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Customer service as an industry keeps developing every year. Customer expectations are growing up, technologies are developing fast, and new approaches are coming. Anyhow, the goal is the same as it has been for years - the perfect customer experience and stable customer retention. The customer service team gives proactive measure to every interaction throughout the customer journey, customer expectations are investigated and fulfilled faster than a client understands it, and customer satisfaction is the highest priority.
To create ideal customer relationships with a brand, you need a strategy. As a result, a proactive customer service approach has been developed. The proactive customer service tactic is based on resolving customer service issues before a customer notices those issues.
Nonetheless, even if proactive customer service looks like the ultimate solution, some companies are still using reactive customer service. So what is the best way to achieve customer loyalty and provide positive experiences? What is proactive meaning in business? What is the difference between proactive customer service and reactive service? How to build an ideal proactive strategy? How to be proactive and what does it mean to be proactive? How to service customers proactively? What are tips for implementing proactive customer service? What is a proactiveness example?
What is the proactive customer service?
Proactive customer service (proactive support, proactive communication or proactive approach) is the customer issue-solving method established on the principle of resolving issues proactively before a customer faces those problems. It has many stages of implementation, which need a skilled proactive customer support team and a thoughtful proactive customer service strategy. It is based on customer service automation and proactive reaction, and its objective is to increase customer loyalty and customer retention. Every interaction during a customer journey has to be provided with various support proactive contact center tools to assist clients in resolving the issues or answering common questions on their own, without applying to an agent for help - thus, proactive customer service is maybe the most complicated customer service model, but still, the most efficient.
According to a proactive customer service strategy, clients must be equipped with all the necessary tools to deal with any issue, and what’s essential - they should feel satisfied by using these proactive customer service tools and get a positive experience. By the way, self-service is a trend now, so it’s another argument for implementing a proactive customer service model.
What is the difference between proactive customer service and reactive?
Proactive customer service as a proactive strategy has its goal to eliminate problems before clients face them. This means the proactive customer service approach is effortful and requires permanent monitoring processes to be organized to identify issues as momentarily as possible. Continuing this thought, you need more experienced and highly qualified employees to control all aspects of the proactive support strategy and avoid any imperfections that can cause customer complaints.
The forms of how the proactive customer service strategy may be implemented vary: from proactive solutions and proactive supports such as chat-bots, FAQs, self-service knowledge bases to IVRs, automated surveys, and social listening.
Reactive service is well-known, so another word for reactive is “classic” service. Its goal is to solve a client’s problems only when a client comes with a complaint to an agent. The main nuance is that you can’t get rid of reactive service even if you want to do so. Anyhow the customer service team will achieve requests for assistance or appeals, but it doesn’t mean you have to be limited in using further solutions.
Descending customer retention rates, more heightened customer satisfaction, improved customer experience, and additional insights into customer behavior - here are the benefits of proactive customer service, so we don’t see any reason to avoid using the proactive model even if you perform excellent reactive support.
What should be the priority - reactive or proactive support?
Reactive support means a client makes the first step - and often he comes with bad news. Angry calls, refunds, etc. - all of these communication touchpoints are painfully familiar for any proactive contact center leader. The trouble lies in the nature of such communication - it starts only when the problem harms client, so the goal is not only to tackle the trouble but to change the client’s impression.
Proactive customer service is about proactive problem-solving - it makes you communicate proactively with the client before the trouble harms them. Now imagine how will customer satisfaction improve in this case. Proactive solutions just enhance customer experience.
There is a sense of providing a quality customer experience by proactive approaches - by allowing clients to tackle problems directly and proactively, without any participation of the contact center’s agents. Proactive customer service also increases the chances for positive customer feedback by both useful services and the intuitive nature of self-service tools.
Proactive customer service: identify, react, eliminate
Three words describe the entire proactive customer service strategy. Instead of a reactive service, where clients are the testers and bug finders of your products, proactive customer service takes responsibility for the goods and services. According to proactive customer service, all common questions or common issues that can face the client are already answered or solved by the proactive customer support department and put into knowledge bases.
