Understanding the Basics of CXA: Diving Deeper into the Pillars of CXA

In our journey to explore Customer Experience Automation (CXA), we've already covered significant ground. We've defined CXA as the powerful combination of Artificial Intelligence, Process Automation, and Customer Experience. We've also delved into the conceptual underpinnings and guiding principles that make CXA a revolutionary force in the CXA Manifesto.

This blog dives deeper into the pillars of CXA. We provide a more detailed analysis of how these different components leveraged together create better, more empathetic customer experiences. Let's explore how the synergy of these elements is reshaping the landscape of customer interactions.

Core Components of CXA

Customer Experience Automation is more than just a sum of its parts. The software category has come to be understood as a symphony of technologies and strategies working in harmony to deliver exceptional customer experiences. At its core, CXA brings together the precise application of artificial intelligence, customer experience best practices, and automation to create a powerful engine optimized for customer satisfaction and business efficiency.

Artificial intelligence serves as the brain of CXA, providing the ability to understand, learn, and make decisions. Customer experience principles form the heart, ensuring that every interaction is designed with the customer's needs and preferences in mind. Automation acts as the hands, executing tasks quickly and consistently at scale.

When these elements work together, the results are transformative. AI can analyze vast amounts of customer data to predict needs and personalize interactions. Customer experience principles ensure that these interactions are meaningful and simple to complete. Automation then allows these personalized, meaningful interactions to be delivered consistently and efficiently across all touchpoints while remaining goal or outcome-oriented. 

Let's break down each of these pillars and their sub-components.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence is generally understood as the category of software that leverages patterns in data to make predictions towards expected results. There are many sub-segments of the very broad software category of “AI”, and below are the elements important to the CXA category:

1. Conversational AI: This is the technology that powers chatbots and virtual assistants. It allows for natural language interactions by understanding customer intent, and providing relevant responses. Conversational AI in chatbots has been greatly improved by the recent introduction of large language models.
2. Generative AI: This popular AI category can create new content inspired by inputs it has seen in the past; from personalized content recommendations to custom responses to customer inquiries. Used in conjunction with any of the other related AI technologies, generative AI can increase contextual understanding and provide more realistic and expected outputs with greater accuracy.
3. Document AI: This technology can extract and understand information from various document types. Document processing is essential for streamlining processes like claims handling or application reviews where documents are common. It relies on technology features common to the intelligent document processing (IDP) space.
4. Augmented Intelligence: This combines human intelligence with AI, allowing human agents to work more efficiently with AI assistance. AI models give humans actionable insights, and they then are able to act on that information. It is conceptually similar to ‘human-in-the-loop’ but not quite the same.
5. Machine Learning - Classification: This subfield of AI is the application of historical data to find which categories new samples belong in. It’s essential for great customer experiences because at high volumes, it helps route customer inquiries to the right department or agent, ensuring faster and more accurate responses, and establishing prioritization.

Customer Experience

Customer experience is the summary relationship of all the interactions between a brand and its customers with the net target of customer loyalty. A narrower field is User Experience (UX), the interaction between customers and a specific digital product, which aims to optimize usability, accessibility, and design. A poor user experience makes good customer experiences harder to achieve. Below are the elements important to the CXA category:

1. Voice of the Customer: This is an approach and a methodology. It involves collecting and analyzing customer feedback to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points.
2. Customer Experience Management: This overarching strategy ensures consistent, positive experiences across all customer touchpoints.
3. User Experience: UX focuses on the ease of use and level of satisfaction derived from a customer using a specific technology product.
4. Customer Engagement Center (CEC): This is the technology that acts as a central hub for managing all customer interactions across various channels and viewing the data those interactions generate.
5. Total Customer Experience: This holistic approach considers every aspect of the customer's journey with a brand, from awareness to post-purchase support.

Automation

Automating processes that traditionally take time in back office settings allows customer, partner, and stakeholder experiences to maintain their quality even as scale grows. There are many approaches and software categories

1. Robotic Process Automation (RPA): This technology automates repetitive, rule-based tasks, freeing up employees for more important issues. It also increases efficiency and reduces errors in rote tasks. 
2. Intelligent Process Automation (IPA): This technology uses artificial intelligence in addition to  rules-based systems to make automation for complex tasks a reality - CXA owns a separate ethos from intelligent process automation with its focus on automating across employee and external experiences, but there is much conceptual overlap between the two.

By leveraging these components, businesses can create customer experiences that are not only efficient but also personalized and empathetic. AI can predict customer needs and tailor interactions accordingly. Customer experience principles ensure these interactions feel natural and satisfying. Automation ensures that these high-quality experiences can be delivered consistently at scale.

The Shift in Methodologies

Customer Experience Automation is the combination of three historically separate disciplines and technologies, expertly weaved together with the singular goal of improving customer experiences for all industries, highly regulated or not. The weave of other disciplines lets enterprises borrow from their approaches to form a new strategy when thinking about customer experiences.

Customer-focused: Solutions within the CXA category reflect a new mindset for IT teams because they demonstrate a focus on technology optimized for great customer outcomes instead of technology that fits within an organizational silo — even if enterprises only add technology that bridges the gaps between other platforms as an engagement layer.

Whole-of-Office: CXA blends automation for customers with automated applications that help employees, and so the category enables a new approach to problem solving. IT teams can use a suite of technological capabilities that blend channels, orchestration, and intelligence layers to facilitate experiences for everyone. 

Build for scale: The subset of elements from other categories deployed within CXA enable a commitment to scale first. If enterprises didn’t have to think in terms of growing scale, they could just use human intervention for all customer experiences. However, AI makes experiences feel more human, CX adds intuition and ease of use, and process automation makes them repeatable. 

Customer experiences are very difficult to automate repeatedly when IT groups struggle to piece together disparate elements needed for customer experiences that aren’t purpose-built to connect to each other. When all the pillars harmonize together, enterprises can approach their customer experiences with a whole new set of methods and strategies.

Conclusion

Customer Experience Automation is a powerful fusion of cutting-edge technology and customer-centric strategies. By combining AI, customer experience best practices, and complex automation, businesses can create experiences that are efficient, personalized, and responsive. It may also be obvious to readers, but the benefits of experience automation does not only apply to automating the engagements between brands and consumers. The category’s focus on automating both customer experience and its resulting backend processes, also serves business partners and internal stakeholders well.

In our next section, "The Evolution of Customer Service to Customer Experience Automation," we'll explore the journey that led us to this revolutionary approach. We'll see how customer service has transformed over time, culminating in the advanced, empathetic, and efficient world of CXA.