According to recent research from Salesforce, 66% of customers expect companies to understand their needs. However, customer experience is not easy to measure. It involves several KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) such as NPS (Net Promoter Score), CHS (Customer Health Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score)… 📈 At the heart of these KPIs are many concerns that users and marketers might have. Is customer data centralized? Is the experience seamless between different channels? If you use marketing automation, it can help you improve your customer experience. In this article, we’ll tell you how marketing automation can make your customers feel engaged and satisfied with your brand. What is CX (Customer Experience)? Customer experience is defined by the way customers view your brand. This relates to specific channels but also to the brand experience as a whole. The way your brand is perceived by customers can make a huge difference in your ROI (return on investment). When it comes to solving problems that relate to customer experience, you should have measures in place to prevent complaints as far as possible. This is part of customer experience: your goal is to make it simple and positive. 😊 How Marketing Automation Can Improve Customer Experience If done right, marketing automation can be very effective in increasing customer satisfaction and engagement. We don’t recommend automating every single interaction, but automation can create a filter that enables the main issues to flow through seamlessly to your support and sales teams. It allows you to choose where to focus your efforts to keep customers happy. 🙋♀️ In this section, we’ll go through seven tips (and a bonus!) for your marketing automation that will improve customer experience. 1. Customer Satisfaction Surveys Surveys are essential to know what customers think of you and your products. They can be fully automated, which means all you have to do is get the data and evaluate results. We suggest having several questions in your survey to ensure the results can be trusted – some yes/no questions, some open questions that require a bit of writing… ✍️ We recommend being careful with incentives (like coupon codes) in exchange for participation, as that can lead to “fake” participation. In order to avoid this, you should also order your questions in a logical sequence, with trick questions that help you distinguish sincere responses from freebie seekers. 2. Update Customer Data Old and inaccurate customer information is a big problem in marketing and sales. You can automate data collection to make sure your customer data is up to date. This kind of information is usually stored in your CRM. If you use Platformly, you’ll have your CRM and marketing automation toolset in the same app. 💻 Updating customer data is good for sales purposes and ensuring your emails don’t land in the wrong email address, which is a recipe for disaster. Good mailing list ”hygiene” prevents you from landing in spam or sending messages to email addresses that have been deleted or deactivated. By using marketing automation to collect new data about each customer, you make your campaigns more efficient and your customer experience more coherent. 3. Automate Customer Emails No matter the size of your list, once it starts to grow, it gets quite impractical to send emails individually. That’s what marketing automation is all about: automating interactions to save time and money. 🤑 Therefore, we recommend sending campaigns using custom fields (that will be filled with the user’s name and details). The same can be done with transactional emails and other communications that can be set up automatically. Also, you can set up automated responses for common questions and define when the email needs to be forwarded to a customer. 4. Use Bots For Quick Replies Bots can be useful when all your team members are busy or offline. Usually, these bots respond based on keywords from what your users type in the chat box. Therefore, they can reply to simple inquiries before getting an actual employee on the case. 🤖 Of course, you must ensure that when a human needs to take care of that lead or customer, the user is transferred rather than kept in an annoying loop. That happens with many websites and companies, so it’s important to understand bots are limited in their ability to assist customers. Nonetheless, having a bot in the front line can help you assess the hot leads and customers you should follow up with. This improves customer experience as they don’t have to wait for a reply on simple questions and can be directed to the right team member by the bot based on their needs. 5. Reach Out to Customers at Risk of Churn There are tell-tale signs that a customer wants to cancel their account. This usually refers to plenty of complaints (especially on social media), less interaction with your service, and other specific signs that depend on your product or service and how customers use it. 🤷 The issue is that, even though you might know the signs of possible churn, it’s not easy to pay attention to them, especially if you have a lot of customers. By using marketing automation to evaluate these signs of churn, you can be aware of which customers are at risk and how to prevent them from leaving. Also, you can set up an automation flow to reach out to these customers automatically before it’s too late. 6. SMS Marketing SMS marketing is uncomfortable for many marketers and entrepreneurs. After all, it’s highly personal, and customers can get quite angry if boundaries are not respected. However, this channel, while difficult to manage, is very powerful taking into account the deep connection it establishes with customers. Sending SMS campaigns through Platformly is easy and not only will it incentivize orders but will also create a better customer experience. 📲 7. Centralized Data One thing is crucial in CX: ensuring every interaction is recorded and integrated to provide a seamless experience for every customer. For this to be possible, your data must be centralized, i.e., contained in a way that makes it easy for several team members to have access to important details such as purchase history, interactions with support, and so on. If you use a tool like Platformly, you can add all these details automatically to your customer profiles, which improves customer satisfaction with your company and, indirectly, contributes to a better return on investment. 💰 Bonus Tip! CRM & Marketing Automation Reports We mentioned a few KPIs in the introduction that you should pay attention to. But how do you keep track? Enter Platformly’s Reporting tools. Platformly allows you to set up specific reports that include the information you need, for the period requested: two weeks, one month, three months, etc. These reports combine data from different sources, such as the CRM area, the automation flows, the webhooks… Reporting can be done for your own company as for clients, and you can create different accounts to access separate layers of information. Wrapping Up As you can see, there are many ways in which marketing automation can improve your customer experience, and they are not limited to this list. Automation is here to stay and can help your business in many different ways. So, what are you waiting for? Try Platformly for free, today. Looking for more information? You can always find us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.