The Ultimate Guide to Automating Marketing, Sales and CX

Why Your Competitors are Choosing Automation, and How You Can Do It Right

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Philip Mandelbaum
03/01/2022

robot playing the piano, symbolizing how people envision automation

Put aside for a moment your fears about a Brave New World. Yes, AI can be scary (very scary), but robots can also improve our lives. Every time you drive through a toll with your EZ-Pass, self-check your groceries, browse your Netflix recommendations or translate languages on your smartphone, you’re streamlining your life through automation. COVID patients rely on automation every day, surviving on life support systems and ventilators that use sensors to monitor body signals and trigger device features. When you get a personalized email or see an ad for something you recently searched, that’s the result of automation too. And so are your exchanges with chatbots. Of course, automation doesn’t always work. Sometimes, for instance, customers simply want to talk to a human being; other times, brands send auto-replies on social media platforms that cause a lot more harm than good. Since “the one key differentiator that can make your business stand out from the crowd is the customer experience you provide,” the question for CX, sales and marketing professionals is: How do we leverage automation — the right way — to benefit our customers and our business?

Automation, the Wrong Way

For 90% of consumers today, quality customer service means an immediate response, but as Bank of America learned during the Occupy Wall Street movement, not all responses are created equal. Even if you respond right away.

Like many other major brands, Bank of America had a dedicated Twitter customer support account in 2013 when an activist tagged @BankofAmerica in a post sharing a protest photo. Like many other customer support accounts, @BofA_Help was equipped with an auto-responder. So when the activist shared his experience being chased away from a Bank of America building in New York City, @BofA_Help responded with a generic “thank you for contacting us” message. While this may have more than sufficed for a typical customer service request, it was an inappropriate response to the particular tweet — and Twitter noticed.

Quickly, more and more Twitter users (Bank of America customers and prospects) joined the conversation, prompting even more auto-responses from the help account; @OccupyLA tweeted that the bank could “stop stealing people’s houses,” to which @BofA_Help responded: “We’d be happy to review your account…”

screenshot of an auto-responder tweet from Bank of America's help account, @BofA_Help, demonstrating poor customer service caused by automation

Unfortunately for Bank of America, this viral incident damaged the brand’s already tarnished image.

Learning from Our Mistakes

The Occupy Wall Street debacle was embarrassing (and possibly costly) for Bank of America, but it did teach us and them a valuable lesson: use social media auto-responders (and automation) at your own risk.

Following the CX horror story, Bank of America adapted its social media policy, removing the auto-responder and requiring ‘personal’ messages for all Twitter replies. This stopped the bleeding, but was it a long-term solution?

In short, no. Customers love to share their experiences with companies and products online, and they expect responsiveness and empathy. So while you could respond to each and every customer complaint or endorsement individually, or create a collection of stock responses to serve as a starting point for customer conversations, the time and resources required would be costly and inefficient.

The solution isn’t avoiding automation. It’s better automation.

(In the case of social media auto-responders, Bank of America could have used a ‘smart’ AI-powered automation solution that understands the nuances of language and emotion, guides agents through conversations, provides auto-responses using natural language processing, and offers context-driven action recommendations. This would enable the company to relieve its customer service reps from some of the more monotonous work, while empowering them to respond personally when appropriate.)

closeup of customer experience professional's headset, next to a computer, turned off, demonstrating the time savings provided by automating customer success efforts

What is Automation in Marketing, Sales and CX?

In marketing, sales and customer success, automation refers to the use of any software or other technology that leverages machine learning, robotic process automation, natural language processing, smart workflows and/or cognitive agents to decrease human interaction and manage and streamline repetitive processes and tasks that would otherwise be performed manually.

What is Machine Learning?

Machine learning is a branch of AI that uses data and algorithms to imitate the way humans learn, improving accuracy over time. The algorithms are trained to make classifications and predictions, and uncover insights through data mining. These insights impact KPIs, driving decision making within applications and the business.

What is Robotic Process Automation?

Robotic process automation is a technology that uses business logic and structured inputs to automate business processes; companies can configure the software, or robot, to emulate human actions in processing transactions, manipulating data, triggering actions, and communicating with other systems.

