2 June, 2022

ActiveCampaign’s Shahid Nizami On How CXA Is Creating 1:1 Experiences Through Automation

By Solomon Nivison-Smith

In this exclusive interview, B&T spoke with Shahid Nizami, APAC regional vice president of ActiveCampaign, about how businesses can save time while improving experiences for customers, all with the help of ActiveCampaign CXA.

It could be said that the goal of every modern business is to create a loyal customer base. Sure, your product or service needs to be desirable or fill a gap in the market, but good sales don’t always lead to strong customer relationships. In a post-pandemic world, customers want to be able to relate to the business they shop with, and feel like they have a genuine connection with the core beliefs of those lucky few they choose to buy from. A close bond between business and consumer has arguably never been more important.

The unfortunate side of that is there are plenty of factors involved in making a customer happy with that (hopefully) mutually beneficial relationship. Email chains and contacts can be difficult to manage, especially when there is often an inherent level of automation involved. Survey responses and automatic texts or calls have a similar effect. It has often been theorised that this automation comes as a polar opposite of the personalisation companies are craving at present, because it prevents businesses from dealing with their customers on a one-to-one basis.

Enter ActiveCampaign, and its Customer Experience Automation (CXA). The CXA technology provides an opportunity for growing businesses to combine automation with 1:1 experiences, allowing for these pedestrian interactions to become more attuned to the individual receiving them.

With ActiveCampaign recently releasing their CXA Impact Report, a survey that gathered data from customers across 20 countries in an attempt to ascertain the real results of their technology, B&T sat down with their regional vice president for APAC, Shahid Nizami, to discuss the impact CXA has had on ActiveCampaign customers and how the technology will continue to help them grow.

The first thing that needed answering was exactly how CXA enables this combination of automation and 1:1 experiences, especially given that most people in the industry consider them to be antithesis to one another. Nizami explained that core to this understanding is the idea that each customer goes on a “journey” with each business they interact with, and that CXA streamlines that process while still giving customers a 1:1 interaction with the company.

“Every business is very aware now that their customers don’t interact with them only with one channel, right? They’re on social, they’re on email, messaging, chat, text, everywhere. CXA helps to connect you with your customers where they are, and deliver the right message at the right time of the customer journey,” said Nizami.

The inspiration for CXA came from this core idea that automation doesn’t have to be contradictory to personalisation. ActiveCampaign recognised that there was a hole in the market for a concept like this, and aimed to provide a service that could support businesses of all sizes. “The general feeling is that if a business is trying to get into hyper automation, you won’t be able to do hyper personalisation. Dear first name, dot last name – it’s so generic, right? You want to do a lot more, which is truly meaningful to the customers.”

When the results came in from ActiveCampaign’s CXA Impact Report, they were overwhelmingly positive, particularly in B2B, B2C and eCommerce. All told, 96 per cent of users agreed that ActiveCampaign helps them improve the experiences their customers have with their company, and 95 per cent of growing businesses report that automations help them achieve what they couldn’t on their own.

Above all else, the stat that surprised Nizami was the reported number of new leads for companies, with the report showing them doubling over the course of a year to a whopping 110 per cent of the respondent’s previous numbers.

“We knew in principle, we would expect our customers to have pretty solid results from CXA. But when we commissioned this study, I would say we were even more thrilled and surprised to see that impact which our customers are getting out of CXA,” said Nizami.

“For example, the report [showed] that customers are able to more than double their new leads year over year. We thought, yeah, it’ll be 60 per cent, 70 per cent, but 110 per cent with the new leads? That’s tremendous.”

While B2B, B2C and eCommerce were the biggest portions of users, there were survey responses from all kinds of companies and users who had positive things to say about CXA. This is one of the best things about the CXA interface according to Nizami – “it’s so generic – in a good way – that people can pick up CXA, and no matter what industry you belong to you can get a lot out of it.”

So, what’s next for ActiveCampaign? Having recently acquired both PostMark and DMARC Digests, the goal appears to be continuing to develop and evolve CXA while also growing the business and increasing the strength of various partnerships.

“We actually invest a very big part of our revenue back into research and development, and it’s more than double of the industry standards. So that way, we are really trying to make the product evolve and evolve and support the growth of our customers,” added Nizami.

If you’re interested in reading the results for yourself, they can be found here: https://www.activecampaign.com/lp/partner/marketing-automation-statistics-2022

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