All Things Automation

Hi Readers!

Eli here. I’ve never been more excited to share that I’m BACK HOME. This message is coming to you from Bala Cynwyd, my Philadelphia suburban enclave. After traveling for a full month, I’ve been itching to get back home and into a rhythm again.

I came home to more junk mail than a hoarder's living room can handle, but I did receive some delightful CPG packages as well.

I got a box full of goodies from my favorite vibe curator @NFGClub that included some goodies I’ve been excited to try, as well as some shrooms from the folks at Mojo and some CBD gummies from a new brand called Noma. I recently had the opportunity to connect with the Noma team on Mentorpass, and I am excited to see them build. As long-time followers know, I am an unboxing connoisseur, and I was truly impressed with both Mojo and Noma’s unboxing experience. 

[Note: None of these are paid ads, I just love sharing new CPG brands I love with founders I respect and want to succeed!]

Some other fun stuff this week: Cody and I just finished recording a Down To Chat podcast episode with our partner in crime at JRB Joanne Coffey, and I can’t wait for y’all to hear it. If you have an extra 30 seconds and feel like it, I'd love if you can drop a quick review on Apple Podcasts, it'll truly help us grow this thing. 🥺Review DTC pod 🧡This week is a bit chaotic, and it’s me vs. jet lag with jet lag taking a firm lead in this round, so we’ll keep it a bit lighter.

In this newsie, I’d love to chat a bit about Automation! 🤖

We’ll split this into 3 quick and easy sections:

1. Automation: What is it? 🤔2. Can I R2-D2 my entire CX operation? 🦾3. Easy Automation Wins 💃

1. Automation: What is it? 🤔

Thoughtboi’s be like “I saved 16.4 hours by automating my day and outsourcing my entire operation, now all I do is watch my tomato plants grow and count my money.”

I’m, however, not a thoughtboi (yet), so I’ll keep this real: The problem automation solves is a simple one. What starts off as a one-time small task can grow into an annoying repetitive task as a business scales. For example, tagging and segmenting customers based on marketing needs, adding notes to orders based on items ordered, or even notifying your CX team via slack when a very large order comes through and tagging that order as “VIP.” 

The art of automating your entire operation with fun tools like Zapier and Alloy is cool and all, and we’ll briefly touch on that stuff, but the bulk of this newsie will be about automation as it relates to CX.

When it comes to CX, companies quite often receive the same message over and over, and the response is often…the same. 

When done well, automation absolves you from doing the same repetitive task over and over, saving you time, money, and whatever hair you may have left. It can also improve customer happiness when Connie gets a speedy answer to her question rather than getting an annoying “thank you for your email, we aim to respond to your message within 72 hours” emails.

On the flip side, when done not so well, your customers feel like they are talking to a robot, can’t easily get answers to their questions, and are left feeling frustrated and unimportant. 

In other words, automations have to walk the narrow line of saving you time while not depersonalizing your customer experience.

For example, tools like Wonderment can automate shipping delay updates so your fave customer does not have to reach out asking “where is my order” when FedEx takes it on an international joyride.

Or you can integrate Klaviyo with Shopify to send discount codes to customers at a very unique point in their customer journey (based on spend, recency, frequency, etc.)

Oh, and you can even have full-on conversations with your customer’s using AI chatbots to resolve their issues in real time. 

I mean, there are so many cool automation opportunities when it relates to customer communication, and some of them can truly transform your business. 

So let’s get into what CX automation looks like, and what should you automate vs personalize:

Here are some of the popular Customer Service automations:

• Email automations: Auto-responses to emails that give customers the ability to potentially work through an issue until a human can come and fix it. You’ll see many large brands use this when things get busy. These emails generally have some FAQ’s in them, as well as a “click here if your issue is resolved” button too.

• Live chat: This tool allows users to initiate customer support interactions from nearly anywhere on your website with human agents or chatbots.

• Chatbots: Often powered by AI, these can have basic conversations with your customers to remedy most basic questions when the support team is out, or even be a first-touch tool for customers.

• CRM automations: Customer relationship management (CRM) tools like Klaviyo can automatically personalize message replies and send them, move customers into different segmentation groups, and a ton more.

• Interactive Voice Response (IVR): IVR is automated phone-based support that collects info from customers, presents them with options, and automatically transfers them to the right department. Some IVR tools can understand what customers say and direct them, a feature called NLP, natural language processing. (The ones that you spam 0 until you get to a representative. 😏)

2. Can I R2-D2 my entire CX operation? 🦾

HMM. So you can probably guess my thoughts on this one. I hate to sound lawyerly here, but it really does depend. Here too, just as we discussed with regard to email spam, there’s a cognitive dissonance between some of the automation we’d hate as consumers vs. the automation we are setting up for our own customers.

