4 Top Reasons to Adopt Automated Customer Journeys in 2024

Automation seems to be the buzzword of the 21st century. Be it automated customer journeys, automated customer service or automated responses, industry experts and leaders are vouching for the wonders of automation. 

But why is automating customer journeys important? Let’s get into it with a scenario.  

Say you’re a fitness brand that serves Gen Z customers. A young man visits your website after following and engaging with your social media posts for weeks. When he lands on your homepage, he struggles to find a product he’s been eyeing. He reaches out to customer service for guidance and is put on hold for over 30 minutes. Frustrated, he abandons his purchase and goes to your competitor.  

This isn’t just an illustrative example: research shows that almost 50% of all online shoppers in the U.S. will abandon their carts if they can’t find a quick solution.  

Customer journey automation can solve issues like this and more. For instance, if you mapped customer journeys rigorously, you’d be able to predict customer pain points at different journey stages and solve them proactively. You’d probably arm your website with an AI-powered chatbot that sensed customer frustration and sprung into action, linking the customer to relevant products or asking follow-up questions. 

In a study conducted by Hanover Research, more than 60% of companies have found that customer journey maps contribute to developing new products and services, increasing ROI and overcoming internal challenges with over 96% of B2B companies saying customer journey maps boost customer loyalty.   

In short, when you’re dealing with discerning customers in a competitive marketplace, ensuring personalized solutions at scale is imperative to business growth and customer journey automation can help you achieve this end.  

What is an automated customer journey?

Customer journey automation refers to the use of technology to manage and optimize customer interactions throughout their customer journey with a brand — from first exposure to post-purchase engagement.  

Automating customer journeys helps anticipate customer needs, reduce friction and provide personalized, timely support at each stage of the journey. By minimizing friction and plugging gaps in the journey, automation helps control churn, drive loyalty, and extend customer lifetime value. Additionally, businesses with enterprise-level clients or subscription models can drive more feature adoption, upselling, cross-selling, annual recurring revenue, and retention rates with meticulously designed automated journeys.  

How does customer journey automation work?

Knowing what customer journey automation is isn’t enough. You need to understand its nuances and implement it in a way that works for your business. Customer journey automation starts with identifying your automation goals, be it improved customer loyalty or lowered response time.  

Follow by building precise audience profiles to understand your audience demographics and psychographic traits such as their communication preferences, favorite channels, top dealbreakers, and so on. Using data collected at various customer touchpoints like social media interactions, website searches, support tickets and customer service requests, automation allows you to provide personalized experiences to the customer. This could be through targeted emailing, personalized product recommendations or preferred suggestions for issues.  

💡Pro tip: Invest in unified and AI-powered customer support technology for journey automation. It simplifies data collection, trendspotting, and progress tracking in real-time.  

Automated customer journey vs. traditional customer journey

Automated customer journeys rely heavily on technology and data-driven tools to guide customers in their interactions with a business. While there may be human intervention, it is restricted to the most essential ones. In this way, it differs from traditional journeys that depend only on manual touchpoints. While there are merits to both, automated customer journeys are more relevant in today’s digital age. Here’s how the two compare: 

Why should a business automate customer journeys? 

Historically, customer journeys have been plagued by inefficiencies because of manual overload, buggy data analytics and a lack of personalization. With automation entering the picture, most of these challenges were eliminated or minimized, leading to more efficient, cohesive and personalized customer experiences plus other benefits like: 

Higher efficiency 
Many routine, mundane tasks in the customer journey such as lead generation, customer onboarding and feedback collection can be automated. For instance, 87% of businesses that use automation tools (such as conversational AI in contact centers) not only ease the burden on agents but also save costs through improved efficiency.  

Interesting read: A-Z Guide on Contact Center Automation 

Lower operational costs 
A direct impact of higher efficiency is lower costs. A reduced need for extensive human involvement in different customer touchpoints means you can redirect manpower judiciously to business areas that require more specialized attention. For instance, just by automating customer service, businesses can save up to 40% in costs.  

Greater loyalty and retention 
Automation tools give you real-time customer data and insights that can be leveraged to nurture customer retention and loyalty. You can tailor marketing messages, support responses, and digital experiences to every customer’s unique needs, journey stage and persona, making them feel appreciated and understood. This can be an excellent way to build customer loyalty, given that 78% of customers say personalized communication nudges them to make repeat purchases. 

