A potential customer sends you a message asking about your services. You see the notification while you are in the middle of something, tell yourself you will come back to it, and then the day keeps moving.
By the time you remember, several days have passed.
For the person waiting on the other side, that delay is part of their experience with your business.
During her Bloom Connections Educational Moment, Miesha Williamson showed us how AI and automation can help close some of those gaps. Her presentation focused on improving the customer experience, but what stood out to me was that she wasn’t talking about automating everything simply because we can.
She was looking at the moments where a customer is trying to move forward and the business unintentionally makes that harder.
Miesha knows that problem firsthand. She talked about messages getting buried in DMs, landing in spam, or simply not being seen quickly enough. When that happens, the person who reached out may not wait.
As Miesha acknowledged during the conversation, potential customers can “go to somebody else.”
That gives us a different reason to think about automation. Saving time for the business matters, but so does making it easier for a customer to get what they need when they are ready to take the next step.
Start by Looking at Where the Customer Gets Stuck
Before Miesha showed us any tools, she shared an example from her work at Expedia that put the customer experience at the center of the conversation.
Following the pandemic, Expedia was dealing with a high volume of customer support calls, chats, and emails. Miesha analyzed customer feedback to understand what was driving people to contact support.
One of the recurring issues was surprisingly simple. Customers were having trouble finding their itinerary and receipt.
The solution wasn’t to automate another conversation with them. It was to make the information they were already looking for easier to access.
Changes were made so the itinerary and receipt were more prominent after booking and in the confirmation email. Miesha said improvements like these contributed to a 30% reduction in call volume while also making the experience easier for customers.
I think that’s an important place to start because businesses can get so focused on what a new tool can do that we skip the more useful question: Why does the customer need us at this point in the first place?
If the same question keeps coming up, if people repeatedly have trouble finding something, or if a particular part of the process creates unnecessary back-and-forth, that friction is giving you information.
Once you identify it, you can decide what needs to change.
Four Customer Experience Gaps Worth Looking At
For service-based businesses, Miesha identified four areas where AI and automation can make the customer journey easier: inquiry intake, frequently asked questions, appointment coordination, and follow-up communication.
None of these sounds like a major problem on its own.
An inquiry comes in and you respond. Someone has a question and you answer it. A prospective client wants to meet and you find a time. After the conversation, you follow up.
The challenge is what happens when all of those small interactions are happening while you are also serving clients, marketing the business, handling operations, and doing everything else that comes with running it.
That is where small gaps start appearing.
An inquiry sits too long. A common question gets answered differently depending on the day. Scheduling takes five emails. Someone who seemed interested never hears from you again.
Miesha’s approach was to look at those moments individually and consider where a better process could keep the customer moving.
The first opportunity begins as soon as someone reaches out.
Make the First Step Easy to Complete
When someone is interested in working with you, you need enough information to understand what they are looking for.
You probably don’t need everything yet.
Miesha recommended keeping the initial inquiry process short and focusing on roughly three questions that provide the information you need to determine what happens next.
She demonstrated this using Tally for her tutoring business.
There is a more detailed intake process once someone becomes a client, but the initial inquiry has a different purpose. At that stage, she is gathering enough information to understand the person’s needs without making them complete a lengthy form before a relationship even exists.
That distinction is useful.
We often build business processes around everything we eventually need instead of what the customer needs to do right now.
A shorter first step can give the business enough information to respond while making it easier for the prospective customer to keep going.
Once that information is captured, the next opportunity is answering the questions that tend to come up again and again.
Your Frequently Asked Questions Can Become Part of the Experience
If you have been in business for any amount of time, you probably know several questions you answer constantly.
People want to know about pricing. They ask how the service works. They want to understand cancellation policies or what happens after they book.
Miesha recommended identifying those recurring questions and developing clear answers that can become part of an automated customer journey.
During her demonstration, she showed how ManyChat can be used to respond when someone reaches out through social media.
A lot of us know ManyChat from the familiar social media automation where someone comments a particular word and immediately receives a link. Miesha showed how that same type of technology can play a larger role in the customer experience.
Instead of every inquiry depending on you noticing a DM at the right moment, an automated conversation can begin gathering information and answering common questions while the person’s interest is still fresh.
The key is that the conversation needs somewhere useful to go.
The Right Questions Can Determine the Right Next Step
Miesha demonstrated how this works inside her own ACT test preparation business.
