What is Automation & what does it mean for CX and customer journeys?

Experts and analysts have been talking about the “customer era” for several years now, but companies have needed time to grasp this concept.

Of course, we would like to provide a seamless experience for our customers, but there is a challenge behind the scenes: a set of different processes and systems — that don’t communicate with each other or share information — creates a frustrating situation for customers.

In this context, how can we rethink our processes to meet their needs and deliver the dematerialized, personalized and secure experience they expect?

Automation is key

The basis of a good customer experience, whether for a medical appointment, opening a bank account, or processing insurance claims, is streamlining and automating processes.

Learn more: Use VoC platform to listen, analyze and understand better your customers

If your new customer integration and service delivery processes are slow, manual, and tedious, you can’t decently claim that the customer is your number one priority.

What is automation?

First things first, let’s understand what automation is.

Automation is the use of software to create reproducible instructions and processes to replace or reduce human interaction with computer systems. Automation software runs within the boundaries of these instructions, tools, or structures to perform tasks with minimal or no human intervention.

Automation is a key element in the optimization of the computing environment and digital transformation. Dynamic, modern IT environments must be able to evolve faster than ever before, and IT automation plays a key role in this.

The customer experience starts with the customer journey

Understanding the customer journey allows the company to identify their ‘touch points’ with the brand, improve the customer relationship with the company, and act to ultimately optimize the customer experience.

This journey is built by always adopting the customer’s point of view, not the company’s. This mapping of the customer journey is Customer Journey Mapping.

To do this, all you have to do is identify the stages of the customer journey, noting, in particular, their positive or negative experiences. We can thus know their needs, their objectives, and the obstacles they have faced throughout the process.

Highlighting them helps identify changes, improvements, and innovations that can be made to optimize the customer experience.

Customer Journey Mapping allows a close analysis of usage according to each user profile (personas), and through each communication, transaction, or distribution channel.

Automating the journey

Nevertheless, mapping the customer journey is not an end in itself. It should rather be considered as the starting point of a process automation project. Tracking and recording all customer actions and the follow-up of “who did what and when” to improve operational efficiency.

Automation will further increase business performance, for example by automatically collecting data or displaying key performance indicators (KPIs).

For example, a company in the transport industry was able to use modeling and automation to define the communication channels preferred by their partners and to simplify the process of communicating with their end customers.

In summary, to deliver an optimal customer experience, it is necessary to be able to manage customer processes quickly, whatever the channels of interaction chosen by the consumer, and to be able to make them evolve in an agile way.

At the basis of this optimization approach, the knowledge and mapping of customer journeys must be pursued by the digitalization of these journeys and their automation.

Originally published at https://feedier.com on February 22, 2021.