Why proactive customer service is good for your business.
Proactive customer support was identified by Forrester Research as a top customer service trend. But what is proactive customer service? And how can providing proactive customer service benefit your business?
What is proactive customer service?
As opposed to reactive customer service -- when customers with questions or concerns contact your company -- proactive customer service is focused on identifying and resolving issues before the customer has to reach out. Studies show that “best in class” contact centers are evolving their approach to embrace proactive customer service. And they do this by anticipating the customer’s journey and potential pitfalls, especially in their post-purchase experience. By addressing potential challenges before the customer experiences them, businesses can help create happy customers, and we know that happy customers make the most loyal customers.
What is an example of proactive customer service?
Imagine one of the following situations happened to you:
You sent flowers to your mother for her birthday.
Your credit card information was skimmed from a gas pump.
A construction project next door accidentally cut a cable to your home.
Instead of:
Wondering if the bouquet of roses had been delivered,
Unknowingly fueling the spending spree of a thief, or
Arriving home to watch the big game without cable
Proactive customer service provides you with:
Real-time SMS messages on the status of your order
A phone call from the credit card company to review potentially fraudulent charges
An email notification about the issue and when it is expected to be resolved.
How can offering proactive customer service benefit your business?
Not only does providing proactive customer support help you increase customer loyalty, decrease the number of inbound contacts you receive, and help you engage with customers in a positive way, it also benefits your business by:
1. Acquiring new customers
Proactive customer service allows you to identify strategic opportunities to engage with prospective customers and convert them to customers.
2. Retaining existing customers
In anticipation of what an existing customer might need and addressing their concerns proactively, you can strengthen your existing relationship with those customers.
3. Creating advocates
Connecting with customers in a meaningful way turns them into advocates who will proactively tell others about their positive experiences with your company.
4. Reducing contact escalations
By getting ahead of frustrating experiences, proactive customer service allows your company to reduce further contact center escalations.
How can NICE help your organization provide proactive customer service?
NICE is the leading cloud customer interaction platform—100% focused on helping contact centers achieve their customer experience goals. Our flagship contact center solution, CXone, allows contact centers to holistically execute the different elements required to successfully deliver a digital-first omnichannel customer experience, including workforce optimization, analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence.
CXone empowers agents to delight customers by providing a consolidated inbox of interactions from all digital and phone channels, meaning customers can experience seamless omnichannel service. For more information on how you can build a more proactive customer service model, check out our webinar, “Making Customer Experience a Competitive Differentiator.”
Related resources
Any digital channel
Your customers are trying to reach you for service on digital channels – even if you’re not there yet. How many SMS text messages go to your call center phone number with no response? Who’s trying to find you on Facebook, Twitter, or WhatsApp and not finding you? Now with CXone it is easy to provide digital-first omnichannel service in all the channels your customers expect.
Personalized digital interactions: deliver native experiences in each of 30+ messaging channels, such as rich media, emojis, and other collaboration tools.
Simple to Activate: pre-integrated channels make it easy to offer to customers and agents.
Easy to Say “Yes”: simple packaging removes barriers to offering all channels to customers and agents.
Empowered agents
CXone empowers all your agents to deliver a true digital-first omnichannel customer experience by simultaneously combining all customer interactions in one intelligent inbox across multiple digital channels and voice for agents to select ("pull"), while dynamically prioritizing the most time-sensitive or real-time interactions according to service levels ("push"). All delivered in a single application – complete with full customer context, journey history, and sentiment.
Single Interface: one inbox for all digital messaging and real-time (voice/chat) channels – retaining native experience of each messaging platform.
Agents in Control: ‘pulling’ work in natural flow, while dynamic prioritization maintains SLAs – and prevents ‘cherry picking’.
Customer Card: full customer context, journey and conversation history, plus sentiment.
Holistic management
With CXone, omnichannel interactions are managed holistically, from agents to supervisors and beyond. Integrated workforce optimization, analytics, automation and artificial intelligence across digital and voice interactions ensure complete management across contact center operations.