If we talk about an easier life, we’ll give a sample of such proactive customer service.
Imagine a company that sells software for email marketing. It is designed for Windows, but the firm decided to scale up and open a new market in Switzerland, where most laptop users prefer MacOS. Developers just put a line “works on Mac” on a product, but there is no info on the website or social networks about how to start it on the mentioned operating system.
Unhappy customers make massive calls to the support department, where they stay in queues, repeat the same questions, and listen to a long description of installing the virtual machines. May you foresee the result of such “service”?
Numerous refunds, negative customer feedback, tons of disgusting reviews, and one-star rates on Capterra or Trustpilot, a customer experience that clients want never to happen again - that is what will happen.
How does proactive customer service help here? In various manners: chatbot instructions for installation, FAQ link, instructions put directly, etc. Funny, how easily such trouble can be created, and how simply it may be avoided via proactive customer service.
Proactive customer service: research is a key
Where does proactive customer service get data about potential problems? Actually, it all gets through customer interactions - the thing called proactivene management. You have enough contact center tools to notice every interaction to avoid troubles. The service provided is based on three parts: you track interactions, define proactively potential problems, and find solutions.
It may be monitoring of interactions on the website, thematic forums surfing to find popular questionsl, and permanent community support in social media to find out future customers’ issues by using customers’ comments, or just product testing to find out its pros and cons proactively.
Omnichannel contact center software has an advantage over other solutions in its integration capabilities with all communication channels to help you implement proactive customer service. That means your agents can monitor every digital channel to avoid leaving any client’s issue without attention.
How to implement proactive support?
A good question for those looking to improve their contact center performance. As it’s clear that the reactive model is a must-have, you should know that proactive customer service is an add-on to reactive service, not a replacement. By the way, we can’t talk about the final shift from one to another, but the creation of customer service automation is impossible without proactive customer service.
So where is the starting point? Well, you don’t need to spend years to complete the shift to proactive customer service. First of all, you should allow people to contact the company through all possible channels. That means not only an email or phone, but social networks, messengers, or voicemail too. More digital channels are required to receive more customer feedback and data to build proactive strategies.
The second step is to offer self-service options - like a FAQ or knowledge base. You have internal information resources for agents, so it won’t take a lot to adapt them for clients. I
To deal with numerous contact channles, you need an omnichannel contact center equipped with special contact center tools.
Nine tips to become a proactive customer service guru
Let’s first learn what’s the model of proactive support.
At the top of the funnel are tools that have to solve customers’ problems before they will determine the problem that exists. These instruments contain FAQs, automatic messages, chatbots, etc. This phase is essential to get additional insights into customer behavior.
The next stage is about self-service. Here we should mention the IVR system and knowledge bases, where the customer is looking for the answers to his questions.
The third phase is direct contact between the customer and support operators. For a sample, an omnichannel contact center can be organized via social networks, email, phone, SMS, and so on.
The final step is about receiving feedback to improve the service provided. It can be organized as live feedback during calls, automated customer surveys, or even post-contact analysis of the contract by recording the call or by another option.
The best piece of this approach is that a client has two entire stages before contacting a living agent, so a great number of his issues are solved even before the client determines them as the existing problems. Even if such a situation happens, exceptional customer service automation allows a client to solve the problem on his own.
But even after comprehending a proactive approach as a funnel, you need a deeper understanding of all its essential tools and methods to perform proactive customer service with excellent performance. Now we are going to talk about every one of them separately.
Knowledge base and FAQ as the first line of support
The interesting Vanilla research states that self-service is adored by almost all clients. As it’s mentioned in the study, 79% of buyers wish businesses to furnish self-service tools, 84% prefer to resolve troubles on their own, and a fantastic rate of 92% would like to use knowledge bases - proactive companies are all around us. We suggest not ignoring these scores and finding ways to implement knowledge bases and FAQs as soon as possible as a part of proactive support implementation.
The same study also says that people are more willing to choose another company after bad clients’ service - 61% have said so, but on the other hand, 78% of buyers would buy more goods from a firm that has assisted them with a great service. And to comprehend what is meant by “great clients’ service”, we must remember that this study is about self-service - and this is exactly what buyers are looking for, as well as proactive support is also a part of customer expectations.
