Automation is now officially non-negotiable for ecommerce customer experience (CX) and customer service (CS). Customer expectations have never been higher. People now expect to be able to resolve any issue with a business almost instantly, often without needing to speak to support agents or deal with email conversations. 

CX is also just as important. Technology can now deliver consistent, timely, and personalized interactions at scale. This increases customer satisfaction and creates lifetime buyers. Customers want as little friction as possible when interacting with your brand, and most importantly, they want to feel taken care of. 

One of the easiest ways to achieve this is through automation and purpose-built flows that ensure your customers are informed, supported, and happy. In this blog, we’ll break down some of the best automation flows your business should set up to make sure that your customers have the best possible experience with your brand.   

What is CX Automation?

CX automation is the use of technology, often AI-driven, to streamline customer interactions and support processes without constant human intervention. In practice, CX automation ranges from AI chatbots that answer FAQs to workflows that automatically update customers, aiming to create a smoother customer experience.

These days, customers demand fast, efficient 24/7 service. For small to mid-sized businesses, the only way to achieve this without hiring staff to work around the clock is through automation. 

By 2025, as much as 85% of customer interactions may be managed without human intervention, highlighting a major opportunity to work smarter. When done right, CX automation improves customer satisfaction while reducing your team's workload and costs.

Actionable Automated Flow Ideas

Whether you’ve just begun setting up automated flows for your business or you’re looking to add more to your company’s roster, here are eight ideas to improve your CX via automation. 

1. Warm Welcome & Onboarding

Start here if you don’t have any proactive onboarding or welcome flows in place. With automated welcome messages and helpful resources, these flows are designed to engage customers before or right after their first purchase. In ecommerce, this might look like an email series for new customers (e.g., “Welcome to X! Here’s 10% off your next order and tips to get started”) or a chat pop-up that appears on a customer’s first visit to guide them through your offerings.

If you sell products that require setup or have a learning curve, an onboarding flow can drip out how-to content or FAQs over the initial days/weeks after purchase. These communications are pre-scheduled and triggered by customer actions (account created, first order placed, etc.), so they roll out without anyone on your team manually intervening.

These kinds of flows preempt common questions and issues, show that you care about customers' success with the product, and reduce customer support tickets. Customers are more likely to actually use and enjoy what they bought, leading to higher satisfaction and boosting your customer lifetime value (CLV). 

2. Pre-Purchase FAQ Flow

These flows provide immediate answers to common questions shoppers have before they buy, often via a chat widget or an interactive FAQ section. They aim to alleviate any uncertainty about product features, sizing, store policies, shipping, and related aspects that might prevent someone from completing their purchase. 

To implement something like this, consider using a chatbot or an interactive menu within a chat interface to present common questions from your product/cart pages. Clicking on a question reveals a preset answer or directs the customer to a relevant page on the website. This can also include a sizing guide flow if you sell clothing. 

3. Intelligent Ticket Routing & Prioritization

Automated customer service can save your team so much time manually sorting, tagging, and responding to tickets. These automations use rules or AI to route incoming customer inquiries to the right team or person and tag priority levels. 

You can set up triggers based on keywords, customer profiles, or issue types. For example, if a message contains “refund” or “return,” it’s instantly assigned to the Returns team; a VIP customer’s email is flagged and sent to your senior support staff; and a chat that selects “Billing issue” on a contact form goes straight to your billing specialist.

The result? Faster response times, less bouncing around departments, and your customer issues get solved with less friction overall. This dramatically improves the customer experience and results in even your unhappiest customers (at the time) turning into repeat shoppers at your store. 

4. Self-Service Returns & Exchanges

Is there anything more annoying than having to go through a convoluted process to get an item you bought online exchanged or returned? Thankfully, the return/exchange process can be simplified with customer service automation. 

With a well-configured flow, customers can initiate returns on their own via a self-service returns portal or automated chat. For example, a “Return Item” button on your website or chat asks for the order number, verifies eligibility, and automatically generates return instructions or a shipping label. You could also set up an automated CX flow that answers questions about your shipping and return policies, helping customers find this information before they hit the “Place Order” button. 

This reduces the support burden of managing returns. Automation handles the routine steps (verifying order details, issuing return labels, updating inventory systems) that would otherwise hold up your staff. This saves time and labour costs, minimizes errors, and allows you to get products back in stock sooner. 

Customers who know they can easily return the items they buy are also more likely to purchase from you in the future since the stakes are lower. 