Enhanced customer satisfaction 
At every customer touchpoint, automation can significantly improve the customer experience and hence, their satisfaction levels by at least 25%. For instance, automation in the customer onboarding process can allow for frictionless signups and contextual assistance, improving CSAT and product adoption rates significantly.   

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of automating customer journeys, let’s get into how exactly you can do it.  

Step-by-step guide to automating customer journeys

An automated customer journey involves the use of technology and tools like artificial intelligence and data analytics to map customer interactions, select the right automation tools, implement strategies and measure success. Let’s get into how you can do this in a systematic fashion.

Step 1: Map the customer journey 

Before you go about automation itself, you must understand your customers’ needs, motivations, pain points and behavioral patterns by plotting customer journey maps. This entails monitoring your customers as they traverse journey stages such as awareness, interest, purchase, retention, and advocacy to define what kind of automation needs to be done to optimize each stage.   

After this, list all channels of customer interactions including website, email, social media channels, live chat, call center and customer support requests. This will help you create an end-to-end customer experience and a strategic automation plan to address customer pain points.    

Step 2: Identify areas for automation 

Once you have customer journey maps unique to your brand, it's time to assess which tasks and customer touchpoints can be automated. Since resources and time are limited, prioritize automation based on key factors, such as:   

• Automation goals: If you aspire to use automated customer journeys for reducing churn, driving upselling or reselling initiatives, or improving product adoption, prioritize areas that impact these goals directly.  
• Revenue impact: Evaluate how automation will influence revenue, be it by recovering abandoned carts, subscription improvements or generating leads. Automation when used smartly can boost profit. 
• Pain point severity: Work on relieving the most severe customer pain points first. For instance, if 80% of your customers complain about long wait times for basic queries, implement chatbots on your customer-facing properties. You may want to prioritize this over less critical activities like post-purchase engagement.   
• Frequency and volume of interactions: Prioritize repetitive, time-consuming tasks like sending welcome emails to new customers, collecting feedback, sending follow-up emails or updating customer records for quicker responses. 
• Data availability and quality: The outcome of automation depends on the accuracy and depth of your data sets. You may use AI to automate data collection on social media and other customer communication channels, so the output is clean, segmented and real-time. 

Step 4: Select the optimal automation strategy

Choose automation tools to improve personalization and feature adoption. For instance, you can implement automated targeted ads to specific customer segments based on their behavior or needs when introducing a new product feature. This can stoke curiosity and increase adoption as the updates would likely be relevant to them. 

Automation like this can be implemented at each stage of the customer's journey. Another example would be to send personalized promotions or discount offers once the customer has expressed interest. By tailoring each phase of the customer journey through automated touchpoints, you can ensure that feature adoption becomes an integral part of the overall customer experience, boosting long-term engagement and product success. 

Step 5: Create automation workflows 

Creating automated workflows would require you to set up a series of automated actions triggered by specific customer behaviors. These triggers could be event-related such as when a customer signs up for your mobile app, subscribes to your newsletter, makes a purchase or abandons their shopping cart.

Defining triggers clearly is important for your automation to work smoothly. At the same time, you must work on providing tailored messages based on a particular customer’s past patterns. For example, you could trigger an automatic email to a customer after purchase to collect feedback or provide contextual recommendations based on their purchase history. 

Best practice: While defining triggers, be careful about the timing of an automated action for it to feel natural. For instance, while sending a follow-up email after a purchase to track product satisfaction, time it after a few days of delivery to allow the customer enough time to use it.  

Step 6: Test automation outcome 

Before you go live with your automated customer journey, test all your workflows to ensure they work as intended.   This can be done in phases — starting with a pilot test released to a small segment of loyal customers who would be willing to provide feedback. Verify different scenarios using test runs for all triggers you have automated. Ensure to check edge cases and large volumes as well to see if your system can handle them.   

Pro tips:  

• Run the workflows through A/B testing with different variations (for e.g. different automated messages) to find versions that yield the best results. 
• Always ensure automated workflows allow for human intervention with a smooth, seamless handoff. For instance, in bot-led interactions, there should be an option to opt for human agents so customers can reach an agent if they are dissatisfied with the bot’s response. 

