Impatient customers of today hate waiting on hold to talk to customer service representatives and more so, in general, avoid even contacting customer care; leading to dissatisfaction with the brand as their grievances are not addressed in right manner or in right time. Keeping this in mind, brands today are adopting automation for their businesses so that most grievances of customers can be easily tackled through chatbots using AI and machine learning.

Here comes automation into the big picture of CX (Customer experience) and CCM (Customer Communications Management) for an improvised digital experience. Fast, faster and fastest delivery and grievance redressal is the future of competition amongst CX leaders and not just product and price. Automation not just reduces complexity, it leads to reduced wastage of resources and helps in an efficient service delivery and ultimately a better CX.

Automation helps companies focus on more high-touch communication involving machine learning, IoT, AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Big Data- all of which support a satisfied CX for customers

To know more about NLP read the article CX Trends To Watch for in 2019 .

Understanding the expectations of your customers

With automation a bank can predict with the help of user data and digital footprints whether a customer wants to open a new bank account, check their balance, transfer money or create an online profile. Automation helps in tracking the entire process or CJM (Customer Journey Mapping) with ease.

Brand adopting automation find more time and resources to provide customers with long lasting, high-quality experiences, rather than wasting their time on simple interactions that machines can easily care about. Automation is the key to future customer experience (CX) and allows companies to focus on the great experiences that will have significant interactions with the brand. Instead of waiting for hours, they can get the answers they need quickly, leaving the company more time to focus on service delivery and offline channels.

Listed below are ways in which automation can give your customer experience a boost.

1. Greater ability to focus on high-touch customer interactions

Many tasks performed by your customer support personnel manually, such as customer identification, account details recovery, problem logging, are routine tasks and require little thought. Unfortunately, these are tasks that consume most of your staff time. By automating these mundane tasks, employees have a greater ability to focus on the human side of customer support. Let the machine capture the simple parts of the task so that the human interface can dig into the problem, understand what the client wants, and provide the most thoughtful solutions.

2. Personalization

Intelligent automation helps companies leverage detailed insights about customer behavior and habits to create a more personalized customer experience for their prospects. It helps business to have a detailed view of customer history and past interactions by collecting, storing and reporting critical information to empower them for accurate data-driven strategies. With broader picture into customer needs and expectations automation helps in designing marketing campaigns for reaching specific audiences.

3. Simpler user experience

Customers want to do simple work. After all, they pay you to deliver a product or service. Why should they do more? Ensuring that user experience is simple and straightforward is a good way to minimize customer grievance. Automation with predictive analytics can help in that as well.

For example, instead of making your site visitors search for something, chatbot may pop up and ask them exactly what they're looking for, then point it to the right page. If they make purchases from your site on a regular basis, automation technology can post prompts to ask a user if they want to buy the same item as last time.

4. More self-service

Your customers do not want too much responsibility when it comes to dealing with you. At the same time, self-service is often the most effective way to solve a problem. Just typing your problem on the chatbot on the company website is much easier than spending an hour on the phone. With automation, customers have instant access to tools that enable them to solve problems in a painless and efficient manner.

Self service capabilities also help your employees. There is nothing satisfying about spending your time in data entry. By freeing your staff to focus on the more complex aspects of their roles, they will be more interactive and experience less frustration.

5. Faster Grievance Resolution

Customers hate waiting for long hours to get their grievances solved and it leads to unpleasant experience. With automation brands can offer superior customer experience by greatly improving the way customer interacts with the brand and provide speedy resolution. It leads to reduction of waiting time for customers to get the help more quickly and helps companies for optimum utilization of resources to accomplish simpler tasks. Automation thus leads to seamless and superior experience for customers leading to brand loyalty and image building.

6. Understanding the needs of customers

With millions of interactions through AI brands can now have a deeper understanding of their customers, their preference, likes and dislikes. Through natural language processing a chat bot can offer relevant and contextual communication by truly understanding what people mean. It helps to identify themes and understand sentiments. Hence, proper feedback can be taken about service offerings leading to necessary changes and taking CX to altogether a new level. AI can be employed to automate responses to better understand the issues and fix it accordingly.

Do not miss out on automation

Adding automation technology to a customer experience strategy makes your service more humane and may seem unexpected. Automation will improve the efficiency and workflow of your employees, and ease of use for customers. When it is executed correctly, it wins. It will play a key role to provide customer experience of the future to surprise and delight customer in their journey with you.