What is customer experience (CX) in SaaS?

Customer experience refers to the overall impression and feeling that your customers have of your SaaS business throughout their journey. In other words, it encompasses the entire experience your customers have with your company, and how it impacts their perception of the brand.

What is customer experience (CX) automation?

Customer Experience Automation (CXA) refers to any technology you can use to automate, scale, and remove friction from customer interactions.

What are the benefits of customer experience automation?

Having understood customer experience automation, let’s review some of the benefits of utilizing CXA in SaaS.

Streamlines the customer experience and saves time

One of the most immediate benefits of automating your customer experience is the extra time it provides. With customer experience automation, you are saving time and reducing the workload on your team. This means it boosts productivity among customer success teams so they can focus on more complex tasks.

Drives customer satisfaction

Automation makes it easier to forge beneficial relationships with customers. It also allows you to solve customers’ problems as quickly as possible.

Automated workflows such as knowledge bases or chatbots enable customers to access resources without waiting for human-to-human interaction. A help-center feature also reduces the number of support tickets, which helps teams to prioritize customer issues better and drive customer satisfaction.

Improves retention

It costs more money to gain a new customer than to retain an existing one. To retain customers, you need to do more than offer a good product/service.

Automating customer experience can help you deliver a consistent brand experience that will exceed customer expectations.

How?

Instead of manually asking for customer feedback, you can create an automated feedback loop to help you better solve customer queries. You can also automate your onboarding process, create personalized automated emails, and leverage chatbots to cater to basic customer needs.

Doing all of these will increase customer retention, reduce agent workload, and improve the quality of work.

What are the elements of customer experience automation?

The key elements of Customer Experience Automation (CXA) include:

Orchestration

Orchestration is the process of managing a set of tasks to create an entire workflow.

Let’s say a visitor interacts with a certain page on your tool. You can capture that data and use it to decide how to move that customer through the next stage in the journey.

Orchestration involves using that data to ensure that the customer’s experience with the company is relevant.

Let’s look at this example and set rules for automation:

• Did the customer interact with a page on the website? Target them on social media.
• Did they signup by email to download the guide? Send the first email.
• Did they open the first email? Send a second email.
• Added to email list? Send them a newsletter once a week.

Orchestration manages the entire customer journey by combining all the cross-channel interactions a customer has with a company and providing a more personalized and seamless experience.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the practice of grouping customers based on common characteristics. Segmenting your audience can help you add relevance to your messages and ensure you’re sending the right message to the right people at the right time.

Personalization

You should make every customer feel special and heard, no matter how many customers you have. Make individualized offers, product recommendations, and other content based on your product usage, actions, and other customer data.

Personalized communications are key for customer engagement and retention, fostering brand loyalty, and increasing business growth.

Automation

Automation is the creation and application of technology to minimize human input. Customer experience automation uses your customer data to highlight what works best for each user so you can personalize your marketing strategy to fit each user’s needs.

How to use CX automation and create better customer interactions in SaaS?

We’ve touched on the key elements of customer experience automation. Now, let’s walk through some customer experience strategies for creating better customer interactions in your SaaS business.

Use welcome screens to greet new users and collect customer data

Welcome screens in SaaS are more than welcome messages to greet new customers. A good welcome screen provides a unique opportunity to segment your new users and collect customer data. This information is key in creating personalized onboarding flows tailored to specific use cases.

The good thing about welcome screens is that they are super easy to create.

With a no-code tool like Userpilot, it would take you barely a minute to design an effective welcome screen.

Here is how Userpilot helped Kontentino create a nice welcome screen so that they can segment their customers from the very beginning and understand their needs on a deeper level.

Use pre-defined checklists to prompt users complete key actions

Checklists are great for guiding your users through various tasks. It helps your users identify key features of your product, which means they will start getting value from your product by simply completing small tasks on the checklist.

After you build the checklist, you can use advanced segmentation to find users who completed the checklists and those who didn’t. You can send in-app messages to those who didn’t, to prompt them to complete key actions.

With Userpilot’s smart segmentation, you can segment customers by content engagement. For example, identify those who have checklists “in progress”.

Use tooltips to send the right message to the right user at the right time

Tooltips are in-app contextual messages that guide customers through their user journey with minimal friction. When used properly, they can help users understand complex features and improve user experience.

So how do you implement tooltips the right way? Through segmentation

Use segmentation options to show tooltips to only those users who need them.

Let’s look at the screenshot below. Respond.io (Formerly RocketBots), a business messaging platform, only shows tooltips to highlight a specific feature for new users based on segmentation.

Use artificial intelligence and automatically create onboarding videos to guide users

Creating an onboarding video is a good way to explain how your SaaS works. Making an onboarding video from scratch can be stressful and time-consuming, so your best bet is to use AI to create onboarding videos in minutes.

AI makes it easy to create videos whenever a user wants to learn more about your product or features. This will help you save time and reduce the cost of creating videos from scratch.

Create an in-app resource center and offer self-service support on-demand

When your users have issues that need to be resolved, the best thing you can do is respond promptly. Make sure that they don’t have to wait for a customer support representative for hours. Answer their questions as soon as possible!

And how can you do that easily? By providing a self-service in-app resource center.

In-app resource centers help you reduce support volume and increase customer satisfaction by empowering customers to solve their minor issues without going through customer service. Your resource center can include FAQs, video tutorials, live chats, case studies, and other helpful documentation.

Here is how you can create an in-app resource center code-free with Userpilot.

3 Best CX automation tools to try in 2022

Let’s look at the top three customer experience automation tools to try in 2022.

Userpilot – for in-app guidance and in-app help automation

Userpilot is a cloud-based product experience platform for product and customer success teams to onboard new users and increase user adoption with zero code.

With Userpilot, you can deliver personalized in-app onboarding experiences at each stage of the user journey. You also can create in-app messages (tooltips, checklists, interactive walkthroughs, etc.) and resource centers to provide better CX.

The best part? You can do all of this code-free and without any technical background. Userpilot is also very affordable for its features as the monthly pricing starts at $249/mo.

Want to experience Userpilot first-hand? Book a free demo to get started.

Synthesia – for onboarding video creation automation

Synthesia is a web-based platform for creating videos with AI avatars. Users can use Synthesia to transform text-based content into videos that improve engagement and increase conversion rate.

The tool also directly integrates with Userpilot to help product teams deliver in-app video experiences automatically.

Pricing starts at $30/mo.

Qualaroo – for customer feedback automation

Qualaroo is a customer feedback automation tool to help product teams collect valuable insights from their users at scale.

With Qualaroo, you can create different surveys like CSAT, CES, NPS, etc. The tool also includes features like advanced targeting, sentiment analysis, dynamic insight reporting, and much more to make collecting and analyzing feedback easier.

Pricing starts at $80/mo.

Conclusion

If you want to drive customer engagement, retain brand loyalty and increase retention, then you need to pay attention to customer experience automation.

The strategies in the article and the tools we shared will help you build long-lasting customer relationships and increase efficiency throughout your company.

Want to build product experiences code-free? Book a demo call with our team and get started right away!