Customer Experience Automation: How to Scale CX Without Adding Headcount
Delivering great customer experiences at scale is one of the hardest things a growing business has to figure out. More locations, more customers, more touchpoints, with the same expectation of consistency and care at every one of them.
Customer experience automation is how modern businesses close that gap without adding headcount.
- What to automate and what to leave to a human touch
- How to create consistent CX across multiple locations
- Why automation is especially valuable for handling detractors and escalating issues
Plus, practical advice on mapping your CX workflows and the tools that bring it all together.
What Is Customer Experience Automation?
Customer experience data is crucial to businesses. When analyzed, it can identify what your business is doing well and, more importantly, existing pain points and missed opportunities. Acting on this data can improve customer experiences across various touchpoints and help “close the loop.” This then boosts satisfaction and positive reviews, which in turn helps with both customer retention and attracting new customers. It all starts with clear, actionable customer experience data.
However, the process of collecting and organizing this vital data is repetitive, labor-intensive, time-consuming, and mundane. That makes it prone to human error and, frankly, procrastination.
Customer experience automation (CXA) is the process of using automated tools (like AI and machine learning) to gather and sort these large amounts of data related to customer feedback.
Automating CX is a win-win. Customers get a more tailored experience when companies use data to make improvements, and businesses streamline operations without exerting an impractical amount of manual labor. Employees are freed up for other tasks that benefit more from a human touch, and companies are left with fewer errors without increasing headcount.
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 and organizes 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
Replacing manual CX labor
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. This is of course multiplied exponentially by the number of locations a business has.
Customer feedback automation reduces that required labor. It saves businesses from having to add to their headcount while scaling their CX programs. Instead, they can use those human resources elsewhere, especially in personally following up on feedback. This is known as “closing the loop” created by customer reviews, comments, and survey answers.
Consistency across locations
This point is especially 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 feedback is handled in the same way, exactly to your liking.
Being consistent with customer feedback is also crucial when dealing with “detractors” — customers with low NPS scores. Not only are they likely to churn, they may repel prospective customers via negative reviews. They need to be heard and handled professionally, and if complaints are consistent to a certain location, your business needs to know how it may need to improve.
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 makes it the ideal place to start with customer experience automation: 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: website reviews, email letters (including complaints), help desk tickets, and many more. 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
This is one place where, in particular, you’ll find improved consistency across a large company or multiple locations.
CX automation is ideal for routing feedback based on what customers say. Take feedback routing as an example: if you ask every new customer about their onboarding experience, automation can instantly send negative responses to a human team for follow-up while everyone else receives a tailored “next steps” email. No manual sorting is required.
Issue escalation
Issue escalation means routing problems, complaints, and at-risk customers to the right person quickly and professionally. The goal is simple: get the customer to someone who can actually solve their problem, without making them wade through a loop of automated emails and chatbot responses first.
CX automation handles this similarly to response routing, but with a higher sense of urgency. It automatically removes that frustrated customer in that cycle and connects them with a member of staff, before you lose them to your competition or they leave negative reviews.
The payoff for getting it right is significant. Resolving a problem in a single contact session can raise a customer’s NPS score by 15–25 points — a meaningful shift that’s entirely within reach when escalation routing is set up well.
Follow-up & closing the loop
“Closing the loop” simply 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
Automated post-visit surveys
Set it up to survey customers following a visit, asking questions you want to know the answers to. Did the visit meet their expectations? Did they leave satisfied? 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 discouraging, negative reviews.
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. You can set up your CXA to flag these detractors to minimize or even reverse damage.
Automated review requests
Think of how much manual labor is involved in having your staff organize, send, and track SMS messages or emails for feedback.
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. They’ll end up in the right place for any required action.
RELATED ARTICLE — AI Feedback for Franchises
Automation vs. the Human Touch
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: sending surveys, monitoring online reviews, and analyzing responses. Then, all that information is sent to the appropriate departments, as needed.
It’s repetitive, labor-intensive, time-consuming, and mundane, making it the perfect place to insert automated tools and assistance.
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 by, for example:
- 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
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, but 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:
- Tailored to businesses in your industry
- 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
Next Steps
Thinking about automating your customer experience but don’t know where to start? Here are some expert tips:
- 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.