So we have mentioned knowledge bases and FAQs as your first supporters in the field of providing self-service and proactive support. Their goal is to help customers get all the information they require to start using products and services and avoid facing problems. But there is another great challenge - the actuality of knowledge bases because proactive support has to meet customer needs.
Many companies don’t put the changes in their support databases, so after several product or service changes or updates, the base becomes outdated. Another trouble is poorly designed proactive support materials, which are unavailable to surf through or cut one topic on numerous articles and make the client come for an agent’s support.
Tips for designing an easy-in-use, intuitive, complicated, and adored proactive support knowledge base:
- Segment it to the groups which have topics related to the client journey, such as “Pricing Policies”, “Being started”, or “Setuping”
- Make all materials structured in the same way. If there is one issue, make one article for it. Use relinking to orientate between thematically related writings.
- Use videos and infographics, but the videos should be short and easy to understand.
- If there is an update, update the database too.
AI-based chatbots and IVAs
The second part of your proactive service automation is chatbots and IVAs. AI integrations are not as old as FAQs, but their popularity has grown. The secret to success is their adaptability to customers’ needs and potential customer questions. But to go further, we should differentiate these proactive products.
Chatbot is a chat tool where the system answers customer questions. IVA is a AI-driven IVR, so it is just faster and more efficient than an IVR system. It can provide proactive service and proactive support 24/7 too.
These two tools have a strong value for self-service and proactive service - one of them helps to offer personalized solutions, while another one may plug the gaps in knowledge bases.
Intelligent routing on real-time chats
Even though IVAs and AI-powered chatbots are great instruments to furnish adorable self-service, some appeals still need to be processed by a well-trained and highly qualified agent, even though it does not look like a proactive service tool. Here the work for IVAs or chatbots isn’t over - they usually propose to switch from using an AI-provided interface to a living operator, and after that, a client is linked to a worker who is the most relevant to the client’s question. Isn’t that an example of real proactive service?
How does it work in the context of proactive service? Even here we can’t go away from AI. The system analyzes where the customer is (we mean the exact website page), where he was, what keywords he was using during his visit to the website, and connects an agent who is the most related to the topic of the customer’s issue.
This proactive service method ensures that the client will achieve the best possible service because he is assisted by the appropriate operator. On the other hand, this proactive service trick is well integrated with self-service as when the opportunities of AI-based tools are over, there is one click to switch from them to professional and personalized and proactive service.
IVR system with live updates
IVR solutions are well-known, extremely popular, and maybe a bit annoying for every contact center customer. It is another must-have self-serving and proactive service option that has an irreplaceable influence on customer satisfaction and experience. But classic IVR software can be determined as banal and uninteresting solutions, although it is impossible to set up a contact center without using an IVR system. There is a solution?
You can pleasantly surprise your customers and upgrade your IVR software by using up-to-minute notifications as an example of proactive service. When a client is going through an IVR system to be linked with a relevant operator, he may hear an announcement that his issue is already detected and processed to be resolved. What would be the reaction? Probably, the client will be pleased by such fulminant proactive service.
Such a proactive approach option is as easy to implement as great in the case of improving client satisfaction and experience. We suggest you do not avoid using IVR solutions.
CRM assistance
Most of the clients desire you to know their name, last interactions with a company, and products that they’ve bought. If the agent isn’t equipped with such data, a client can take it as bad service, and at least try one more time to ask for assistance or, what’s much worse, just choose another company.
It is enough to think about having all info related to an exact customer near at hand. Such an option can be provided by CRM assistance - by its integration with a call center software, all required data from the CRM system can be transferred to an agent’s screen before he answers a call. This data can be customized, but mostly it includes info about the last interaction, satisfaction level, survey responses, and total cost of the client’s account.
By receiving this information from the customer base, an agent can construct a strategy for a further call in a few seconds before he’ll take the phone. Just imagine, how better he would perform with this data, and how poorly would his service look if he knows nothing about the exact customer. That is more than enough to think about integrating such CRM support.