Step 7: Implement, monitor and refine automation 

Once you are confident that your customer journey automation works, it is time to make it public. Announce the features to your customers and offer to provide a tour for those who are interested. After the launch, monitor the KPIs you established and leverage analytics to gather real-time data on whether you are achieving your goals.   

But remember, automation is not a one-time process. To truly improve customer experience, regularly collect customer feedback and refine your workflows based on their changing needs. Over time, you can expand your automation to include other parts of the journey such as predictive customer support to enhance the customer experience even further.  

How enterprises leverage automated customer journeys: Real case studies 

Large organizations often have a diverse customer pool with varying expectations. Satisfying different customer personas while maintaining consistency and operational efficiency can seem challenging. Automated customer journeys can deliver significant benefits across critical areas. Here, we outline three ways in which customer journey automation can support the customer service needs of large organizations:  

1. How Lemonade Insurance optimized customer support 

If you are an organization with a large and diverse customer base, you will be familiar with the challenges of handling increased customer inquiries, providing round-the-clock support and resolving larger ticket volumes. Automating some of these with the help of chatbots, self-service portals and knowledge bases can allow you to take care of common issues without human intervention. This way, customer service agents can focus on more complex cases, boosting productivity as well as customer experience.  

Large organizations can also use automation to provide proactive customer support through trigger-based outreach such as sending follow-up messages after a purchase, offering assistance if a customer seems stuck during checkout or improving the onboarding process. Let’s look at the example of a chatbot that a large company used to improve its customer support. 

Lemonade Insurance launched Maya, a chatbot designed to be a friendly guide for customers navigating the insurance market. AI Maya has a warm and smiling personality that instantly connects with users. It also has an easy-to-use interface that simplifies filling out insurance forms, smoothens the initial steps of the quote process and promotes additional insurance products.  

The company has also customized Maya for different markets: In the U.S., AI Maya greets customers by introducing itself and asking the customer’s name. However, German customers hesitate to share their details at the start of an interaction and hence, the chatbot waits a while to ask that question. This automation now handles 25% of customer inquiries and has managed to sell 1.2 million insurance policies since its launch.    

Good read: The Ultimate Guide to Customer Experience Journey 

2. Wowcher gets a marketing makeover 

Automation in customer journeys isn’t limited to customer support. It can enhance other critical business efforts such as marketing. For instance, data collected from customers in the automation process can be used to create specific marketing campaigns. For companies with diverse customers who have channel preferences for communication, automation can tailor marketing efforts to their preferred channel.  

If you want to implement automated workflows for marketing, it can also help with lead generation, personalized messages, cross-selling opportunities and feedback collection in marketing endeavors.  

Take Wowcher, a prominent e-commerce company that uses customer journey automation to create personalized ads. It employed Phrasee’s AI copywriting technology to show personalized Facebook ads to users based on their behavior and interests. With extensive A/B testing to compare AI-generated and automated ads against human-written ones, the company was able to find which ads resonated better. Through marketing automation, the company was able to achieve ad relevance scores of 9 or 10 out of 10 and decrease in cost per lead by 31%.  

Source

Telecom giant transforms its sales processes 

Automating customer journeys can streamline sales workflows and make processes more efficient and effective. For instance, automation can help you not just with initial sales inquiries, but also to qualify leads based on a customer’s brand interactions. This way, your sales team can reach out to high-potential leads that are most likely to close. 

Automation can also be leveraged for follow-up meetings or demos that would ensure continued engagement. Real-time updates on customer interactions, queries or browsing can also help you provide prompt responses to customer needs. 

Take the example of a leading telecommunications company in Latin America that had a large segment of prepaid customers. They often needed to check their call balances or update their credit. The company automated its customer journeys by implementing conversational AI on WhatsApp along with integrating it with Journey Facilitator.  

This allowed the company to offload over 60% of customer queries to the automated bot and freed up live agents to focus on high-value customers. The Journey Facilitator also allowed the company to provide targeted, proactive messaging campaigns that had an impressive 80% open rate. This strategic automation not only improved customer satisfaction but also led to 110,000 sales within the first six months, putting digital sales at 20% of total revenue.  

Read the full story here.  

You too can automate your customer journey with Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management platform that will allow you to provide seamless personalization through omnichannel experiences, deep insights and impeccable integrations.