These days, businesses small and large are expected to deliver engaging, unified, and seamless customer experiences, on top of all the other tasks they need to grow and sell products.
Automated customer experience (CX) solutions make delivering what customers expect a little easier, by helping you manage and improve every interaction with your business.
Many steps along the customer journey can be automated, and they should be. Doing so can streamline your service, cut costs, and increase the personalization of each interaction.
But ultimately, the best tools help you deliver a better experience.
They’ll assist in reducing customer churn, increasing customer loyalty, and nurturing your business’s promoters — and that supports you to grow your revenue.
In this article, we share 5 of the best automated customer experience solutions to help you learn what’s needed from your software.
Why Automate CX?
Automating your CX makes life easier for frontline staff while improving your business results. In other words, you’ll save time and reliably deliver the experience customers expect.
Statistics on the performance of CX automation speak for themselves.
A recent study of nearly 600 companies using automated CX solutions found an average 109% increase in sales effectiveness and a 92% increase in the deal win rate for B2B companies.
Employees were able to focus on their customers, leaving mundane and repetitive tasks to the software.
However, automation doesn’t just benefit your team. Automating workflows and routing feedback to the right teams can help you improve response times and efficiently close the loop. At CustomerGauge, we found that closing the loop every time can reduce your churn by a minimum of 2.3%.
According to Gartner, organizations that actively collect CX data with automated surveys and analyses, and act on the results, see more positive revenue growth than those that don’t.
For example, the digital printing brand Domino Printing Science automated their NPS surveys, setting up triggers based on customer interaction. This simple automation of CX feedback increased Domino’s average survey response rate to 28% and lifted their NPS to an impressive 77 points!
(You can read more about Domino in our report, The State of B2B Account Experience.)
In a nutshell, automated CX solutions let your people focus on what they do best while the automated CX solution takes care of the tedious leg work.
It’s a win-win that generates immense growth for companies.
What CX Tasks Can (and Should) Be Automated?
Consider your customer journey and the touchpoints that don't necessarily require human interaction.
Some of the aspects of the customer experience that can be successfully automated include:
Feedback requests and surveys. Asking for feedback should happen after key points in the customer journey, such as after making a purchase or lodging an issue. Creating surveys is certainly a human task, but sending them should be automatic.
Closed-loop workflows. Once a customer gets back to you an appropriate response is needed. Automating closed-loop workflows means customer issues, feedback, and compliments get routed to the right person in your team.
When you respond faster, with the right information, you improve the customer experience. Responses must be human, but routing feedback should be automated.
Feedback analysis. Doing nothing with your feedback other than getting back to your customers about it is almost as bad as doing nothing. Customer feedback helps you spot areas for improvement and opportunities to upsell, and it may even expose areas for innovation.
Automating VoC analysis lets you do all of this faster, through conversational and sentiment analysis, for example. It can also flag things you might have otherwise missed.
Suggested actions. Some automated CX solutions will suggest the best course of action to reduce churn and improve customer experiences based on your survey analysis. These are helpful for bringing your business into alignment and ingraining a customer-centric approach across all teams.
- Integration with other platforms. Any automated CX solution needs to speak to your other business systems. That way, all teams understand how their work impacts CX and revenue. This means linking to your CRM and project management tools and creating a reliable single source of customer data everyone in your company can use.
5 Automated CX Solutions
When choosing an automated customer experience solution, choose the right fit for your business needs. It sounds obvious, but factors like your target market, the size of your organization, and the industry will influence how well the solution can help you.
For example, business processes in manufacturing are different from in SaaS enterprises, and their customers’ expectations are worlds apart, too.
Keep this in mind when viewing these 5 automated customer experience solutions that will help you do more with less:
1. CustomerGauge AX
G2 Score: 4.6
CustomerGauge Account Experienceâ„¢ (AX) is designed to support B2B and B2B2C organizations by automating customer surveys, streamlining closed-loop workflows, and suggesting key CX actions.
This automated CX solution also links feedback and follow-up actions to business revenue, and the recommended actions let you direct efforts where they’ll have the greatest impact.
CustomerGauge is built around Net Promoter Score (NPS).
While the platform deploys other CX metrics (including CSAT and CES), its focus on NPS enables you to get a quick and clear grasp of customer loyalty. What’s more, you can automate surveys to be triggered by customer actions so they’re sent at key moments, meaning you won’t miss any survey opportunities.
At the same time, automatic monitoring of other engagement signals, such as product use or contact with support teams, combined with automatic surveying creates a holistic view of CX. Meanwhile, closed-loop feedback management sends notifications to the right people along with suggested actions to ensure the correct action is taken at the perfect time.
Strengths
Expands on NPS to include other customer engagement indications that help predict churn and identify opportunities to upsell
Automated workflows for closed-loop feedback make case management flow seamlessly
Automated data analytics and visualizations focus on complex B2B account structures for easy interpretation of signals
Simple to integrate with other business systems and popular CRM solutions
A strong user base of businesses in high-tech, business services, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, telecoms, and logistics sectors
2. Medallia
G2 Score: 4.5
For B2C businesses, Medallia is one of the best automated CX solutions available.