In order for automation to be great for you and your customers, it’s important to keep these things in mind:

a. Ensure it is actually solving their problem: As a business, there’s so much focus on saving time and money, but is this super awesome hack a 10 in getting customers the information/answer they want, or are you just setting up a more glamorous OOO response—or worse, something that will frustrate your customers?

Example of automation that can solve a problem: Connie is looking for her tracking info and she heads to your live chat. You have an automation set up with Gorgias that will allow them to click “my recent orders” to see their order before having to chat in.

Example of something that does not solve any problem: You use a nEw AgE Ai NlP chat that “deflects 99% of customer inquiries,” but it’s actually more like the bots of the AOL era that have no idea wtf your customers are saying. Eventually, they get to a CX rep, but they are now 10x more frustrated than when they started.

Utilize automation only when it serves your customer as well, not just to save $$.

b. Ensure customers can get directed to a live representative if they would like to: As I am sure every one of you knows from personal experience, there’s nothing more frustrating than feeling stuck in an automation loop with no way out. News flash: Your customers hate that feeling as well! It’s crucial to build your automations so that they can connect customers to a human representative if they would like to.

If your automation can’t solve an issue, ensure that it’s able to send the customer’s message to an actual representative or that it can prompt a rep to respond, such as in a live chat workflow.

3. Easy Automation Wins 💃

When it comes to automation, there’s nothing sexier than setting something up that’ll make the k’ching noise when you’re fast asleep. Here are some of my favorite automations, mostly super simple and easy CX wins:

a. Tagging with Shopify Flows: If you are a Shopify plus user, you can easily use Shopify flows to tag your VIP customers for customized messaging, track your retail customers if you have a store like JRB does, or a million other creative ideas to elevate your automation game.

As I’ve mentioned in previous newsies, my favorite flow at Jones Road is our “Shade Match” flow. We offer personalized shade matching at Jones Road and want to be able to track analytics on those orders.

When a customer gets shade matched at JRB, we tag their customer profile on Shopify. We then use Shopify flow to tag all their subsequent orders so we can keep track of AOV on these orders, as well as LTV etc. 

b. Personalized product recs: If you are a brand with more than one sku, it’s important to give customers the ability to have that “store experience,” i.e., let them walk down the aisle on their own, but be in the corner of their eye to help them figure out what products work best for them should they need support.

We use Octane AI for surveys to learn more about our customers, which allows us to recommend upsells and cross-sells based on what we know would look great on the customer. We already know their perfect shade for new product launches as well, which removes a ton of friction to purchase.

Pro tip: if you are a brand with regular replenishment intervals, def worth checking out Repeat as well. 

c. If This, Then That: One of my fav automations tools is Alloy, as it really does plug in to most Shopify tools. You can easily set up triggers like “notify me if product is low inventory/sold out, if customer has order note, if an extra large order goes through, etc.

For some fantastic automation recipes, check out their marketplace here.

Pro tip: aside from getting notified via email, you can also get notified via slack. Some prefer this, some (not me ofc) shudder from hearing the word “slack.”

d. Website Self-Help: We’ve been working on setting up something like the below self-help support pop-up on specific web pages while customers browse Jones Road.  It allows customers to check their order status, tracking number, and shipping information, as well as anything else you customize here. This means that your customers don't need to start a chat with your agents in order to get the needed information. According to Gorgias, the self-service chat portal can easily deflect and automate up to 30% of chat tickets!

e. CX Gorgias Rules: We use Gorgias rules to Automate a ton of CX happenings, but here are some of my favorite ones:

1. Tag all SMS tickets as urgent so we can answer them before emails (customers—again, like you would—expect a faster response on SMS).

2. Assign all NPS survey responses to our “NPS survey response team,” a few CXers on the JRB team

3. Close all Instagram DM tickets on Gorgias. (We handle all DMs on Instagram, so we auto delete them on Gorgias as they come through.)

4. Auto tag all potentially urgent tickets as “urgent.” We pack and ship really quickly here, and want to be able to catch all order change requests before they go out, so we use this basic Gorgias template to tag urgent based on some basic NLP sentiment analysis.

As always, if you enjoyed the newsie, please share with a friend or colleague, and thank you so much for being a CX and Retention stan. 💙

Final question: what would you like me to cover next week?

All my best, 

Eli