4 Ways Automation Can Help Create A Consistent Customer Experience
Guest blog post by Jay Ripton
The business environment is still just as competitive as it was before the pandemic. However, there is less tolerance for ineffectiveness and incompetency in customer interactions and engagement as expectations change radically. You can’t expect buyers to stick around for a brand that doesn’t deliver a seamless and consistent customer experience. In fact, according to a Hubspot survey, 80% of the customers surveyed stopped using a business service with a brand following an unpleasant service experience.
Businesses need to align their marketing efforts with customer expectations. Did you know that over 69% of the customers now expect an ultimate customer experience (CX) when doing business, and more than 78% of them demand consistent engagement and interactions with your company? Understanding your customers’ needs and observing changes in their preferences ultimately shape how you sell, market, and deliver customer service.
One way to create a consistent customer experience is through automation. Automation can help you facilitate communication, address customer concerns, and boost customer retention. Below are a few ways you can use automation to improve your processes and deliver an exceptional experience to your customers.
1. Generate Customized Content at the Top of the Funnel
Leveraging automation is an effective way of improving and enhancing the overall customer experience. Start off by automating the way you deliver emails and blog content to your audience.
Typically, digital marketers send emails to all the subscribers in their mailing list. Even though it is a good approach, it does not yield the desired outcomes. For instance, sending out blast emails or general content to all your top-of-the-funnel prospects isn’t enough to build a lasting and consistent relationship with them. So instead of hoping your generic content would work some magic on your leads, it’d be better to create targeted content that’s sure to get the job done.
For starters, use automation to cluster your customers and prospects optimally. This will help you deliver appropriate and custom content like emails, blogs, etc., that can cater to the right audience. For example, let’s suppose you sell clothing and shoes on your site. The right automation tools can help you determine whether a specific customer would be interested in learning about your latest collections. Marketing automation can help you deliver the latest updates to visitors who have read or viewed shoe-themed content on your site or former customers who purchased shoes in the past. This way, automation allows you to determine what type of content you need to create, and for whom, and ultimately the results that you should possibly expect.
2. Deliver An Exceptional Purchasing Experience with Real-Time Updates
The capacity to leverage, provide, and access updates in real-time on product availability and inventory management lets you ensure that your customers instantly get the required information about the product they want. Meanwhile, you do not miss out on your customers and sales from a business’s standpoint because you can continually replenish your inventory and items promptly.
Allowing your visitors to see the items out of stock on your website, especially for their desired products, can frustrate them. Eventually, it will increase your churn rates as they will move to your competitor’s websites. To avoid such occurrences, it is imperative to make the proper use of automation and provide your customers with real-time updates on your products.
Inventory management is a crucial aspect of any e-commerce store. You need to ensure that you deliver the necessary and adequate information about the items to your visitors.
3. Leverage Electronic Forms To Streamline Processes
When it comes to customer experience, your internal processes can be as impactful as your external processes. Automating form processing and submission enables you to minimize blunders and ensure prompt responses to your customers.
You can use forms for your sales orders that can facilitate your overall ordering process. It often comprises of multiple steps such as generating an invoice, getting approvals from different stakeholders, etc. Furthermore, you can populate visitor details automatically that can simplify the purchasing flow for users while reducing the chances for errors. You can also use dynamic forms to access the database information on demand. For example, your agents can see the order and purchase history of the customers in real-time for quick problem resolution.
Furthermore, it is important to ensure effective collaboration among departments, allowing you to accommodate customer requirements and requests and route them to the respective team/department promptly. This, in turn, helps you create positive interaction for your customers and significantly enhances their experience.
4. Assess Leads, Engagements, and Conversions
Customer feedback is sometimes subjective, but backing it up with figures is an ideal way to gauge your customer’s purchasing pattern and reviews in an accurate manner. Whether it is on-screen time, conversion rates, engagement, click-through rates, or the number of views, having a comprehensive inbound marketing approach is always data-driven.
When you track leads, conversions, and engagement rates of your audience, it enables you to learn what made your visitors convert into customers and what interests them. These data-driven insights that you garner from monitoring your customers allow you to identify the latest trends and gaps as well as refine your overall marketing strategy accordingly.
Automated marketing empowers your business and helps you gauge, determine and nurture your prospective clients, leveraging valuable and highly personalized content based on their online purchasing behaviors and interests. It helps you track your prospects and customers, which in turn allows you to offer them something that piques their interest, encourages repeat purchases, and improves their experience with your brand.
Wrapping Up
Salesforce reports that 82% of the customers stop doing business with a business because of unfavorable customer support and experience. Customers are a predominant aspect of every business and should be the utmost priority. Therefore, it is imperative to make most of automated technology to integrate all the systems within your organization to deliver a consistent and transformative experience to your customers.