Proactive customer service is a term that often used in customer service departments around the world. Businesses that take time to understand the needs and preferences of customers always have a special place in the hearts of their clients. The basic meaning of proactive customer care is where an organisation approaches or helps a client before the issue even arises, thereby keeping them from contacting the service centre.
By anticipating the customer’s needs in advance and extending customer support to resolve their issues, businesses can increase retention rates and consequently, customer loyalty. Proactive customer service is an efficient method for businesses to establish a factor of trust and intent that your company will go above and beyond to fulfil the expectations of their customers at any given point in their journey.
Proactive or Reactive Service
Consider proactive client support similar to getting vaccinated. It’s proactive assurance of your body against an infection that may affect you in a much later stage. Proactive client support offers answers for issues that haven’t occurred at this point in time.
Whereas, Reactive client service is similar to over-the-counter medicine. It’s a responsive treatment of your body against a sickness that has affected you already. In receptive client support, a representative steps in once an issue has effectively taken place.
It is important to understand that what matters most is realising who takes the principal action. Proactive service implies the business initiates contact with the customers, and reactive assistance implies the client is the first one to connect.
The most ideal situation is to use both systems of customer support for effective results. The point where you notice patterns in a client’s buying behaviour, proactively suggest services that would enhance or support their cycles. At the point when a client has inquiries concerning their product, responsively answer those inquiries and guide them to proceed further.
Why Do Businesses Need To Implement It?
Even a single negative client experience can hurt a brand’s market reputation. Addressing customer problems even before they run into one can provide businesses with a considerable amount of competitive edge and boost brand reputation at the same time. Some benefits of proactive customer service are:
Improved Productivity
In the event that your business isn’t aware of your customer’s needs as opposed to being ready to resolve grievances and queries, you’re passing up a vital opportunity to expand proficiency and profitability. A study by Altimeter tracked down the main source for grievances online as helpless encounters. So, recognising negative emotions encompassing your image at the right time is simply the most ideal approach to ensure the presence of a backup plan during an emergency. Investing lesser time in harm control implies additional time and assets contributed in a function that really needs it.
Moreover, by addressing inquiries before your clients raise them, you can fundamentally decrease the quantity of customer service assistance calls. This will enable specialists to direct their attention on more significant issues that require extra time and effort.
At long last, by investing more energy in speaking with your clients, you can efficiently collect more information about customer requirements, goals and potential new territories where you can grow your operations to fulfil their needs. At the end of the day, with proactive client assistance, your clients can help you plan and refine your business processes to serve them better.
Improved Customer Loyalty
Today, over 37% of all messages in the form of tweets are client assistance related (out of 500 million tweets each day)! While it might sound rather overwhelming, in practicality, it’s a great chance for businesses to transform distressed clients into happy ones. The best way to do that is by adopting a proactive customer support strategy.
When customers realise the amount of time, effort and assistance businesses invest in understanding and analysing their needs well in advance, they will feel heard and understood. Moreover, by offering an early help framework for client trouble spots, it can go a long way in building long term brand devotion and promotion. Likewise, proactively speaking with clients concerning potential issues can help businesses to set up a factor of trust and recognition, which turns into customer loyalty. When your customers trust you, they will ceaselessly compensate you by bringing more business. Through a proactive service technique, you can guarantee that your clients stay yours.
CUSTOMER Empowerment
With a dynamic shift towards advanced omni channel customer experience, a definitive type of proactive client assistance is required for customers to navigate applications across all channels on their own. Many clients like to discover answers to their questions themselves as opposed to calling or sending emails to an organisation. Thus, assigning a place on business websites where clients can educate themselves about issues that they experience or have faced before can significantly help them to become independent. Proactively empowering your clients to help themselves engages the customer and improves the general customer experience.
Proactive customer care essentially deals with tackling issues before your clients even realise they have them, and the improved client experience powers brand achievement. It may require some additional ideation and strategy to develop such a framework, yet the advantages are certainly worth the effort.