Did you know that 73% of customers think customer experience is an important factor that drive their purchasing decisions and about 86% are willing to fork out more money for better customer experience.
In the United States alone, organizations approximately lose $1.6 trillion annually as a result of poor customer experience. This often leads to customers switching to competitors in most businesses case.
While personal interaction is essential to build relationships with customers, delivering a good customer experience at scale can be quite challenging for businesses. The lack of standardized process often leads to inconsistency and inefficiency which creates frustrating experience for consumers.
Luckily, with today’s advance technology, organizations can automate customer experience processes and standardize workflow to deliver a much more efficient and consistent customer experience. Customers will be able to gain relevant offers, assistance, and content when they need it.
Here are 5 ways on how organizations can improve their customer experience using automation technology.
1. Delivering personalized communications at larger scale
Today’s consumers want content and offers catered to their needs and preferences.
72% of customers only engage with marketing messages that are targeted, 80% are likely to purchase from brands that personalizes their customer experience, and 92% are more likely to buy from brands if they can get relevant recommendations and information.
Businesses can cater to customer needs based on their preferences, browsing behavior, real time interaction and order history with the existence of automation technology by implementing business logic and complex workflows.
Organization can also deliver messages using the most appropriate channels such as chat-bots, social media posts, website content, text, email, and more.
Here’s how organizations can use automation to implement personalization strategies.
- To segment customer lists, organization should automate data collection and analytics on all touch points of customer experience journey. This will allow businesses to distribute relevant offers and content at the right place and time to the right people.
- Use automated email marketing with workflows which can deliver product recommendations or offers based on each customer real time interactions with the brands and to deliver highly targeted content which includes follow up on support calls, relevant blog articles, new product announcement and cart abandonment messages.
- Create and provide highly personalized content and recommendations on website or through social media in order to build loyalty, increase sales, and drive engagement.
2. Simplify inventory management and order tracking
Gone are the days where businesses can just send email to their customers notifying that their orders are on the way and sit back. By using automation technology in managing inventory, warehouse, and fulfillment process, customers can know more about their order status without much cost.
Another benefit of automating inventory management is that it allows businesses to compile and use real time data analytics to know latest market trends and forecast demand. Businesses will be able to stock the right products which then enable customers to get what they want when they want.
Automation in inventory management and order tracking can be use to:
- Prevent products from running out of stock by setting data driven rules for reordering and anticipating market demands using real time analytics so that businesses can have the right stock to meet customer demands.
- Display the number of items left in stock with real time tracking so that customers won’t get disappointed when they order an item and find out later that the item is sold out. In a way, this also helps to add urgency which can increase conversion.
- Notify customers by sending automated emails alerts that the items they left in their carts are low in stock.
- Provide order status, carrier information, and delivery time to customers.
- Notify customers if there’s a delay in shipment and provide updates on the new delivery time.
3. Use chat-bots to provide real time customer support
56% of consumers prefer to contact a brand through messaging apps or chat rather than a phone call. Thanks to AI-powered and automation technology, chat-bots can simplify customer support workflows while delivering a relevant experience in real time
The many benefits of using chat-bots includes, the ability to handle many routine support inquires without wasting time, frees up human agents so that they can focus on more complex issues and build instant customer relationships.
Here are some ways businesses can utilize chat-bots to optimize customer experience.
- Answer customers questions right away on the spot
- Screen customers needs and direct them to the right agent.
- Differentiate general inquiries from customer complaints
- Collect necessary and important information about customers before routing them to the right agent. This will allow a much simplified interaction and personalized experience which is more cost efficient
4. Streamline processes with electronic forms
Businesses can use online dynamic forms if they want customers to fill up a form, process a purchase order, or even to sign an agreement. This simplifies customer experience and save businesses from a lot of paperwork.
Even the information gathered from online forms can be synced up with organization internal systems automatically and is accessible at any time. Additionally, it also saves time from re-keying the information manually which can cause further errors and delays.
Organizations can facilitate form processing and approval with automation by:
- Automating workflows. This is useful if there’s multiple stages to go through. With automation, orders would be able to be processed faster.
- Use database to auto fill or populate forms using customer information. This will simplify customers purchasing experience and will reduce the possibilities of errors or missing information.
- Develop collaboration between several internal departments to route customers request towards the right team
5. Use real time analytics to improve customer experience
With the existence of automation technologies, organizations can cleanse, compile and analyse a large amount of available customer data. Factors like customers browsing behavior and purchasing history can be analysed in order to enhance real time decision making and simplifying the customer experience
Companies should also organize customers feedback to discover patterns and trends.
By using real time data analytics, companies can generate insights and create reports which can be used by the whole organization so that decision makers have access to the latest customer insights in making data driven accurate decision to improve customer experience.
Conclusion
In today’s data driven world, companies that don’t simplify their business process might get left behind compared to those who provide streamline processes in understanding their customers better. With the existence of automation technology, organizations can become more responsive to customer needs by providing relevant information and helpful services in real time.
Other than streamlining customer interactions, automation can also help to prevent unnecessary internal problems, leading to a more customer centric company.
Not everything should be automated though, most consumers still values the human interaction which can build meaningful customer relationship that will increase sales and improve customer loyalty.