What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural language processing (NLP) uses computer science, AI, linguistics and data science to enable computers to understand verbal and written human language. By identifying named entities and word patterns using tokenization, stemming and lemmatization, NLP is able to convert unstructured data to a structured data format. Its components include: natural language understanding; and natural language generation:

Natural language understanding is used to determine the intended meaning of a sentence by focusing on machine reading comprehension through grammar and context
Natural language generation is used for text generation based on a given dataset

from behind, a man writing on a white board with black marker; on the white board is a workflow strategy, demonstrating how marketing automation can create triggered actions based on customer behaviors

The Benefits of Automation

Effective digital marketing, sales and CX requires the completion of many repetitive tasks, and without automation these time-consuming activities can leave little room for strategic thinking or creative content creation. Particularly in today’s hypercompetitive, very online environment, this is why:

At least three quarters of all companies use automation (SocialMediaToday)
More than 60% of marketers plan to increase their automation budgets (Invesp)
Nearly 40% plan to use automation in the future (Act-On)
AI will be the top category driving infrastructure decisions within the next three years (Gartner)

By automating your employees’ more mundane responsibilities, you can free them up to focus on the message, and the big picture — and truly understanding your customers so they can deliver the most personalized, empathic and relevant content and solutions.

Automation can help you with:

Lead generation, including targeting, personalizing and capturing customer data from content marketing, digital ads, organic social posts and landing pages. Companies can save more than six hours per week simply by automating social media.
Lead nurturing, including A/B tests, targeted drip campaigns and triggered and scheduled emails. Automated emails have a 70.5% higher open rate and a 152% higher click-through rate than generic email newsletters.
Upselling, like sending automated post-purchase emails to customers recommending additional products based on purchase history, interests and/or how they’ve used your website.
Productivity, by enabling campaign autopilot, which allows employees to measure, iterate and optimize in real time.
Campaign measurability, by providing deeper insights on what inspires different user personas to take various actions.
Customer engagement/success, by providing auto responses when applicable, guiding agents through conversations, and maintaining comprehensive customer databases. Using chatbots alone can save 30% of customer support costs and speed up response times by up to 80% for routine questions.
Sales, including lead scoring, pipeline customization, trigger emails and scheduling.

By reducing human intervention and streamlining repetitive processes and tasks, automation provides the following benefits to businesses:

Time savings and improved productivity. When you automate your marketing, sales and customer service processes, you free yourself to focus on strategic tasks and boost productivity. With the right automation solution, you can put your strategy to work and let it run, collecting data to improve future campaigns while you focus on other initiatives (like fine-tuning your email messaging or developing an influencer marketing strategy).
Cost savings and higher ROI. Automation can enable staffing cuts, which can lower business expenses. More importantly, though, automation reduces human error and the costs associated with correcting mistakes by limiting human intervention in repetitive, mundane technical tasks, while allowing employees to focus on delivering the human connection customers have come to expect from their favorite brands.
Better internal relationships. 97% of employees and executives believe that a lack of alignment impacts the outcome of a task or project. By simplifying processes and integrations, automation improves the working relationships among marketing, sales and customer service employees. Instead of staying in silos, these three historically disparate departments can brainstorm cross-departmental strategies, share customer information and integrate funnels, as well as coordinate with IT to implement the right 360-degree automation solution.

Plus, the statistics support the suppositions:

63% of companies using marketing automation outperform competitors (Moosend)
Businesses using marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads (Ascend2)
Automation could save enterprises more than $1 trillion annually in costs associated with poor lead management (wrike/Citrix)
80% of marketing automation users see improved lead generation, and 77% see more conversions (Invesp)
Automation improves sales productivity by 14.5% (Nucleus Research)
Automation grows the sales pipeline by 10% (Nucleus Research)
Automation can lead to a 30% increase in deal closures, an 18% decrease in sales cycle, and a 14% decrease in sales administration time (IDC)
Automation reduces marketing overhead by 12.2% (Nucleus Research)
Omnichannel marketing automation produces 90% higher customer retention rates (Omnisend)

a woman experiences augmented reality as part of an experience provided by a company focused on personalized marketing

