The importance of customer experience needs no introduction— 96% of customers remain loyal to a brand that considers brand perception a priority. 

However, delivering a consistent and customer-centric experience is not as straightforward as it seems, especially when you have to do it manually. There are tons of repetitive and error-prone tasks that can affect your efficiency or negatively impact delivery.

And that’s where customer experience automation comes in.

Automation helps you streamline your customer service by delegating tasks, such as ticket routing, rerouting, follow-up emails, and data entry, to AI-powered tools. This means human agents can focus on more strategic and complex customer interactions.

In this article, we’ll explain customer experience automation, its benefits, and how to use it to boost your ROI.

What is customer experience automation? 

To answer this, let’s split our definition into Customer experience and customer experience automation.

• Customer experience is a sum of all customer interactions with your business, from their first contact to post-purchase support and the impression they form through these interactions. This encompasses every touchpoint, including browsing your website, engaging with your marketing efforts, interacting with your sales team, using your product or service, and receiving customer support.

• Customer experience automation (CXA) means using AI-driven tools to streamline, optimize, and enhance these interactions with minimal human intervention while still delivering great results. This approach, which allows businesses to automate repetitive tasks, workflows, and communications, results in reduced human errors, consistent support, and personalized services.

Customer experience automation vs marketing automation

Marketing automation refers to using software to streamline marketing processes and manage multi-channel campaigns. However, it focuses heavily on pre-purchase interactions and lead generation.

In contrast, customer experience automation covers your marketing and sales funnel, including pre-purchase and post-purchase interactions. This approach aims to build customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty.

Customer experience automation vs customer relationship management

While both CXA and CRM aim to nurture brand-customer relationships, the latter primarily does that by centralizing your customer data. CRMs also have minimal or zero customer interface, meaning only your business interacts with the system, not your customers themselves.

On the other hand, CXA offers a customer interface through AI agents like chatbots and integrates with CRMs, ERPs, and other home-grown systems to utilize customer data to deliver personalized experiences.

How does customer experience automation work?

Customer experience automation leverages three crucial components to streamline each touch point in your customer’s journey for faster and more effective service delivery:

• AI agents: AI-powered chatbots engage your leads and customers on the front end to simulate authentically human-like conversations. An example is the all-in-one customer service platform Plivo CX’s self-service chatbot, which is an OpenAI-developed bot capable of custom training for accuracy and relevance.
• Agent assistance: Automation tools provide valuable support to your human agents in the backend through real-time suggestions, seamless retrieval of relevant customer data, and automation of routine tasks during interactions.
• Workflow optimization: Escalation workflows, interactive voice response, ticket routing, and sticky rerouting standardize your processes to boost overall efficiency.

These automation components work in tandem to eliminate drags in your customer experience and enhance satisfaction.

Key advantages of customer experience automation for ecommerce

As HubSpot data suggests, 86% of customer experience leaders believe automation will positively impact their service delivery, and 71% plan to invest more in AI agents like chatbots. Let’s explore some advantages of doing the same for your ecommerce business:

1.Offer 24/7 support

67% of consumers want a response to their queries within 3 hours, and over 60% want 24/7 support availability. That’s not something a 9-5 helpdesk offered by your human agents can help offer, especially when serving cross-border buyers outside your local timezone.

Customer experience automation helps you eliminate these geolocational and support barriers by using round-the-clock AI-powered chatbots built to handle more than 80% of routine questions. 

Moreover, you don’t need to hit a break with your customer data collection and analysis. Your automation works nonstop while you nap.

2.Reduce operational costs

For a mid-sized ecommerce business with tens of thousands of customers, you’ll need to set up a bogus team of human agents and data analysts to have a chance at providing a near-efficient experience for your customers. That’s difficult to scale in terms of resource and skill availability.

On the other hand, automating your customer experience with AI agents can help save up to 30% in cost. A single bot can do the work of multiple humans, thus reducing your recruitment costs. Also, good customer experience enhances retention rate and slashes customer acquisition costs.

3.Increase customer satisfaction

Companies using AI report a 20% increase in satisfaction rates. Automation reduces time to resolution, ensures quick escalation to the right channels when necessary, and matches customer data to deliver accurate experiences.

Also, delegating these weights to AI enables companies to allocate resources such as human agents and capital towards improving other core aspects of the customer journey, which serves your customers’ interests.

4.Personalize communications

According to Forrester, 77% of consumers have purchased from or recommended brands that provide personalized experiences.

Customer experience automation ensures this by collating and analyzing customer data from different sources, such as multiple communication channels, e-commerce platforms like Shopify, and CRMs.