The quality of support is exceptional and customer reporting features and in-depth information contained in individual reviews are some of the best features offered.
As with all CX solutions, Medallia’s AI and machine learning expose patterns and trends, analyze journeys, and predict customer behavior. Where it really excels though is the real-time analytics that presents customer feedback in easy-to-understand graphics and delivers insights and alerts to the right people within your organization.
The CX solution integrates with a number of CRMs and project management tools to consolidate different customer information and make sense of it.
It makes routing feedback and improving follow-up rates for customer issues far easier, too.
Strengths
Easy-to-use platform with specific reporting functions, automated data analytics, and visualizations provide insight into CX at a glance
Simple integrations with multiple CRMs and project management tools
Strong B2C customer user base in the finance, technology, telecoms, and retail sectors
Weaknesses
An expensive automated CX solution in comparison to others
Many functions are not ‘out-of-the-box’ and require additional support
3. Sprinklr
G2 Score: 4.5
Sprinklr’s automated CX solution enables businesses to listen to and analyze billions of customer conversations across myriad platforms in real time.
It’s a more comprehensive CX engagement tool than many other solutions. However, there is a risk that it does a lot more than is actually useful for most brands.
Again, Sprinklr aggregates customer feedback into one user interface using AI to analyze multiple channels and determine customer sentiment and intent. However, this software claims to be the only platform to unify customer experiences across all channels — uniting social media listening with direct CX management.
There are two levels of business support for the automated CX solution, Sprinklr Modern Care and Modern Care Lite.
Modern Care is a comprehensive solution designed to assist with customer interactions across the entire organization.
Meanwhile, Modern Care Lite is a free out-of-the-box solution specifically for customer service departments. The simpler solution puts customer experience data at customer operatives’ fingertips so they can spend more time responding and less time searching through CX data and reports.
Strengths
Ability to aggregate customer data from multiple platforms alongside CX surveys
Automated CX feedback analysis to quickly expose insights and suggests actions
Automated responses with AI-driven chatbots
A solid user base of B2C brands in technology, fashion, finance, and hospitality sectors
Weaknesses
The clear B2C focus makes this automated CX solution an unlikely fit for B2B businesses
A wide range of options and multiple menus can make it difficult to navigate the system
Difficult to get further detail on automated CX analytics
4. Freshdesk
G2 Score: 4.4
Designed to help B2C businesses deliver excellent customer support, Freshdesk’s Customer Success solution automates CX workflows and measurement.
Primarily a platform to support help desk and customer support teams, Freshdesk also automatically monitors CX signals to spot opportunities and alert team members to any risk of churn.
It aims to create a single source of truth on the health of accounts and helps customer service operatives anticipate customer needs.
Connecting customer feedback from multiple channels, Freshdesk makes CX data easily accessible to customer service teams so they can spend more time on delighting customers and less time hunting for the right information.
Strengths
Automatic routing of CX issues and CX workflow automation
Automated omnichannel CX feedback analysis to expose insights and suggests actions
Integrates well with CX management solutions to promote customer-centricity across B2C and B2B organizations
A strong user base of B2C businesses in retail, tourism, and automotive sectors
Weaknesses
The strong customer service focus silos CX data rather than sharing it across the organization
Essentially a CRM with some additional CX management automation for customer support functions
5. HubSpot Service Hub
G2 Score: 4.4
For businesses getting started with CX automation, HubSpot Service Hub is a good answer. It’s essentially a CRM with CX automation add-ons.
It pulls customer data into one space to simplify engagement and improve insights and is particularly good for marketing, customer service, and sales teams. The shared inbox for customer communications and automated help desk ticketing speeds up the resolution of customer issues.
However, it’s not just about firefighting.
HubSpot lets you set up CX feedback surveys and automatically send them in response to specific customer triggers such as website visits. But, there’s a drawback: full CX management and automation for improving NPS and CSAT scores across large organizations require integration with a dedicated CX management tool.
Strengths
24/7 personalized assistance for customers
Full visibility of customer feedback across multiple channels
Free and paid subscriptions for CX automation
Integrates well with CX management solutions to promote customer-centricity across B2C and B2B organizations
A strong user base of small-business users in technology and internet-based services
Weaknesses
Set-up can be time-consuming and search results unintuitive
Essentially a CRM with some additional CX management automation for customer support functions
CustomerGauge for B2B CX Automation
Each of these automated customer experience solutions helps businesses to understand their customers’ journey better, as well as to automate and improve it in order to grow. However, of all the solutions reviewed here, CustomerGauge is the only one developed specifically for the complexities of B2B and B2B2C business relationship management.
Along with automating feedback requests, analysis of B2B accounts, and monitoring other customer engagement indicators, CustomerGauge’s AX solution links specific customer experience actions to your revenue.
All suggested actions have the intent of creating the biggest impact on your business's bottom line.
Book a free demo today to see how you can automatically expose new opportunities to enhance your customer experience and analyze feedback to act on areas for improvement!
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