5 Tips to Humanize the Customer Experience with Automation

People tend to think that the more technology they add to their customer experience, the less human-centric it becomes.

This isn’t a baseless accusation.

Over the years, we’ve seen automated prompts and machines replace call center representatives – and it’s not been a pleasant customer experience.

There’s a right and wrong way to improve your customer experience with automation. If you don’t have a deep understanding of who your customers are and what they need, automation will only highlight your digital experience shortcomings.

How to Humanize the Customer Experience with Automation

Today, you have countless pieces of technology available to improve your connection with customers. Automation and AI shouldn’t replace human interactions with machines. Instead, focus on ways automation can bring you closer.

1. Decide What You Shouldn’t Automate

83% of B2B buyers say treating them like a human instead of another sales number is the most crucial factor to winning their business.

People don’t buy from machines. They buy from people.

Before adding automation to your existing marketing and sales processes, you must first analyze your processes and figure out what you absolutely shouldn’t automate.

Anything that requires human-to-human interaction usually shouldn’t be replaced with automation. Processes like this include phone lines, customer service support emails, chats, and general sales interactions.

Remember that you’re using automation to improve your customer experience – not necessarily to trim budgets and do more work with less. Those are just extra benefits.

2. Offer a Live Chat/Chatbot Combo

Live chats are always ideal if you have the staff available to support it. Live chat boxes appear on your website when someone visits your blog or any website page. The visitor can see that a human is available to answer their questions.

If you don’t have staff available to respond to live chats immediately, don’t offer it. Leads will only get frustrated when their answers go ignored.

Chatbots, however, are extremely useful for filling the gap either during out-of-office hours or when human interaction just isn’t possible.

You can train your chatbot with machine learning to answer questions and improve itself based on feedback. Chatbots are especially useful for collecting data and understanding your audience’s needs.

Use the information you get from your chatbot to create FAQs, blogs, and landing pages so relevant information is readily available on your site.

3. Hyper-Personalize Your Content Hub

Artificial intelligence and machine learning also make it easy to offer a completely unique content experience to every visitor.

Much like how Netflix or Amazon makes personalized recommendations based on behavior, AI engines on your website use similar algorithms to make content recommendations.

In this case, automation improves the customer experience because it offers a much more relevant content experience. Every lead will see your content created for their unique niche, vertical, or pain point instead of generic blog recommendations.

Artificial intelligence will also choose content recommendations based on the visitor’s stage of the buyer’s journey. Not only does this humanize the experience, it also nurtures leads where human interaction isn’t possible.

4. Provide a Unique Email Journey

Email is one of the best methods for communicating with leads because it’s a one-on-one environment. You’re not fighting against choosy algorithms for space in the inbox.

You do, however, need to create relevant content if you want leads to open and read your emails.

Automation lets you develop unique email journeys so your content is always relevant and actionable. Leads should feel like each email was written just for them and no one else.

Segment your subscriber list by industry, vertical, or account. From there, develop a distinct journey for each segment with a relatable welcome campaign, onboarding content, introduction to your company, promotions, and more.

Make sure your email copy always sounds more like a personal conversation than a marketing email. That’s key to humanizing the customer experience through automation.

5. Use Analytics to Guide Content Creation

Predictive analytics help remove a lot of the tedious work associated with tracking leads to understand their future behavior.

Automation here also comes in handy for developing relevant content. Predictive analytics tools can identify patterns across your database undetectable to human minds. You can also incorporate data from other sources like intent data for deeper insight into your audience’s needs.

You can uncover new pain points, issues, and relevant topics your leads might find interesting. No one wants to read the same generic content they’ve already seen five times from other websites and forums.

Automating certain parts of analysis ensures that your communications are always timely and on-point with your audience’s needs.

Be Mindful About Using Automation to Improve Your Customer Experience

Remain mindful of how you use automation throughout your digital experience. Just because you can automate a task doesn’t mean you should. Many jobs are still best left to humans – no matter how much the AI technology improves.

AI and automation can certainly replace tedious tasks and improve analysis, but they’ll never effectively replace human emotions and conversations. Be a brand that recognizes this.

Interested in the latest best practices and opinions on automation and AI in marketing and sales? The Televerde Resource Library is your one-stop shop.