What Is Customer Experience Automation (CXA)?

If you are a marketing, sales, or customer service professional, there are two numbers you must remember: 

• 76, which is the percentage of consumers likely to stop doing business with your company after just one bad experience.
  
• 63, which is the percentage of consumers who will pay more for your product or service if they experience great customer service. 

Those numbers underscore why it’s vital to deliver a superior customer experience (CX). Technology, especially artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), can help speed the way. By automating customer experience (CXA) with AI and ML, you can meet growing expectations for personalization and responsiveness — without overextending your team. 

In this post, we’ll explore the benefits of CXA and how to put it to work in your business.

Main Takeaways

• Customer experience automation uses the latest technology to streamline and optimize the customer journey for a better customer experience.
• Unlike marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM), CXA bridges the gap between online and offline customer journeys.
• Major benefits of CXA are increased efficiency, better personalization, improved consistency, scalable customer support, and higher conversion rates.
• Tools you should consider for CXA include chatbots and virtual assistants, interactive voice response (IVR), conversation analytics, and features like Invoca’s PreSense.

Customer Experience Automation Explained

Customer experience automation (CXA) uses AI, analytics, and automation technology to streamline and personalize interactions across the entire customer journey.

CXA doesn’t replace live-agent conversations, but it automates routine, behind-the-scenes workflows that make those human interactions more effective. 

AI tools bridge the gap between online and offline journeys to create a single map of the customer journey. So, for example, when a customer researching online uses a phone number posted on a product page to call the business, AI tracks that transition.

How CXA Differs from CRM and Marketing Automation

Customer experience automation encompasses broader touchpoints than marketing automation and is more action-oriented than traditional CRM. Done well, CXA works as a bridge between online marketing campaigns and strategies and offline customer activity and revenue outcomes. 

Here are some of the main differences between CXA, marketing automation, and CRM.

CXA vs. CRM vs. Marketing Automation

CXA

• ‍Primary Purpose: Enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty‍
• Focus: Optimization of the entire customer journey, including sales, marketing, and support‍
• Capabilities: Self-serve options, automated response, troubleshooting, personalization, segmentation, reporting‍
• Business Impact: Brand loyalty, referrals, customer satisfaction, increase sales

CRM

• ‍Primary Purpose: Manage customer relationships‍
• Focus: Sales‍
• Capabilities: Customer data management, sales force automation, customer service support, reporting‍
• Business Impact: Increase sales

Marketing Automation

• ‍Primary Purpose: Streamline marketing efforts and improve efficiency‍
• Focus: Streamline and personalize marketing campaigns, such as emails, texts, and ads‍
• Capabilities: Lead generation and nurturing, email marketing, social media management, reporting‍
• Business Impact: Generate and nurture leads

Key Components of a Successful CXA Strategy

A successful CXA strategy has four core components. Working together, they provide a unified framework for optimizing and delivering an exceptional customer experience.

1. Orchestration

Orchestration ensures a consistent experience across every touchpoint by connecting automation tools and channels. For example, conversation analytics unites digital interactions — like websites and social media — with offline touchpoints like human-to-human phone calls.

2. Segmentation

Connecting online and offline touchpoints generates data at scale, enabling meaningful segmentation of your target audience by behavior, demographics, or psychographics. This segmentation is essential for delivering a truly personalized customer experience.

3. Personalization

Delivering experiences tailored to each customer using accurate data and behavioral insights is a core pillar of any CXA strategy. Personalization enables businesses to offer automatic product recommendations based on past purchases or expressed interests.

Automation tools can also route callers to the right department or agent by analyzing intent from their online activity. A prime example of this is Invoca’s PreSense, which uses intent data to power smarter call routing.

4. Automation

Automation and ML streamline routine, time-consuming tasks that keep human agents from focusing on high-value customer interactions. According to Salesforce’s State of Sales report, sales reps spend 70% of their time on non-selling activities. 

By automating email campaigns, scheduling, and CRM functions, businesses free their teams to focus on what matters most: selling. ML also automates the collection and analysis of large datasets, including insights from phone conversations when paired with conversation intelligence software. This enables faster, more precise personalization, more effective audience segmentation, and fine-tuned marketing outreach.

Benefits of Customer Experience Automation

CX automation directly benefits business revenue and growth in the following ways.

Benefit 1: Increased Efficiency

Automation reduces agent workload by taking over routine interactions, freeing sales and marketing to focus on high-value conversations that drive sales.

Benefit 2: Better Personalization

With ML and automation, tailoring messages to the right audience becomes faster and more precise, improving engagement and relevance.

Benefit 3: Improved Consistency

Automation enables consistency, ensuring every customer receives accurate and timely responses regardless of the channel they use or the team they contact.

Benefit 4: Scalable Customer Support

Tools like intelligent call routing, chatbots, and virtual assistants can handle growing volumes of customer interactions without adding headcount.

Benefit 5: Higher Conversion Rates

Automated data collection and analysis creates opportunities for faster, targeted responses to prospects, leading to higher conversions. 

How to Implement CXA for Omnichannel Journeys

Your customers are on an omnichannel journey, so what’s the best way to implement a CXA strategy that meets them where they are? Take the following steps to guide you. 

