Your Customer's Journey should be the first thing you think about when you wake up, and the last thing you think about before you go to bed. Your job is to offer your awesome service or product to your customers in the simplest, and best way possible. Make sure you check out the 5 Laws of Customer Experience in our other post.
Fortunately, there have never been more tools on the market to help make your customer journey an awesome one. In this list we're going to look at 10 CX Automation Tools can improve your Customer Journey. Hopefully, you're doing all of these already, in which case give yourself a pat on the back
Starting off with probably the most simple, because your ability to utilize this tool will either or inhibit the effectiveness of every other item on this list. Segmentation is how you categorize your customers. Basic tools allow you to do this by creating simple lists, for example a "Potential Customers" List. Advanced segmentation is a tool that allows you to create dynamic lists (constantly changing) that can use deeper, more advanced data points to identify which contacts belong to them. For example, a list of "Potential customers, who have purchased in the last 30 days, who visited the website in the past week". See the difference?
Okay, this one should be a no-brainer by now. If a lead subscribes to your product updates, your blog or your newsletter you should be pushing them into an email sequence with the intention of converting them into a paying customer or a repeat customer. Whilst it's super easy to throw together a drip sequence, and some platforms even offer plug-n-play templates for you - you should spend some time A/B testing your sequences, and optimising the flow as much as possible to increase your conversion rates. Email marketing is incredibly easy to implement, but difficult to completely master!
While you're at it with the email marketing, did you know that now you can add "dynamic content" to your emails? Dynamic content is content you can add to an email with conditions attached to it. To give you an example - say you have customers in 4 different cities and you want to send an email updating them about events you're hosting. With dynamic content you could have one email design which will show each customers details of the events that are nearby to them, as well as relevant timezones etc. Perhaps you'd even add an image of the city they reside in. The point of dynamic content is to give your customers a personalised experience and not waste their time with content thats irrelevant to them. The possibilities with this are endless!
Yes, you read that correctly. Personalisation isn't solely reserved for email content. Some CX tools will allow you to personalise content on your webpages or landing pages depending on criteria that the visitor matches. For example, if they are a returning customer you could display content related to products/services that match their interest. Customers can cut to the chase and access the value that they're looking for. This kind of functionality is particularly popular for personalising landing pages.
Chat widgets are awesome! They show your customers that you are invested in customer service and helping them find what they need. They're also a great way to capture new leads to push into your sales funnel. In case you're wondering, you don't need to be sitting at your computer answering basic questions all day. Chat Bots are automated chat widgets, that will respond to questions with pre-defined answers. Kind of like an interactive FAQ page.
If you know your customer journey well, you'll know what your customers want before they even know it. You'll know exactly the steps they typically take through your website. Event triggers are a great way for your website to "listen" for the steps they're taking, and then take actions based off them. For example, a customer clicking a particular button or link on your page could be an 'event' which triggers a highly-targeted, personalised email which delivers them a call to action. Or it could notify someone on your sales team that they should reach out to the prospect.
Don't just rely on email to reach your customers. SMS or alternative messaging, like Whatsapp are a great way to make sure your messages don't get missed. Appointment and meeting reminders are an obvious use case, but we've also seen clients get great results using SMS marketing for product updates and sales notifications. The key is to ensure that you're delivering value for your customers rather than being intrusive.
In the same vain as SMS, push notifications are another way to make sure your messages don't get missed. Push notifications are messages that can display on a customer's screen when they're not even on your website. Powerful, huh.
Do you have a "check my emails" time of the day. For me it's as soon as I wake up in the morning, and then again when I start the work day. Get every email ticked off and then get on with the day. Well it turns out a lot of people do this. Predictive sending is a a tool that will make sure your emails will get sent to a contact at the time they are most likely to open it. That way, when "check my emails" time comes around, the email will come through like clockwork and be sitting there right at the top.
Omnichannel customer journeys are the future. That is, connecting with your customers through every possible channel. This is a can of worms that will be opened up in a future post, but the most simple and accessible example is making sure your customer journey extends to your social media presence. Cool things you can do here is target certain customers with social media ads based on the data you've collected through your website.
