Nowadays, proactive customer service is the norm in the ‘24/7’ customer support environment, allowing the company to respond rapidly to the customer’s needs, while making each customer interaction a pleasant one.
Spotting and responding to common questions reduces call volume, allows agents to focus on more urgent issues, and saves money on customer care while simultaneously improving satisfaction.
Self-service
As its name clearly suggests, the self-service strategy is a proactive customer care approach, where the customers must help themselves. This often consists of granting the customers knowledge bases or FAQs access, live chat or simple automated messages (SMS or email) that automatically answer to basic customer requests as well as provide instructions on how to proceed and connect with an agent if the problem is more complex.
Self-service is one of the main proactive support trends for this very reason: it saves your team (and customers) time. By significantly reducing the amount of calls agents have to worry about each day, and helping those customers who have no issues with your product or service reach their questions at any given moment, self-service heavily improves the general customer satisfaction and makes the problem-solving process for your team more time- and cost-efficient.
By taking advantage of data that tells you things about your audience, like previous interactions with your brand or details about products they currently use, you can customise communications in ways that make customers feel like you care about their experience with your products and services – as well as liberate your team to work on pivotal issues rather than obligatory ones, thereby having the byproduct of your teams being happier (proud of themselves) and more productive.
Social media
Forward-thinking customer support strategies should emphasise helping customers experience better service before they ever complain directly to the company. By reaching back to customers sooner to offer them a resolution before their situation deteriorates further, companies can save money, increase satisfaction and ensure all of their customers have the best possible experience.
In addition, with social media, companies are given a great possibility to pre-emptively connect with their customer base to better satisfy their requirements. Furthermore, social media can result in a company promptly acknowledging an error by delivering a rapid response and assisting customers with their concerns in a speedy manner. Moreover, social media gives the company the ability to identify any issues with the product that customers might be facing ahead of time.
Twitter allows Brooks Brothers to interact daily with their customers regarding what they’re experiencing, both in-store and online – giving the company feedback on the pieces of their business that can frustrate and impede when it matters most, so Brooks Brothers can focus on fixing it. The company’s use of Twitter makes a statement to its customers that they care about them and their experience – and, as a side benefit, might also save time dealing with minor but common customer service requests.
Knowledge base
They’re often referred to as ‘knowledge bases’ and are central collections of information pertaining to any given domain, such as FAQs for a specific product, how-tos on troubleshooting offline behaviours, or an organisation’s handbook. Knowledge bases will also often house training materials, standard operating procedures (SOPs), proprietary software documentation, and anything else that an employee needs to do their job better.
Customers save time, clerical resources are freed up – or redirected to deal with more challenging issues where, ideally, smart people with training can really apply their talents – and your customers get the answers they need. Top-class knowledge bases have both high recall (ie, they’re easy and fast to search) and high precision (ie, the labels make sense and the right stuff gets highlighted). A link to reflect that knowledge base – via email, Facebook or your website – keeps it fresh, gets it out there, and lets more agents be available to address those knowledge-called-for issues that really do need real human hands-on attention.
With proactive support, businesses can predict the buyers’ need in advance, whether it is refilling a drink before it runs out or notifying the client about a delay in delivery – businesses that regularly utilise proactive support create a great and trouble-free experience for the buyers.
Proactive support also reduces churn: addressing customers before they have a problem means they won’t churn due to frustration, and companies will be less inclined to invest in the ‘firefighting’ that otherwise could cause loss of future business.
Businesses can use the same knowledge base to pre-emptively reach out to their customers with answers to the most common questions and issues they face, and with information on new products and services that might best cater to their needs – essentially letting consumers know that you care about enhancing their experience, while simultaneously avoiding inbound support enquiries and freeing your teams up for more urgent queries.
