These days, acting on an interaction after the fact—or even in the moment—isn’t enough to truly stand out among your brand’s competition. Customers increasingly expect brands to know them well, to anticipate their requirements, and to offer help even before they realize they need it. This shift in customer expectations demands a transition from a reactive to a proactive customer experience.
Proactive customer experiences require leaders to not just react to customer feedback but use customer data, analytics, and insights to predict what the customer will need next. Better still is when employees have the right information and are empowered with the right tools to meet those needs in advance. Leaders are now able to guide their teams in leveraging these insights to build proactive strategies that enhance customer engagement.
Proactive outreach: a crucial tool
Proactive outreach entails reaching out to customers before issues arise and proactively guiding them through the journey when appropriate. The ultimate goal is to anticipate customer needs to enhance the overall customer experience.
For example, home goods brands like Wayfair and Ikea offer augmented reality (AR) apps to help customers visualize furniture in the actual room. This proactive engagement can drive increases in revenue per visit and order size. Knowing your customer’s journey will help identify where proactive prompts may help them move from one step to the next.
This type of outreach takes multiple forms, such as personalized messages regarding a new service that matches their preferences, an update about an upcoming maintenance window, or a simple check in to gauge their satisfaction level. The key is personalization; reaching out must be done in a way that feels unique and tailored to each customer.
To do this well, leaders need to combine insights from data with an understanding of the customer.
Implementing proactive outreach
Ready to start an effective proactive outreach strategy? Here are three steps to take:
1. Customer insight
Use data and analytics to understand your customer’s behavior, preferences, and journey. Leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can help forecast future actions and needs.
Your business has a number of opportunities for gathering customer insight. Tools such as predictive analytics can be trained to anticipate customer behavior and preferences, which reveals the likelihood of actions such as churn risk, purchase probability, or responding to marketing campaigns. Your brand can then tailor strategies to better accommodate the customer journey.
Customers who have interacted with your business have firsthand accounts they can share of their experiences—so use them! Offer surveys or feedback forms to collect customer preferences, pain points, and any suggestions they might have. This data can be critical in improving your products, services, and overall CX.
2. Personalization
With insight comes the power to personalize. Develop your outreach so that it resonates with each customer individually. This will show your customers that you understand them and are there to support their specific needs.
Tailored journeys that span from the beginning of a web search to gathering customer feedback after an interaction create meaningful connections, which can lead to increased engagement and brand affinity.
Consider the following ways your brand can create personalized experiences:
- Gather and analyze data from customer interactions
- Collect—then act on—customer feedback
- Use tools and systems that can help generate optimized journeys
When brands implement personalization tactics within their CX strategy, it enables them to identify trends, triggers, and patterns that recognize, and therefore allow them to anticipate, particular needs. In personalizing the customer experience businesses can deliver recommendations and offers, streamline communication, and resolve issues as proactively as possible.
3. Multi-channel approach
Customers have different preferred communication channels. One customer may favor voice as their channel of choice, whereas another may balk at the prospect of speaking to a live agent and find text messaging more desirable. As technology advances, channel options are likely to keep evolving as well.
That’s why it’s important to use a multi-channel approach for your outreach, ensuring each customer receives your message on their preferred platform. The most effective way to do this is to provide omnichannel CX, which fosters a seamless, integrated experience across multiple channels and touchpoints. An omnichannel approach connects disparate channels and focuses on creating a unified and consistent journey for customers, regardless of the channels they choose to interact with your brand. They’re able to switch between channels effortlessly while maintaining continuity and personalized engagement throughout their journey.
Customer journey mapping can also help determine how customers experience your brand throughout their journey, including how the channels they use affect it:
- What is the overall goal the customer is trying to reach?
- Are there points of friction where customers are getting stuck?
- What emotions are playing a role and/or driving customer intent?
- Does the customer reach any points of genuine satisfaction or delight?
Mapping journeys can never be just an afterthought. The process helps you identify points of success or failure that could help reshape your CX strategy moving forward. The right journey map can play a significant role in proactive outreach in the future.
To learn more about effectively mapping the customer journey, read this mini guide and get the full workbook at the end.
Building customer loyalty through proactive outreach
By implementing proactive outreach, you do more than just meet customer expectations; you foster a sense of trust and loyalty. By demonstrating that you are invested in their experience and that you are taking steps to anticipate their needs, customers feel valued and appreciated. This, in turn, bolsters their loyalty to your brand.
By developing personalized, proactive outreach strategies, we can deliver exceptional experiences that drive customer loyalty. As we move forward in this exciting CX era, embrace the power of anticipation, personalization, and proactive communication. It's what our customers are asking for, and it's what we, as CX leaders, are here to deliver.