliver the messages that CXM experts craft.
Elements of customer experience automation
Customer experience automation isn’t about bombarding consumers with constant communication. In Niel’s experience, “Advertisers that immediately start messaging, emailing, serving up advertising to customers as soon as they leave the website actually see a decrease in interest.” Effective CXA delivers the right message to the right person at the right time to make the customer journey smoother.
Here are the essential elements of successful CXA implementation:
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Audience segmentation.Customer segmentation groups users together based on commonalities, such as shared interests or similar demographics. Creating distinct customer segments helps marketing and communication teams tailor messages for each audience’s unique needs.
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Orchestration. Even straightforward customer interactions require communications across multiple channels. Orchestration ensures that all your communication channels work together during the customer journey. It involves leveraging existing customer data to make informed decisions about when to communicate on which channel.
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Automation. CXA tools automate communications, including emails, push alerts, and SMS notifications. They also simplify back-end operations by analyzing data and automatically updating customer profiles or routing support tickets to relevant teams.
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Personalization. For customers, personalization can mean the difference between a helpful update and an irritating, disruptive notification. This involves analyzing customer data and using audience segmentation to deliver personalized messages tailored to user needs. “Don’t collect information just for the sake of collecting it,” Neil says. “Think about how you might use it to personalize your emails, experiences, or deliver better value to users.”
6 ways to implement customer service automation
- AI chatbots
- Automated emails
- Automated SMS messages
- Customer profile maintenance
- Communication routing
- Customer surveys
Here are the most effective CXA processes businesses use to streamline operations and improve the customer experience:
1. AI chatbots
AI chatbots are instant messaging tools for handling simple customer queries. Chatbots often appear on the bottom right-hand corner of a website, denoted by a speech bubble icon. These tools use natural language processing to interpret inquiries.
They gather information from resources like internal databases, FAQ pages, and product instructions to provide basic customer support with details about products or company policies. Chatbots are available 24/7 and deliver responses within seconds, but they can’t replace human agents when customers need help with sophisticated issues.
2. Automated emails
Email automation tools can enhance the customer journey, respond to consumer actions, and help deliver personalized campaign messages. To enable automation, create rules that dictate when CXA tools send emails. For example, you could create a series of welcome emails triggered by first-time purchases to build a seamless onboarding experience.
You can also set behavior-based rules where specific customer actions trigger emails. Abandoned shopping cart emails are a common example of behavior-triggered emails. With automated abandoned cart emails, customers who leave your website midway through a purchase receive a timely follow-up.
3. Automated SMS messages
SMS automation works similarly to email automation. Account owners use rules and conditions to determine when messages are delivered. Like email, rules can be tied to the customer journey, specific actions, or customer segments.
4. Customer profile maintenance
CXA tools can help create and maintain customer profiles. Customer profiles contain user-selected preferences, such as newsletter opt-ins and saved searches. To build richer profiles, businesses collect first-party data generated by customer interactions. Transactional history is an important part of this dataset, but it’s not the only component.
CXA tools ingest data from multiple sources and update customer profiles automatically. Connecting information from your other marketing tools, like customer relationship management (CRM) systems and email marketing software, helps create a comprehensive view of customer preferences. Automation ensures that profiles are always up-to-date and accurate; if customer behaviors change, they’ll be reclassified as the program syncs data.
Niel emphasizes the importance of observing other customer behaviors, saying, “There are going to be customers that come to your website, but they’re not sure if they want to buy right away. Those relationships are just a natural part of doing business. Only tracking clicks and conversions may be a little bit shortsighted because you lose touch with those customers who may come back multiple times and contribute a lot of value.”
5. Communication routing
Automated routing can improve operational efficiency. CXA routing analyzes customer queries and directs messages to customer service agents or relevant teams based on a set of predefined rules. Routing rules can be based on conditions such as customer type, issue type, purchase history, and geography. Automated routing can enhance customer satisfaction by helping businesses resolve issues quickly.
6. Customer surveys
Automation helps build feedback collection into your standard workflow. With CXA, businesses can set feedback surveys to run at regular intervals. Automation tools collect customer responses and organize data. Reviewing up-to-date feedback can reveal valuable insights and help teams make data-informed decisions.
Customer experience automation FAQ
What is customer experience automation?
Customer experience automation (CXA) streamlines and personalizes how your brand interacts with customers throughout their entire journey—from first contact to repeat purchase and beyond. Rather than just storing data like a traditional customer relationship management (CRM) system, CXA uses that data to trigger automated, behavior-based interactions for managing client relationships. In ecommerce, CXA platforms help businesses deliver timely, relevant experiences at scale—boosting engagement, loyalty, and conversion rates without manual effort.
What are automated experiences?
An automated experience is any customer interaction that technology executes without human intervention. AI chatbots are a common example of automated experiences. When users submit questions, these tools automatically supply relevant information from a database or redirect the question to a customer service representative for additional assistance.
What is automated customer service?
Automated customer service refers to using technology and automation to handle aspects of customer support. Automated tools can supply basic information at any time, but complex customer issues may require assistance from a customer service representative.
