TL;DR:

• Customer experience automation (CXA) can enhance revenue and increase customer satisfaction.
• CXA platforms convert manual tasks into automatic processes, improving customer service operations.
• Implementing CXA improves ROI, resolves issues faster, and delivers personalized experiences at scale.
• Real-world examples show how automation can improve customer experience and boost conversions.

The thought of automating repetitive customer service tasks has likely crossed your mind. But often, that consideration is followed by a train of concerns: Will automation eliminate personal touch? Will it reduce the quality of customer service? Will it replace human agents?

In reality, customer service automation (CXA) can enhance your revenue and increase customer satisfaction.

Read on to learn more about CXA and get four easy ways to automate. We'll also share a story of how one company successfully implemented CXA and gained 23% more conversions.

{{lead-magnet-1}}

What is customer experience automation (CXA)? 

Customer experience automation (CXA) refers to the process of automating and enhancing the interactions that customers have with a business. It involves using automation tools like a helpdesk, Macros, Rules, and artificial intelligence to automate various aspects of customer engagement, from pre-sales and support to the post-purchase stage.

What is a customer experience automation platform? 

A customer experience automation platform is a tool that can convert manual customer experience tasks into automatic processes. CXA platforms aim to alleviate the workload of human customer service agents while optimizing customer service operations.

Gorgias, for instance, is a leading example of a CXA platform, offering a wide range of powerful features, such as:

• Efficient ticket triage
• Automated responses across various channels
• Automated order management
• Automated emails
• Smart Article Recommendations via Chat and email
• Powerful integrations with ecommerce platforms‎
  

The impact that CXA can have on your customer experience (and bottom line)

Implementing CXA is not just about lightening your team's workload, it's a transformative strategy that greatly influences how customers interact with and perceive your brand. CXA ensures that your team can focus on more intricate interactions, resulting in an improved ROI, increased customer loyalty, and offering personalized experiences at scale.

Improve ROI for your support & experience teams

Customer service agents who have poor impressions of their companies say they don’t have all the tools they need to do their job. Factors like clunky software and insufficient training and processes all contribute to their experience, which, in turn, affects the overall customer experience. 

The solution is to equip agents with powerful tools, like CXA, that will make their jobs easier and your customers’ experiences more enjoyable. Automation and an improved customer service ROI go hand in hand, leading to faster and more profitable customer experiences.

Help customers resolve issues faster

One of the immediate benefits of CXA is faster resolution times. With automation handling routine tasks like resolving where is my order (WISMO) requests and answering pre-sales questions, agents have more time to attend to complex support tickets and meet customer expectations with precise answers.

Deliver more personalized experiences at scale

Most automation skeptics fear losing the human touch once you bring automation into the picture. However, the reality is quite the opposite. A comprehensive CXA strategy allows support teams to express their brand voice and personality through adjustable features like pre-written templates or Macros. If your CXA platform restricts you from customizing default responses, you should find a tool that can adapt to you and your customers.

CXA in action: 4 easy ways to use automation to improve the customer experience

Now that we've covered the theory, it's time for your support team to implement CXA. Below are the top four ways to quickly incorporate customer experience automation using Gorgias Automate. We'll provide details on each feature, offer tips to get the most out of them, and showcase examples of how these strategies have worked for actual merchants.

1) Use Quick Responses to give customers instant answers to simple questions

Quick Responses are predefined replies automatically triggered when customers ask specific questions in Chat.

When to use: For teams who receive a daily flow of frequently asked questions that require them to copy and paste the same responses.

Tips: 

• Quick Responses are best for answering FAQs that have straightforward answers and don’t need elaborate explanations
• Infuse your brand messaging and vocabulary into your Quick Responses to maintain natural interactions with shoppers
• Always provide a route back to live support channels through email, live chat, phone, SMS, or social media in case customers need more assistance

Real-world results: The stationery company Ohh Deer achieved an impressive average 4.95 CSAT score and generated about $12,500 per quarter after implementing Gorgias Chat alone.

