Customer Experience Automation: How to Scale CX Without Adding Headcount

Want to scale your customer experience without increasing your headcount? Customer experience automation is the key.

In this guide, learn everything you need to get started with automating your CX, including:

What to automate and what to leave to a human touch
How to increase CX consistency across multiple locations
Why automation is great for detractors and issue escalation

You’ll get advice about mapping CX workflows, plus tips about automation tools that make the entire process come together.

What Is Customer Experience Automation?

Customer experience automation (CXA) is the process of using automated tools to take over tasks normally done by humans. These repetitive jobs are part of collecting customer experience data. The information is needed to make improvements and “close the loop” started by the feedback.

What it is

Customer service automation replaces mundane, often repetitive tasks performed by human employees. It uses automated tools like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning. They gather and sort large amounts of data related to customer feedback.

This part of dealing with customer experience (CX) is labor-intensive and prone to being affected by human error. By automating this process, employees are freed up for other tasks that benefit more from a human touch.

Companies are left with fewer errors in this category, and they don’t have to increase headcount to get the information they need. Once the data has been gathered, it can be used to improve the customer experience across various touchpoints.

You can boost satisfaction and increase positive reviews. This in turn helps with both customer retention and attracting new customers.

Automating CX is a win-win. Customers get a more tailored experience when companies use data to make improvements (aka “close the loop”). And businesses streamline operations without exerting an impractical amount of manual labor.

What it automates

Most people think of solutions like chatbots and help desk phone algorithms when they start exploring CX automation. But in fact, these elements are rarely involved, if at all.

Instead, customer experience automation collects data on things like:

Online reviews
Survey responses
Email correspondence
Complaints
Customer service tickets

RELATED ARTICLE — How to Gather Customer Feedback

Why CX Automation Matters

As mentioned above, CX automation can be a huge boon to companies of all sizes, across all industries. Let’s look at the two key ways it makes a difference.

Replacing manual CX labor

First, the manual labor needed today to collect and sort customer feedback is immense. The more ways customers have to share reviews and complaints, the more labor is needed.

Customer feedback automation reduces that required labor. It saves businesses from having to add to their headcount, and yet, they can still scale their CX programs.

Importantly, they can use those human resources elsewhere, especially to follow up on feedback. This is known as “closing the loop” created by customer reviews, comments, and survey answers.

Consistency across locations

Another benefit of CX automation is providing better consistency across all business locations. This is essential for larger companies with branches and multinational enterprises.

You’re not missing any key pieces of data when you use the same process for all company locations. And because CXA also helps delegate next responses, you ensure all similar issues are handled in the same way.

For instance, “detractor” customers are those with low NPS scores. Not only are they likely to churn — they may repel prospective customers via negative reviews. You might want those customers to be managed by a special department to retain them and stop damaging negative feedback.

What You Can Automate in CX

When you begin to automate customer experience, you have many options when it comes to what exactly you want to automate. Here are five common examples you might consider across the timeline of customer feedback.

Feedback collection

Collecting customer feedback is one of the most labor-intensive tasks of monitoring CX. This is an ideal place to start with customer experience automation because it makes the process so much more efficient.

As discussed earlier, you can collect feedback from wherever customers leave it. Each business creates different opportunities for this. Typical places include website reviews, email letters (including complaints), and help desk tickets. You have to map the customer journey (touchpoints) for your business to see which are the best collection avenues for you.

Survey distribution

Customer experience automation can also be used to distribute surveys, not just collect them. You can automate sending surveys to customers sorted by criteria, such as:

New buyers of goods or services
Customers with certain NPS scores
Clients who receive help desk support
Prospects at certain sales funnel points
Repeat customers who buy again
Customers who leave for a competitor

Response routing

CX automation is ideal for routing feedback based on what customers say. This is one place where, in particular, you’ll find improved consistency across a large company or multiple locations.

For example, say you routinely ask all new customers about their onboarding experience. You might want to forward all negative responses to a human team while others get an automated “next steps” email.

Issue escalation

Using a group of actual employees to handle problems, complaints, and potential churn is issue escalation. CX automation handles this similarly to response routing but with more urgency.

The goal is to escalate issues quickly to the right person or department. That destination has to be able to solve the problem for the customer. You don’t want them churning and leaving negative feedback online.

And you don’t want to leave them frustrated in a never-ending loop of emails and text messages with bots. Resolving a problem in one contact session can raise the customer’s NPS score by 15–25 points. That’s a significant boost that’s very attainable with the right routing to an escalation specialist.

Follow-up & closing the loop

You can use CX automation to follow up and close the loop too. To review, closing the loop means making improvements or changes based on customer feedback. These may be company-wide protocol changes or simply issuing a refund to a dissatisfied individual.

Customer experience automation may send a survey or text message to a customer to make sure their problem was solved. Or it could be used to notify all your customers of a major change in response to their collective voice.

CX Automation Use Cases

How can CXA be utilized, especially when you have multiple locations or franchises? Below are a few use cases to demonstrate.