Step 1: Map Customer Touchpoints

First, create a customer journey map of all online and offline customer touchpoints. Incorporate conversation analytics to add data from voice interactions and complement online insights. 

Use the map to understand customer emotions and pain points and identify touchpoints that might benefit from automation.

Step 2: Choose the Right Channels

Next, select the best channels for automation based on your knowledge of customer preferences and your own business goals. Here are some online and offline options you might consider including in your CXA strategy:

Online

• Chatbots, virtual assistants
• Self-service portals
• Automated email response

Offline

• IVR
• Intelligent call routing
• Conversation analytics

Step 3: Integrate Digital and Offline Data

While collecting data from a customer’s online journey is straightforward, capturing it at scale from offline sources — like phone calls — can be far more challenging. This often leaves businesses with significant blind spots in their customer experience data. 

AI-driven revenue execution platforms like Invoca solve this problem by tracking, recording, and digitizing calls for easy analysis. With a complete view of the customer journey, brands can address pain points and deliver a seamless, consistent experience.

Tools and Technologies for CXA

The tech tools you choose can, and should, work together within an integrated customer experience automation ecosystem. Here are some examples. 

1. AI Chatbots and Self-Service

AI chatbots use natural language processing and ML to comprehend user intent and provide helpful responses to customers. Chatbots can handle common customer support inquiries such as order tracking and shipping status, product availability, and troubleshooting, such as account login issues. Chatbots can also drive lead generation by engaging with customers, collecting information, and qualifying prospects.

2. Conversation Analytics

AI-powered conversation analytics captures insights from phone calls and other voice interactions at scale. The intelligence you gain from analyzing this data can help you refine automation strategies, uncover pain points, and improve the customer experience through better segmentation, personalization, sentiment analysis, and campaign optimization.

Conversation analytics can also reduce time-consuming quality management workflows, giving contact center managers more time to provide targeted coaching to agents so they can deliver better customer experiences.

3. PreSense

PreSense, an automation tool from Invoca, boosts personalization by automatically routing callers to the best available agent based on their website activity. It also equips agents with valuable insights — such as the caller’s name and digital behavior — so they can personalize the conversation from the very first interaction. By removing friction at this critical stage of the customer journey, PreSense helps deliver a smoother, more efficient customer experience.

See how PreSense works in the short video clip below:

4. IVRs

IVR systems automate elements of the phone experience, creating an efficient and flexible customer experience. They are easily configured and provide a 24/7/365 self-serve, lifelike conversational option that can assist callers with routine tasks like cancellations or prescription refills. This allows live agents to focus on more complex tasks.  

Measuring CXA Success with Key Metrics

If you invest in automation, you’ll want to know if it’s delivering results. Measuring success also identifies areas that need improvement. There are many metrics to choose from, but these three are considered essential to measuring the success of customer experience automation.

1. Conversion Rates

Conversion rate measures how many customers complete a specific action, such as joining a rewards program or making a purchase. Conversions can happen online — like clicking an ad — or offline, such as calling a sales representative. Tracking conversions across the entire customer journey is essential, and tools like call tracking make it possible to capture and calculate offline conversions accurately.

2. Customer Satisfaction Scores

Customer satisfaction is measured through surveys and feedback, and key performance indicators (KPIs) like customer lifetime value (CLV).

A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is based on the ranked response to a question asking if a customer is satisfied or dissatisfied. Automation improves CSAT by streamlining routine processes and freeing employees to focus on troublesome customer issues.

3. Average Handle Time

Average handle time is a measure of customer service efficiency, used in contact centers. It measures hold and call time, and any related work after the call by the agent, such as writing up and filing a report or updating the CRM. Contact centers with high AHT typically face elevated operational costs and poor customer experiences. 

Reductions in AHT are achievable through automation. For example, contact centers can use intelligent routing to automatically send the caller to the best agent, reducing unnecessary transfers. Teams can also use AI to generate automated call summaries and update the CRM, reducing after-call work so agents can move on to the next call quickly and efficiently.

Enhance the Customer Experience with Invoca

With 76% of consumers likely to leave a brand after just one poor interaction, customer experience can make or break business growth. Customer experience automation (CXA) helps businesses stay on the right track by automating routine, repetitive tasks — boosting satisfaction while freeing live agents to focus on high-value interactions.

CXA also unifies digital and offline touchpoints, giving marketing teams the complete data they need to segment audiences and personalize outreach. Tools like IVR, chatbots, conversation analytics, and Invoca’s PreSense make offline interactions, such as phone calls, as seamless as digital ones by providing agents with caller insights and routing calls based on intent.

Additional Reading

To learn more about how Invoca’s quality intelligence and customer interaction management tools can support your customer experience automation strategy, check out these resources:

• Customer Experience Marketing: Why It Matters and Key Strategies  
• AI for the Customer Experience: Benefits, Challenges, and 10 Examples
• How to Personalize Customer Experiences With Data Analytics 

You can also book a free demo with our team to find out how Invoca can help you efficiently achieve customer experience automation. Contact us today to schedule one.