Today’s customers demand more from companies. Reacting quickly to problems and issues isn’t enough. You need to offer proactive customer service to engage your audience, retain buyers, increase sales, and ultimately outperform the competition.
Customers no longer trust companies to keep their best interests at heart. Failure to understand the challenges your customers face and implement strategies to preemptively overcome them doesn’t help the issue. Proactive service demonstrates a commitment to delivering the best service and support to all customers, giving you an edge over the competition.
Unfortunately, it’s not easy to implement. During an interview with the CXToday team, Senior Research Director for Gartner Eric Keller revealed that proactive service leads to a 9% increase in a customer’s value enhancement score. However, when implemented incorrectly, proactive outreach can damage consumer trust and lead to additional costs for companies.
So, how do you implement proactive customer service effectively?
What is Proactive Customer Service?
Proactive customer service is an approach to customer service that involves anticipating customers' needs before they need to contact you. It can include immediately alerting customers when you make a mistake, informing them about product changes, and recommending products they might like based on their previous purchases.
Examples of proactive customer service include:
- Ensuring customers can immediately track service outages and incidents as Microsoft does with its service health portal.
- Connecting with customers to introduce them to products, services, or features that might be valuable to them based on your knowledge of their needs and pain points.
- Consistently searching for ways to improve the customer experience, like offering onboarding programs that teach users how to use new solutions.
AWS is one company that enables and offers proactive customer service. They ensure companies can access machine-learning-powered solutions to review customer data and design personalized outbound campaigns at scale. They also inform their customers about potential outages, reach out to existing customers about product updates, and follow up on reported issues.
Proactive Customer Service vs. Reactive Service
Reactive and proactive customer service are differentiated by who in the relationship makes the first move. With proactive service, companies initiate the first contact with the customer. With reactive service, it’s the customer that needs to reach out first.
Proactive service can be challenging to deliver. It’s difficult to predict precisely what your customers need in advance. However, waiting for a customer to contact you about a problem is like waiting for your smoke alarm to sound because your casserole is burning.
You might be able to salvage something and stop the problem from getting worse, but the damage is already done. Reactive service means that by the time you deliver a solution, your customer is already frustrated with your brand and potentially looking for alternatives.
Proactive service allows you to anticipate problems before they occur, improving the customer experience and saving customers time and effort. Notably, no company can be completely “proactive.” You can’t anticipate everything. There will be times when you do need to react and respond quickly to unpredictable incidents.
But a proactive approach helps you to cut down on those “reactive” efforts, and differentiate yourself from the competition.
The Benefits of a Proactive Customer Service Strategy
Though it’s easier to be “proactive” in customer service today than it once was, there are still challenges involved in implementing the right strategy. You may need to invest in new technology, workflows, and training processes. So, why should you bother?
Simply put, proactive customer service delivers results. 89% of customers think proactive service gives them a more “positive” experience with a brand. Additionally, 81% of shoppers say it increases the likelihood of buying from a business again.
A Gartner survey even found proactive service can lead to a full-point increase in various CX metrics, such as customer satisfaction, effort, and net promoter scores.
A proactive approach shows your audience your business is customer-focused and always striving to deliver a phenomenal experience; it provides benefits like:
Increased Customer Loyalty
89% of customers believe proactive customer service leads to a better customer experience. I prefer to receive a notification on my phone when an app isn’t working as it should rather than trying to troubleshoot the problem myself.
Whether you’re informing customers of problems or sharing insights into new products or features, a proactive approach delights your customers. It shows them you always have their experience and their needs in mind. This leads to an increased chance of retaining your customers long-term, which means you also end up with better profits due to a higher customer lifetime value.
Higher Sales and Revenue
Customers are often distracted when shopping. Around 70% will abandon their cart after adding an item to it. Sometimes, they only need a little extra support to decide.
Reaching out proactively with an offer or deal your customer might be interested in can increase your chances of conversions. Alternatively, having a chatbot or FAQ on your website that allows users to answer any questions they might have about your shipping or return policies can give them the reassurance they need to complete a purchase.
Improved Agent Experiences
As mentioned above, a reactive approach will always be necessary in the contact center to some degree. However, if your agents spend all their time putting out endless fires, they can easily get overwhelmed. Proactive support can reduce the strain on your agents.
If you offer customers FAQs, knowledgebase guides, and chatbots, they can proactively address more issues without seeking agent support. This means less pressure on your employees. This reduces the support tickets agents have to handle, reducing the risk of stress and burnout.
