This is the second post in our series on proactive customer service. For the first post, Proactive Customer Service for the Contact Center, click here [LINK].
Customer service has undergone a great many changes in the past decade. For one thing, customers are demanding a seamless, omnichannel experience - one that lets them contact you via phone, text, live chat, social media, and email.
They’re also more and more interested in solving problems on their own, forcing companies to make self-service portals an important part of their customer service strategy.
It’s all part of the general movement that forward-thinking companies are making toward proactive customer service, and away from the reactive mode.
Proactive customer service can help you head off customers’ potential problems by taking the initiative to address them before your customer contacts you.
In this model, you’re the one getting in touch first, whether by a personalized email or by offering a comprehensive knowledge base for customers to peruse on your website. The idea behind proactive customer service is that you want to reach customers before their issues become full-blown problems.
This has benefits for you and your employees - fewer support tickets and more loyal customers - as well as for the people who purchase your product or service.
For example, let’s say you sell blenders. Do you get a lot of questions about product longevity from customers in the pre-purchase stage? Do you see your post-purchase customers asking each other for blender recipe tips on your social media profiles?
These are just two examples of questions you could address via your proactive customer service efforts. An answer to the product longevity question could go into your online, customer-accessible knowledge base or FAQ, and you could tweet the information as a “Did You Know?” tidbit for your followers.
If customers are offering each other recipes and cooking tips, maybe you want to consider compiling a recipe book to have available as a free download.
Paying attention to what your customers are asking both you and each other will give you a good place to start.
It makes sense to start your new strategies with one or two pilot projects, so you can gauge interest and pivot quickly if needed.
To use the recipe book example, perhaps you would email 100 of your most recent customers with a link to a simple set of recipes that can be made using your blender. If you got decent click-through and download rates, you could invest more resources and put together a full e-book.
Or maybe you have a notification service you want to start using, so you can notify customers of service appointments the day before they’re scheduled.
You could put together a short survey asking how people feel about the notification service using a system like Enterprise Feedback Management and send it to a random group of customers. Using that feedback, you could decide whether to roll out the notification system, how often notifications should go out, etc.
These opportunities can be both large and small - anything from building an app that lets customers submit and access their service tickets, to giving shout-outs to your customers and followers on your social media channels. As you continue to focus more and more on these customer service methods, your organizational culture will shift more toward proactive service.
Want to read more about implementing 21st century customer service in your contact center? Read our post “3 Companies Offering Amazing Customer Service - and What You Can Learn From Them.”
