How to Up Your Customer Experience Automation Game

Without good customer experience automation, the best marketing in the world won't save you.

Sales and marketing will get your customers in the door, whether physically or digitally. 

But customer experience automation makes sure they come back and refer you to their friends and colleagues.

Introduction to Customer Experience Automation

Imagine you’re shopping for a Bluetooth speaker, and you find exactly what you want. It’s the right shape, size, and color. It has a long battery life and excellent sound quality. The price is less than you expected to pay.

You should be happy, but… 

The website where they sell your speaker is frustrating and hard to navigate. When you submit your payment info at checkout, the screen refreshes without acknowledging the sale. You’re not even sure if the order was taken or not, and you have to check your email just to be certain. 

Next, there’s a long wait for delivery with no explanation. You don’t know when your order is expected to arrive. When you try to find out, you just get automated messages that aren’t helpful.

After a long wait, your speaker arrives in excellent condition. All is well, but you probably won’t buy anything from that business again.

You see, the experience your customer has when they buy a product is almost as important as the quality of the product itself. 

This is where customer experience automation comes in. 

Understanding the Impact of Customer Experience Automation

Worldwide changes in recent years, including the COVID-19 pandemic and Gen Z coming of age, have caused many people to shift their values. 

According to research by Accenture, purchasing choices are no longer a mere transaction. People see every aspect of their lives in terms of social movements, global issues such as climate change, and personal identity.

The same report notes a full 64% of consumers say they wish companies would respond faster to their changing needs. 

Even a decision about where and how to buy a small item can become an expression of personality, needs, and values. Your customers don’t want a transaction as much as a relationship. 

As Accenture puts it, we are seeing a shift from customer-centric businesses to life-centric businesses. 

In this context, customer experience automation isn’t just a matter of being more efficient. The experience you create for your customers is becoming a big part of how you stay relevant.

But how does automation enhance customer experience? Isn’t this a paradox?

Well, when it comes to marketing automation, customer experience can take on many forms.

Key Benefits of Customer Experience Automation

When you’re starting a new business and you don’t have many customers, you and your team can give everyone a personalized customer experience. You can and should build relationships with your early customers. 

But as your business grows, you have less time to offer the same quality of experience to each customer. This is when you need to start automating your standard, repetitive tasks.

Paradoxically, customer experience automation will help you build relationships. Carefully planned automation will keep most of your customers happy most of the time. 

Automation frees up resources (such as Facetime with a real human being) for situations that require more personalization and attention.

Why Trust Us? All beehiiv writers are carefully vetted for their knowledge and experience. Jacob Bear has been writing email marketing campaigns for more than 10 years and was recently named a Top Copywriting Voice by LinkedIn. He frequently interviews his clients’ customers about their experiences with a business or product.

Implementing Customer Experience Automation in Marketing

You could argue that customer experience automation is marketing. 

Anything you do to automate customer experience will ultimately create more opportunities to make a sale. 

What is an example of customer experience automation?

You can set up automation of customer experience in many ways. Here are a few of them:

• Map out the entire customer journey and automate as many steps as possible

• Integrate email signup forms into your ads and social media

• Segment your customers for better targeting

• Use autoresponders to send specific messages in response to specific actions

• Automate your lead nurturing campaigns based on segments and tags

Enhancing Customer Engagement Through Automation

Salesforce has noted that giving your customers a connected experience creates more engagement.

If you want to enhance customer engagement through automation, your best bet is to integrate the tools that your customers will interact with as they do business with you. Use APIs or a service such as Zapier to integrate Calendly, beehiiv, Shopify, etc. 

This integration enables a customer to seamlessly set an appointment, make a purchase, or download the content they want. 

In addition to providing an easy experience for your customers, you will have multiple opportunities to collect data about your customers. The resulting insights will help you make their experience even better. 

Leveraging Automation to Personalize Customer Experiences

At the core of customer experience is the feeling that they're not getting a one-size-fits-all response, but that you are delivering something specifically for them.

Using the data you collect to inform your automation will help you personalize customer experiences. 

For example, a beehiiv newsletter enables you to use advanced segmentation and analytical tools to give each of your readers a message that is closely tied to their needs.

Overcoming Challenges in Customer Experience Automation Implementation

Let's face it. Unless you write your own code or can hire someone to do it, there’s only one way to implement your customer experience automation. You need to use platforms and tools that do the heavy lifting for you.

As customers seek relationships with the businesses they use, a good email marketing platform will always be at the core of your customer experience automation. This is especially important for businesses that rely heavily on digital marketing, such as a niche website.

One of the best email platforms for building relationships is beehiiv. For starters, beehiiv offers API access and integrations with hundreds of the most popular tools on the web.

Our newsletter templates are fully customizable and come with analytical tools that help you track the behavior and interests of your readers. 

Email is a critical part of customer experience automation, and you can make your email more effective by starting a beehiiv newsletter today.