Structured data gives valuable insight into your customers’ pain points, previous support history, and other information that can assist in making informed decisions.

A great example is the omnichannel contact center solution Plivo CX's unified desktop agent, which consolidates fragmented customer data from multiple channels, such as email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat, into a single, easily accessible interface.

This empowers your human agents with real-time access to valuable insights and enables your chatbots to provide tailored recommendations and assistance to customers.

5.Offer consistent experiences

79% of consumers expect consistency in service delivery; however, 55% say they often feel like they are talking to different departments instead of one organization. This disconnect often occurs when departments operate in silos.

For example, the marketing team may focus on lead generation without aligning with the customer service team, leading to fragmented communication and a disjointed customer experience.

Customer experience automation prevents silo operations by breaking the barriers between your marketing, sales, and customer support teams. This results in a unified contact center and allows access to valuable data, ensuring your customers have a consistent experience pre- and post-purchase.

6.Boost customer relationships

Providing faster responses to queries, accelerating order delivery, reducing touch points to purchase, and offering personalized experiences through automation all boost customer satisfaction. And satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal or connected to your brand. 

Customers who feel connected to a brand are worth 306% more in lifetime value. Loyal customers are also good brand advocates and will recommend your business to others 71% more than those who are not.

5 ways to use customer experience automation

While customer experience automation is a must-have superpower, knowing where and how to use it can significantly impact your results. Let’s see some of the most important use cases to consider.

1.AI Chatbots

AI chatbots handle routine queries, manage customer orders through API integrations with stores, sort customer refunds, or simply hand off issues and escalate them to your human agents. These bots can also provide smart product recommendations to customers and help streamline decision-making.

As noted before, Plivo CX’s OpenAI-powered self-service chatbots, which you can train in-house with a custom dataset to provide accurate and hyper-personalized responses to your customers. You can also guardrail them to stay within your company’s playbooks and brand voice.

2.Live chat

Occasionally, your chatbots might hit a hard rock and be unable to address a query. In that case, you can employ customer service automation to reroute the query to a live agent through a smart sorting system that uses customer data to choose the most appropriate human agent and channel.

Plivo CX’s drag-and-drop workflow builder makes this possible by helping you build sleek workflows without coding to streamline escalations, routing, and rerouting. This reduces time to resolution and ensures your customers get the assistance they need. 

3.Self-service portals

Utilize automation to create self-service portals to help customers access their personal information, initiate actions, and solve problems with barely any interaction with your agents. They are personal but password-gated dashboards that have been automated to provide tailored assistance based on customer data.

These portals also often include an account management dashboard that displays relevant transactions, personalized knowledge bases like FAQs, and task management features to apply for a credit card or follow a ticket’s history.

4.Automated notifications & emails

You can set up automated notifications and emails for your ecommerce business based on several triggers, such as cart abandonment, confirmation after placing an order, shipping updates, a drop in the price of previously viewed products, or when a product is out of stock.

Plivo CX’s Shopify integration allows owners to provide proactive support through preset reminders, personalize messaging, and make smart routing decisions based on centralized customer data.

5.Feedback surveys

Use automation tools to collect feedback from your customers to refine your delivery further. You can do this via AI chatbots and simply ask customers to rate their experience after the resolution of a query. You can also send a survey to their emails after an interaction.

Plivo CX’s CSAT collection feature helps you do that by sending predesigned surveys to customers and providing visual analysis in order to pinpoint areas that need improvement quickly.

Implement superior customer experience automation with Plivo CX 

Automating customer experience is seamless only when using the right solutions. Plivo CX offers an AI-driven platform with a full-packaged automation system designed to streamline communication, enhance engagement, and ensure smooth interactions across your channels.

Plivo CX also boasts a 24/7 OpenAI-powered chatbot that can be trained to make informed decisions guided by your company’s policies, accurately and rapidly address customer complaints, and escalate issues to human agents along with detailed notes or data when required.

In addition to that, the tool offers several features, such as:

• Unified communication: As noted before, you can manage all customer conversations across channels like email, voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and live chat from a single, agent-friendly platform
• Seamless integrations: Connect Plivo CX with your existing tools, including CRM, ERP, helpdesk, home-grown systems, and more
• Data-driven optimization: Track real-time analytics and generate custom reports to gain insights into customer interactions and agent performance
• Communication with media support: Enhance interactions with multimedia support, including images, videos, and documents
• Increased productivity: Streamline workflows with message templates, internal notes, and skills-based routing
• Comprehensive features: Leverage call recording, IVR, multi-language support, and robust security features for a complete solution

To learn more, book a demo!