Greater Customer Satisfaction
Being proactive with your support ensures your customers get the most value from your product or service. Think of it this way, if you downloaded an app like Slack and it didn’t give you step-by-step guidance on how to set up your channels, and connect with colleagues, you’d spend more time figuring out how to use the solution, than enjoying its features.
Plus, with proactive customer service, you reduce the number of times customers have to contact your team actively. Ultimately, no matter how friendly and fun your support team is, no one wants to waste endless hours talking to support staff.
How to Implement Proactive Customer Service: Step-by-Step
Building a proactive customer service strategy can seem daunting. Even in today’s digitally transforming world, we don’t have crystal balls to show us the future. However, you can take steps to make your team more proactive.
Step 1: Dive into Your Data
To proactive resolve the issues your customers face, and pre-empt their needs, you need the right data. You need to know what your customers frequently complain about, what questions they ask your bots and customer service teams, and what features they struggle to use.
Some CX vendors, like Dialpad, offer access to tools to help you gather this data, such as “customer experience scorecards,” which give you granular insights into potential pain points. Other CCaaS platforms allow you to track valuable data that can offer insights into friction points.
For instance, using conversational analytics tools, powered by AI, you can pinpoint common terms and topics that emerge during conversations. If you notice many customers struggle with initially setting up their new software, for instance, you can create an onboarding program to address this.
Step 2: map the Customer Journey
Customer journey mapping is a valuable strategy for proactive customer service. It allows you to step into your customer’s shoes and examine the potential challenges they face when interacting with your company.
If you discover that customers spend a lot of time contacting your support team after they first make a purchase, you can create a set of knowledgebase resources that answer the questions they commonly have. If you discover that customers seek help from your wider community on social media, you know you can use social media as a channel for proactive communications.
Mapping the customer journey can also help you understand the different needs of various groups in your customer base. You might find that your enterprise-level customers prefer to connect with you via the phone for step-by-step guidance, while smaller buyers prefer email. This will help you to plan the strategy for your proactive approach to service.
Step 3: Send Out Customer Surveys
Only 1 in 26 customers will complain about a problem they encounter with your product or service. The rest will simply stop buying from you, and look for a better solution elsewhere. Sometimes, delivering proactive customer service starts with proactively asking your customers about their experiences, needs, and the problems they face.
Questionnaires and surveys are a great way to learn more about your customers and what they need most from you. You can use loyalty management and survey tools to create and automatically send surveys to customers asking various questions.
You might ask, “What problems do you face most with our products?” or “What do you wish we offered more of?” Companies like HootSuite even ask customers whether they have enough information to make purchasing decisions.
Step 4: Use Social Listening Tools
Gathering feedback from customers is excellent, but it’s not simple. The reality is only a handful of people will have the time to answer a survey or want to offer their insights. I’ve lost count of the number of feedback requests I’ve ignored in the past.
However, customers don’t have as much trouble sharing their experiences online. We’re all happy to ignore feedback survey requests and then complain about an issue we had with a company on social media, searching for empathy from our friends.
Fortunately, there are ways to listen to your customer’s conversations. Social listening tools like Hootsuite, and Mentionlytics can gather comments about your company from social channels, forums, and even review websites. They can help you track common topics related to your business and even give you insight into customer sentiment.
Step 5: Be Open and Transparent with Customers
Nobody feels comfortable admitting to a mistake. You want your company to seem almost infallible to your target audience. However, customers know companies aren’t perfect. In a McKinsey survey, more than half of the respondents said they trusted companies more when they disclosed information about data breaches and mistakes.
Promptly letting customers know when something goes wrong, whether with your data security or your product, is critical to earning their trust. It’s also an essential part of ensuring you stay compliant with regulations like GDPR.
As soon as you notice an issue, connect with customers on the channel you know they prefer to use, sharing what happened, and the steps you’re taking to address the issue.
You can also make it much easier for customers to keep track of common incidents with a portal where customers can see current outages and status issues, like Zoom does here.
Step 6: Build a Knowledge Base
No matter how intuitive you think your products and services are, there’s a good chance your customers will need help getting the most value out of their purchase. Knowledge bases and FAQ pages aren’t just a great way to help customers address and troubleshoot problems.
They can also help to educate customers and help them mitigate potential issues. For instance, a knowledge base filled with FAQs, articles, video tutorials, and guides can allow customers to access all the benefits of their new purchase without speaking to an agent.