5. Proactive Status Updates & Notifications

These flows keep customers in the loop by automatically sending out status updates for key events before customers ask. This includes shipping/delivery updates, problem alerts, and service notifications. If an order is delayed, the system emails the customer an apology with the new expected delivery date. When a support ticket is received or resolved, an automated message confirms reception and the status. 

Proactively hearing about an issue and getting regular updates means the customer doesn’t need to chase your company for information. For example, rather than wondering “Where’s my refund?” after sending back a product, the customer automatically gets a message: “We’ve received your return, and your refund is being processed.” 

This transparency helps customers feel less anxious and less forgotten while reducing ticket volume, since there’s no need for them to follow up manually.

6. Personalized Product Recommendation/Quiz Flow:

These kinds of flows can leverage CX automation and AI to guide customers towards products they’ll love or options that will work best for them. 

For example, your store can have a “Product Finder” chatbot or quiz that asks customers a few questions about their preferences and needs, then suggests the best-fitting product. This can also work based on past customer data: the system might automatically recommend complementary items (“Customers who bought X also like Y”) on the website or by email.

These flows work well to reduce decision fatigue and lower the chances that customers will pick the wrong variation of an item and then need to start a return. Personalization also helps boost sales overall by upselling or cross-selling in a natural way. 

Like many of the others on this list, recommendation flows can capture useful data on customer preferences that can help inform marketing or product development. 

7. Back-in-Stock Notification 

This flow is a great way to mitigate disappointment over a desired/needed item being unavailable. It also saves customers the time and effort of manually checking back for restocks. 

These types of automations are usually triggered with a “notify me” button or form (asking for an email or phone number) on your product pages that displays when items run out of stock. 

This flow enables businesses to recapture potentially lost sales, helps gauge demand for specific products, and builds a list of potential customers engaged in your business for future marketing efforts.

8. Automated Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Surveys and Review Requests

Ratings and reviews are a great way to build trust in your brand and products, but most people don’t think to come back to your page to review something unless they actively have a problem. That’s why asking for feedback is so important. 

Examples of these flows include asking for a “How did we do?” five-star rating once a support chat ends or a ticket is marked solved, or emailing the customer a one-question survey about their experience with your customer service team. 

Similarly, after a product is delivered, an automated email might ask the customer to rate their shopping experience or write a review. These flows are triggered by events (chat closed, order delivered, etc.) and require no manual outreach. 

Customers get a reminder to let you know how you did, while your company gets a steady stream of data on how your support and services are performing. You can spot issues, such as when ratings drop after a certain type of interaction, and identify great service moments to praise your team for.

Choosing the Right CX Automation Platform

While individual tools can handle some tasks, a dedicated CX automation platform is the key to building an intelligent automated CX strategy. Using multiple, disconnected tools can lead to data silos, inconsistent customer experiences, and management overhead. 

Conversely, a unified platform offers centralized data, consistent branding, easier management, better analytics, and better scalability. This is where our favourite CX automation platform, Gorgias, comes in. 

As an ecommerce agency that’s seen its fair share of brands with overworked customer service agents juggling the same common customer questions over and over, we love how Gorgias allows companies to offload up to 60% of customer support issues to AI-powered chatbots and intelligent CX automations. 

Gorgias's "Flows" feature directly enables many of the self-service automations discussed earlier. For example, it can be used to answer shipping policy inquiries, automate returns and exchanges, recommend products through quizzes, and notify customers about product restocks.

The AI Agent in Gorgias goes beyond FAQs to understand customer intent, personalize responses, and even perform actions within integrated systems like Shopify.  It can learn business policies and brand voice and access customer data to autonomously cancel orders, track orders, edit subscriptions, and process returns. 

Finally, it can issue refunds and update shipping information based on customer requests, freeing your human agents to handle more complex inquiries and deal directly with VIP customers.

Conclusion

CX automation gives ecommerce businesses the tools to deliver consistent, on-brand, 24/7 support while lightening the load on internal teams. With automated flows like automated FAQs, returns, personalized recommendations, and proactive status updates, your ecommerce business can offer enterprise-level service without needing an enterprise-sized staff.

As a Gorgias partner agency, we at Blue Badger have the automation skills you need to set up flows that turn one-time shoppers into regulars. From initial setup and integration to customizing automation rules and AI training, our team can ensure these flows work smoothly and are tailored to your brand’s needs. Get in touch with us today to get started!