Today, if you can’t scale your customer experience strategy to span the entire customer journey, you’re going to miss out on valuable customer conversations, thereby leaving money on the table. Your customer service strategy needs to deliver support 24/7 while meeting your prospects and customers in the channels they are more comfortable in - think Messenger, WhatsApp, WeChat. The key here is to deliver a personalized and proactive engagement whenever and wherever they want.
Enter conversational AI.
When you leverage AI and knowledge base software, you’ll deliver the best customer experience you possibly can. You’ll see a boost in revenue, CSAT, customer lifetime value, and agent productivity. The trick is knowing how to add automation to your customer support arsenal correctly, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Let’s dig in.
An automated customer experience (ACX) is the practice of introducing AI-powered automation to the front line of your customer support strategy. While introducing AI can boost engagement across digital channels, ACX is about ensuing both long-term ROI and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) by integrating automation as part of your broader digital strategy. Companies that implement an automated customer experience strategy are four times more likely to see CSAT improvement.
With an automated customer experience strategy, your teams will reduce wait times and improve the overall customer experience. ACX triages, resolves, and reroutes customer inquiries automatically and relieves overworked teams of those mind-numbing tasks with meaningful problem-solving. It’s important to note that adding automation to your customer experience strategy does not replace humans. Instead, it sits on the front line and supports them; when human intervention is needed, the chatbot can hand off the conversation to a live agent within the chat.
AI is a powerful tool. To get the best results, you’ll need to introduce automation with speed and increasingly deeper personalization and functionality levels. We recommend a three-phase rollout; each phase is tailored to your business’s interests to deliver tangible results.
To prepare for the launch, you should connect with the right people (look for people who work with your customers every day - they’re the experts), determine routine processes (these are ideal for automation), and evaluate the best tools for your needs.
Now it’s time to take your chatbot to the next level; you should focus on evolving from answering basic FAQs to automating actions with personalized content. This will let your customer do more since they’ll have more self-serve options, free up your agents for more high-value human interactions, and raise your CSAT further.
This phase is all about scaling your automated customer experience strategy. You should focus on integrating your chatbot across the entire customer journey to unlock new revenue opportunities. Introduce incentives for your customers with proactive, personalized messages while also automated upsells, cross-sells, and payments. This will take your ACX strategy to the next level.
Your first step to successfully implementing your automated customer experience strategy is to assemble a team that will report to your newly established ACX Director in your ACX department.
Before we continue, I’ll quickly explain why you’ll want to create an ACX department because I’m sure you’re asking, “what’s wrong with my current setup?”. There’s nothing wrong with it, but at this point in your ACX transformation, you should be realizing radically diminished costs and increased efficiencies. Now is the time to double down and bring together the individual contributors from the previous phases and form a single, self-sufficient team responsible for entirely driving your automation-first customer experience strategy. This team will help you drive new net revenue.
Within the ACX department, the team will focus on implementing AI and machine learning across the entire customer journey, build and manage the content, track performance, measure outcomes, and optimize the bot performance accordingly. Here are the key roles to include for your ACX team.
While it may seem obvious to your customer support team why you need an ACX strategy, other stakeholders might not understand the benefits and may be resistant to investing in automation until they know more. Here are some key benefits you can use to demonstrate the value and help get them on board.
AI can handle 70% of customer inquiries via automated answers or self-service solutions. By starting every interaction with AI, you can collect information upfront and accelerate time to resolution. If human intervention is needed, customers can be routed to the right agent, and that agent is equipped with all the necessary information to support the customer effectively. This boosts CSAT, loyalty, customer lifetime value and can even become a revenue generator.
An automated customer experience strategy allows you to scale without spending more. You don’t have to invest in human resources when your customer base grows, so you save money while pulling in more revenue. Plus, you can update your services immediately—for example, adding new languages or additional features that will help you keep up with demand and emerging customer needs.
It’s a common fear that automation will replace agents—but the truth is, AI enriches their role. Think of AI as an assistant that provides detailed information and critical context, empowering agents to perform more essential tasks with better accuracy and more energy. Removing repetitive, mundane tasks attracts more talented employees and reduces attrition on your team, so your best people can focus more on sales and relationships and less on service tickets.
To create the kind of meaningful connections people are craving in the post-COVID world, you need to infuse every conversation with empathy and emotion. And you need to do it at scale.
Dive into some of the challenges businesses face while creating personalized, anticipatory experiences, and how a robust conversational AI can solve them.
How Conversational AI Levels Up CX for Travel & Hospitality Brands Across the Entire Customer Journey.