📚 Related: Why customer service chatbots aren’t a great fit for ecommerce

2) Use Tags and Rules to organize and prioritize customer tickets

Take advantage of efficient ticket triage by using Tags and Rules to ensure the most important tickets are addressed and complex tickets are routed to your most knowledgeable agents.

When to use: If urgent tickets (billing issues, product defects, and inquiries from returning customers) are getting buried in your inbox, you have a low retention rate, a high churn rate, or your inbox is disorganized.

Tips:

• Create “Urgent” and “Not Urgent” Tags to establish a streamlined prioritization process for agents to follow
• Use Rules to direct complex tickets to more experienced agents so you avoid compromising resolution times and customer satisfaction
• Create a Rule to remind agents to follow up on customers who have recently contacted your contact center

Real-world results: Drinkware brand BrüMate cut down their first response time from 5 hours to 1 minute and 30 seconds and drove $9M in revenue after they made use of Chat Campaigns and a Help Center (Gorgias’s customer knowledge base).

Colin Waters, BrüMate’s former Associate Director of Customer Experience, highlights that organizing Tags and Macros by their proper names keeps team onboarding running smoothly. He adds, “I'm very steady with naming conventions. I mean, my team must hate it. But anybody could come in and figure out what it all means without having a doctorate in CX."

3) Automate the order management, tracking, and returns process

Order management, including order creation, tracking, returns, and exchanges, is one of the aspects of customer service that is best suited to automation because of its repetitive nature.

When to use: If you get an influx of WISMO tickets and/or return-related inquiries in your inbox or need to streamline your order workflow.

Tips: 

• Enable tracking, returning, and canceling in Chat to allow customers to quickly check their orders 
• Automate order status notification emails to trigger after hitting milestones in the entire customer journey, such as order confirmations, order delivery, and post-purchase customer feedback requests
• Integrate Loop Returns with Gorgias to automate your returns process and create a returns portal

Real-world results: Jaxxon includes their Return Policy in Chat via Quick Responses and maintains an easily accessible Return Portal. By maximizing their self-service resources, they brought in a staggering 46% more in revenue.

4) Use AI to recommend Help Center articles 

Your articles shouldn’t only be found in your Help Center; make the most out of your resources by sharing them on multiple channels like Chat and email. Making your articles widespread gains you two benefits: an educated customer base and faster resolution times.

When to use: If you have a high return rate and negative customer reviews or sense a lack of understanding from your customers about your product.

Tips: 

• Insert Help Center articles into customer communications to build anticipation and proactively address issues
• Create Chat Campaigns to automate the customer education process, offering targeted information and support
• Scenarios where you can use chat campaigns: holidays and limited-time offers, for customers browsing high-value products, at checkout to reduce cart abandonment

Real-world results: After creating Chat Campaigns that displayed welcome discounts and toilet compatibility checkers to shoppers, TUSHY achieved an impressive 25% increase in revenue and improved customer satisfaction. They also brought their bounce rate down by 37%.

Success story: How Kirby Allison boosted conversions by 23% with CXA

If the previous real-world examples weren’t enough to convince you about automation’s integral role in CX, here’s another success story. 

Kirby Allison, a luxury garment care business, struggled to handle a growing volume of repetitive and time-consuming tasks. Surviving on a minuscule two-person customer support team, they were drowning in tickets outside business hours.

Once they enlisted the help of Automate, it was a weight off their shoulders. Gorgias’s multifunctional Chat provided 24/7 support with Quick Responses, self-service Order Management, and Article Recommendations.

Immediately, Kirby Allison saw a 46% increase in sales, a 23% increase in conversions, and drastically reduced response times.

If you want to make huge successes easy wins — take the first step towards transforming your customer service and book a Gorgias Automate demo today.

{{lead-magnet-2}}