As the name suggests, proactive customer service is about proactively anticipating customer needs before they arise. This involves taking a more proactive approach to customer service rather than waiting for customers to reach out to you with their problems.
There are many benefits of offering proactive customer service, including increased customer satisfaction and retention rates. But how can businesses take a more proactive approach?
Here are four tips businesses should consider for delivering a proactive customer service:
1. Know Your Customers
Before implementing proactive customer service, it’s essential to understand your customers and their pain points. While this may sound like a basic tip, it’s the most important one. Any brand that wants to be successful needs to know its target audience on a personal level. And this goes deeper than looking at factors like age, income, and education level.
You also need to understand your customers’ problems in the past—what made them come to you? What pain points are they still trying to solve?
For example, let’s say you sell office chairs that need to be assembled by customers upon delivery. While you can always send a dedicated instruction manual along with the product, sometimes it’s not enough for customers; assembling the chairs will still be a hassle.
Having a dedicated knowledge base on your website with assembly videos for all the products will make the assembling a whole lot simpler. But let’s take it a step further; you wouldn’t want your customers to hop onto your website, head to the instructional videos section, and scroll through dozens of pages before they find the right video.
You want the process to be as convenient as possible. This is where software solutions can come in handy. You can implement a chat feature on your website so that it’s quick and easy to contact your team when your customers struggle to find the information they need. The above is just one scenario that shows the importance of knowing your customers and understanding what problems they face. If you want to understand your customers better, we recommend:
- Interviewing already-existing customers.
- Identify the most common issues your customers face by connecting with your customer service executives.
- Identify if your customers report any issues related to your brand on review sites or social media.
- Identify where your customers are currently reaching out to you when they need help.
2. Meet Them at Every Point of Their Customer Journey
Your customers will face different problems at different stages of their journey. Whether they’re trying to purchase a product or facing an issue with an existing purchase, you need to be prepared to meet them where they are. To do that, you need to understand precisely what your customer journey looks like. To get started, try mapping out your customer journey on a piece of paper.
Different customers might follow slightly different paths, but there will likely be a general set of steps that most customers follow. As you list the stages of the customer journey, include potential issues that may arise at each step. Once you’ve mapped out the customer journey and potential problems that could occur at each stage, you can start thinking of and implementing proactive solutions.
3. Gather & Implement Customer Feedback
Unfortunately, your customers might not always reach out to your support team when a problem arises. This is why gathering feedback is so important. Knowledge is power. You can gather customer feedback by: ·
- Reach out to your customers via text message and ask them to share their feedback.
- Create a survey that encourages your customers to address what they love about your business and what they wish would change.
- Identify the most common issues your customers report to your customer service team.
- Read through your online reviews regularly.
And remember—gathering feedback should be an ongoing process. Taking a proactive approach to asking for feedback can help you uncover areas for improvement that you may otherwise never have encountered. Once you’ve identified these problems, it’s important to make sure that you act on them and find ways to prevent them from moving forward.
4. Focus on Education Rather Than Being Sales-y
Your prospects and customers are bombarded by hundreds of “Why You Should Use Our Product or Service” text messages and emails every day. Amidst all this clutter, they don’t want another brand slipping into their inbox. So even after a customer purchases a product, it’s essential to provide education about your products and services.
This will help your customers and save your support team time because your customers will have the resources they need to make the most out of your products and services. Having a knowledge base is critical. Your customers should not have difficulty reaching out to your customer support team or looking up how to use your product on Google or YouTube.
70% of consumers have reported that they prefer using a company’s website to understand how to use a product rather than email or phone. As you build a knowledge base, remember that it’s important to make sure it’s not too complicated—make it easy for customers to find the information they need.
One way to do this is to implement a Chat feature on your knowledge base that’ll guide your customers in the right direction. About 55% of customers have reported that easy access to information can make them fall in love with a brand.
5. Make it Easy to Contact You
No matter how proactive you are in your approach to customer service, you won’t be able to be the one to initiate every conversation. However, even if you have an excellent knowledge base and self–explanatory products or services, your customers will eventually need to contact you. So you want to make it as easy as possible for them to do that.
To do this, we recommend using the channel the modern customer prefers texts. Dealer Traffic allows you to text your customers, which provides for ongoing conversations, strengthens relationships, and keeps your customers returning.
Proactive Customer Service will help you win over the modern customer in today’s ever-competitive world, and the competition is fierce.
Offering exceptional customer service is the bare minimum to win over your customers. Being proactive in terms of your approach is a must. Not only can businesses increase customer satisfaction and retention rates by delivering proactive customer service, but it can also help unburden their customer success teams.
It’s the key to winning over modern customers.