Rather than sending everyone who reaches out the same response, her process asks questions that help determine what the person needs.
She may ask what grade the student is in, whether they have taken the test before, when they plan to test, and whether they have completed Algebra I.
Those answers help determine what happens next.
Someone who is still early in the process may receive Miesha’s free mini course. Someone who is ready for additional support can receive information about pricing and booking.
Miesha also demonstrated an AI-powered version that uses information she has provided about her students and frequently asked questions to respond based on what the person says.
What I like about this approach is that the automation isn’t there simply to send something faster.
It helps move the person toward the information or next step that fits where they are.
That same thinking can continue when someone is ready to speak with you.
Scheduling Doesn't Need to Become a Conversation of Its Own
Anyone who has scheduled meetings manually knows how quickly a simple request can become an email thread.
You suggest Tuesday. They can’t do Tuesday. Wednesday might work, but only in the afternoon. By the time you reply with your availability, one of those times has already been taken.
Miesha uses Calendly to remove that back-and-forth. By keeping her available appointment times current, someone can choose from the times she has already decided work for her.
There is nothing particularly complicated about that automation, and that is part of the point.
Improving the customer experience does not always require an elaborate AI system.
Sometimes the better experience is simply removing an unnecessary exchange between someone deciding they want to meet with you and actually getting that meeting on the calendar.
The same principle applies after the initial interaction.
Follow-Up Is Part of the Customer Experience Too
Getting the inquiry is only one part of the journey.
What happens after someone gives you their information matters too.
During the discussion following Miesha’s presentation, she talked about collecting email addresses through the intake process and using an email platform such as Kit rather than leaving customer information sitting inside Gmail.
That creates a more organized way to continue communicating with people who have already expressed interest.
It also highlights something that can be easy to miss when we talk about customer experience.
The experience doesn’t begin when someone becomes a paying client.
It begins much earlier.
It starts when they send the first message, fill out the first form, ask the first question, or try to find the first piece of information they need.
If that early experience feels difficult, slow, or disconnected, they may never reach the point where they become a customer.
Automation Works Best When It Removes Friction
The tools Miesha demonstrated were useful, but I don’t think the biggest takeaway from her Educational Moment was a list of platforms to add to our businesses.
It was learning to recognize the moments where a customer is waiting unnecessarily.
That could be a DM you haven’t seen yet. It could be a question you’ve answered dozens of times. It could be a scheduling exchange that doesn’t need to happen manually. It could be an interested person who never receives the follow-up they were expecting.
Those are customer experience problems before they are automation opportunities.
When you start there, the technology has a purpose.
You are not adding another tool because AI is popular or because automation sounds efficient. You are making a particular part of doing business with you easier.
And you do not have to rebuild the entire customer journey to begin.
Look for the One Gap That Keeps Showing Up
Miesha’s Expedia example is a good reminder of how useful this can be.
Customers were contacting support because they couldn’t easily find information they needed. Once the company understood what people were looking for, the response wasn’t to create a more complicated support system. It was to make that information easier to find.
A small business can apply the same thinking on a different scale.
Pay attention to where people keep getting stuck.
Look at the questions that arrive repeatedly.
Notice where you’re constantly doing the same thing manually.
Think about the messages that are easiest to miss and the follow-ups that depend on you remembering them at exactly the right time.
Then ask whether a better process, with AI or automation supporting it, could make that moment easier.
That is what I took from Miesha’s Educational Moment.
The opportunity isn’t to automate every customer interaction. It’s to notice where the experience is breaking down and decide whether technology can help you make it better.
About Miesha Williamson
Miesha Williamson is an entrepreneur whose primary business focuses on ACT test preparation, helping high-achieving high school students improve their ACT or SAT scores with the goal of reaching top-percentile results and increasing their opportunities for college scholarships.
She also works with small businesses and enterprises on automation and process improvement and is documenting more of her work and learning around artificial intelligence through A Black Woman in AI.
Frequently Asked Questions About AI Customer Experience Automation
Learn Something. Share Something. Grow Together.
Miesha’s Educational Moment reminded us that a customer doesn’t see all the work happening behind the scenes. They experience what happens when they try to connect with the business.
Making that experience better can begin with something as simple as noticing where they are waiting.
Want to experience the next Educational Moment? Join us at an upcoming Bloom Connections gathering.