Automated post-visit surveys

One excellent way to leverage the power of CXA across locations is to set it up to survey customers following a visit. Ask questions you want to know, like did the visit meet their expectations? Would they go back again for merchandise or services?

Then you can use your customer feedback software to channel replies to the right part of the company for the appropriate response. That includes issue escalation, if necessary.

Detractor alerts & recovery

A detractor alert is a notification that a customer has a low NPS score. This means they’re dissatisfied enough to leave your business for a competitor. Or they might leave negative reviews that discourage other customers from buying. You can set up your CXA to flag these detractors to minimize or even reverse damage.

Your aim is to stop that customer and recover their patronage. It’s probably an issue escalation case that requires swift attention, assuming the customer’s complaints are valid.

Automated review requests

Think of how much manual labor used to be involved in having staff send and track SMS messages or emails for feedback. These are typically issued following a purchase or new membership signup.

Now you can automate the entire process. Set up your CXA to send the request. Then use the platform to sort the results as needed so they end up in the right place for any required action.

RELATED ARTICLE — AI Feedback for Franchises

Automation vs. the Human Touch

Above, we mentioned how ideally CX automation is integrated with a human touch. It doesn’t replace it. Here’s more food for thought related to that idea.

Where to automate

Think of customer experience management as two phases: before and after. The “before” phase is the information gathering part of the process. It’s sending surveys, monitoring online reviews, and analyzing responses.

Then, all that information is sent to the appropriate departments, as needed. This phase is generally where you want to automate. Additionally, you may want to add some automation to follow up after a feedback loop has been closed. Think of this phase as the “after after” segment of the journey.

Where to keep people

Where do you hang onto human staff and use manual labor over automation? It’s typically in the “after” phase.

This part of the process is dealing with the information gathered by your CXA. Once the data has been channeled to the right person or department, a live human can act on it. In general, keep people to perform tasks like:

Helping with support and tech issues that can’t be resolved with automated processes and algorithms
Reaching out to detractors and customers on the verge of churning to retain them and win them back
Making large-scale decisions based on collective feedback from pain points for many customers

You know your business best. If there is an issue you feel is better handled by a live human, don’t try to solve it with automation.

How to Get Started With CX Automation

Not sure where to begin when automating your customer experience? Here are some good starting points.

Map your CX workflows

Above, we suggested mapping your customer journey to see where you should solicit feedback. Likewise, you need to coordinate your CX workflows to these milestones.

For every customer touchpoint, decide if you want a corresponding CX automation point or task. This will make it much easier to get the results you want in the end.

Choose tools & measure impact

While you map your CX workflows, consider your goals for CX automation. They may be different for various customer touchpoints. Common goals include:

Reducing churn
Generating more positive reviews
Signing new memberships
Earning repeat business
Moving prospects along the sales funnel
Reducing tech support tickets

Next, choose your tools to automate customer experience milestones. You want a customer feedback analytics platform that meets the criteria for your business:

Right industry, e.g., wellness, home services, fitness
Capable of gathering actionable customer feedback
Able to work with multiple locations or franchises
Designed to feed data to the right place to close the loop

Finally, set metrics so you can measure the effectiveness of your customer experience automation plan. You may want to tweak certain aspects to get the tailored approach you ultimately want for your customers.

RELATED ARTICLE — Real-Time Feedback Platform

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some quick answers to the most frequently asked questions about CX automation. For more details, check out the sections above.

What is customer experience automation?

This is the process of replacing mundane, repetitive human tasks with automated tools. These tools collect customer feedback and send it to the proper place for resolution. Benefits include:

More efficient business operations
Higher customer retention rates
Increased customer satisfaction
Reduced human error in CX tasks

Can you automate customer experience?

Ideally, you want a balance of automated and human customer experience touchpoints. Automation is fine for basic interactions and collecting/analyzing data.

But you need a human touch to deal with the results. This is true if you’re making company-wide policy changes based on feedback. But it’s also vital when trying to prevent a single unhappy customer from going to a competitor.

Does automation hurt CX?

No. In fact, when done properly, CX automation enhances the process. It saves hours of labor wasted on repetitive tasks that also have higher human error rates. And it frees up human time to give customers a more personalized, tailored response to any feedback they share.

Conclusion

Are you ready to start automating your customer experience? Here are some expert tips to help you get started:

Always start by mapping the customer journey and related customer experience points. Otherwise, you risk missing key milestones where you could be losing customers or brand advocates.
Mapping your CX workflows will require collaboration between multiple departments in your business. It’s good to plan for this in advance so everyone works together toward the same goals.
Recognize that with multiple branches, the customer journey and CX may be different at various locations. But this is all the more reason to automate your CX in order to get better consistency.

Do you have a multi-location brand that needs help automating surveys? Do you need assistance with routing customer feedback and monitoring detractor alerts? Listen360 can help you close the loop and scale your CX without adding to your headcount. Book a demo today to learn more.