Ask the clients about how you’re doing
Real-time feedback and automated surveys are great features to know where you can put more effort and do better, or where are you already at the top. Such surveys should follow clients at every stage of their journey, from entering the main page of the website to buying a product and achieving post-purchase support.
Such surveys are interactive, easy to fill and take a little time for customers, while you get tons of essential information. Customer needs, expectations, displeasure, issues, pieces of advice - all these data can be collected through such surveys.
In addition, automated surveys can be followed by automated messages which relate to the topic of the survey or to things that were evaluated as “bad”. In this way, clients’ answers can lead you to detect customers who need assistance but somehow don’t ask for it.
Use client journey to automate the service
The process of cooperation between the business and a client, as well as the clients' evaluation of this process, is called the client’s journey. The absolute goal is to make it keep a 5-star rating during the whole journey, but there is nothing ideal in the world. Another ideal and theoretical goal is to assist just before it becomes necessary, but it can’t be done manually. But what about automation?
Data about every exact client is obtained from surveys, conversions, interactions, etc. This data constructs the client's journey.
Great samples of service automation:
- Welcoming messages (that’s a part of proactive marketing too)
- Personal offers or discounts for loyal customers
- Reminders for clients who left important processes unfinished
- Sending related articles about the features mostly used by a client
- Sending educational or advertising materials about features that have not been used by a client
This list isn’t exhaustive - you can customize automated messages or other types of contact on your own.
Play ahead with updates
Every product or service changes after some time. The main question is not to update or not to update the product - we hope it is clear enough, but how the changes can affect the community, existing customers, or potential ones who have been already looking for your company to make a purchase.
Especially harmful some updates can be in specific industries, such as highly regulated niches - insurance, health care, real estate, or high-tech industries, which design software or applications, or other complicated and highly technological products.
The community can be satisfied by an update, but sometimes the reaction can be diametrically opposite - and this is the worst possible case for you. So instead of sitting and crossing your fingers while waiting for feedback, play ahead and provide happy customers with all data about updates before you release it.
Listen to the social platforms
Social networks are the places where people are more willing to criticize or in some more hardcore ways destroy a company’s reputation. So, as you could guess, these platforms should be monitored permanently to avoid such things or to solve the existing cases of client dissatisfaction.
Of course, it is impossible to do manually, you better don’t even try it. You can’t control every lead or client just because it will cost you all working time to scroll through their accounts.
What if buyers are not prepared for the results of proactive approach?
Proactive customer service is all about the personalized approach. It starts from unobtrusive suggestions like FAQs or related articles, but some people think there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed.
The proactive customer service works and exists only because of the collection of data regarding customers. Even though this data is provided by the customer by his willingness to do so, sometimes it is better to avoid using all opportunities opened by it - at least, it is one of the popular thoughts.
Personalization means that the interface where the client is doing his interactions will be customized using his preferences of wishes collected by analyzing his previous actions. As research says, it is approved by the bigger part of clients, so there is nothing illegal or immoral in it.
Proactive customer service and proactive customer care have to provide the client with the information he requires for further interactions with a product or service, even if a customer doesn’t know that this data is essential for him.
On the other hand, is it a good idea to use the data to advertise products that are needed by a customer, but he still doesn’t know it? For Nicola Millard, one of the top managers in GlobalServices BT, it is not. For other managers it is, and Amazon, Facebook, and other giants have been doing so for years. It should be your own choice to do or not do it in this way, so we will avoid any recommendations.
Perhaps, the key question is answered - yes, customers are ready for more proactive customer service and proactive response to their issues. The goal is to provide proactive customer service wisely to avoid misunderstandings and negative emotions caused by too obsessive proactive service.
Finally, here’s the conclusion
To save the time that you could spend in difficult thoughts concerning building a proactive customer service strategy, we offer you our proactive product - professionally designed, intuitive, and easy to use. Based on the VoIP technology, it offers you advantages which were mentioned in this writing - third-party software integration, proactive planning, monitoring options, omnichannel approach, and much more. Are you ready to try it?