For customers, too, the benefits outweigh any risks. Sure, companies that do automation wrong may send you sales emails about products you’ve already purchased, or redirect your support query to a documentation page that doesn’t answer your question. But when done right, automation facilitates the very experiences customers seek. Here’s how:

Personalized content. With automation, you can use the data you’ve already collected to deliver the most pertinent content, at the right time and on the right platform, as well as across platforms for a consistent omnichannel experience. Marketers using three or more channels in any one campaign report a 287% higher purchase rate than those using only one, and organizations with strong omnichannel customer engagement retain nearly nine of 10 customers.
The right answers, faster. Most CX professionals still don’t have the strategies or tactics to deliver the frictionless, personalized experiences customers are demanding today. With the right automation solution, you can remedy customer contact pain points, improve self-service experiences, supplement agent support and streamline back-office processes, making customer centricity a reality.

Planning and Implementing Your Automation Strategy

To successfully deploy a marketing, sales and/or CX automation strategy, you need to plan the process and then develop an implementation strategy. Start by fine-tuning and trimming-down your existing tactics to prepare for the new tech.

Redesign and simplify the customer journey by eliminating unnecessary processes, approvals, data inputs and reports
Develop, implement and standardize best practices and ideal-state processes, and codify them firmwide
‘Outsource’ as many processes as possible, providing self-service portals for customers, consolidating apps, and transferring ownership of simplified and standardized processes to third-party providers

Then, turn your attention to your automations.

Delineate your goals and requirements. What areas of your business are you looking to automate? What do you want to achieve with your automation platform? Which capabilities must your automation platform include?
Determine your implementation requisites. What budget will you need? What staffing and other resources will you need? What conversations must be had with the impacted business areas?
Develop your plan and process. What admins, users and rules do you need for governance? How will the automation platform integrate with other systems? How will you migrate customer information from other sources?
Define KPIs and analytics requirements. What are the key performance indicators for determining success/failure? How will you monitor and analyze data? How will you iterate and optimize based on your findings?
Design a training program. Which departments and employees will need to be trained on the new software? Which employees will need new training on new roles and responsibilities? How will you monitor and measure employee development?
Choose the right automation solution. Demo and compare automation platforms based on ease of use, features, limitations, training, support, scalability, pricing, integrations, and analytics and reporting. Request and review case studies and testimonials. Ask other businesses how their automation solution has worked (or not worked) for them.
Start simple, and grow. Before starting something new, focus on automating processes and tasks with which you’re already familiar. Address any issues that may arise. Then expand to more complex initiatives.

yellow neon sign reading 'Go up and never stop' with an arrow pointing right beneath it, on a black background

Selecting Your Automation Solution(s)

Some automation solutions are designed to do many things — like sales and marketing, or sales and CX — while others specialize in meeting niche marketing, sales or CX needs. Some platforms can serve as your CRM; some can integrate with your CMS; and some can work seamlessly with other automation software. All, to one degree or another, strive to collect and use customer data to improve your communications.

For marketing automation, consider:

For sales automation, consider:

For customer success automation, consider:

POV of someone typing on a laptop, with the screen open to Google Analytics

Why a CX, Sales or Marketing Automation Platform is Not Enough

As LinkedIn executive chairman Jeff Weiner once said, “Data really powers everything that we do.” Yet, data is overwhelming for many marketing, sales and customer service professionals, even at the highest levels. In fact, more than half of marketing influencers find data management and analytics to be the most challenging.

You could hire an analytics executive, onboard them, and pay them a high salary; or, you could invest in a tool that outperforms marketing, sales and customer success platforms in all of the following functions:

Data collection and unification: gathering, standardizing, validating, deduplicating and consolidating data from all sources
Profiling: producing and updating a single profile for each and every customer and prospect
Segmentation: creating custom groupings of customers/prospects to enable smarter targeting and personalization
Implementation and optimization: integrating data with end channels, like email marketing or digital advertising platforms, and developing and deploying the best experiences online and off

So what is that tool? A CDP, or customer data platform.

Are You Automated?

Have you automated your marketing, sales or CX functions? Are you struggling to determine which solution is best for your organization? Start the conversation in the Comments section!

Image Credits (in order of appearance)