Customers want to know that enterprises care about their experience too, and this is something that proactive support helps establish. Proactive support helps to build this and increase both customer satisfaction and loyalty.
A good form of pre-emptive support is creating a knowledge base where visitors can find FAQs and tutorials for a more pleasant experience without having to contact your staff.
Identifying Problems Before They Occur
Engaged before it become a problem, proactive support helps your brand stay out of hot water that could degrade your reputation. For example, if a customer had an issue with a product or service, they could post a negative comment about you on Twitter or write a negative review on their personal blog. This type of incident could actually negatively impact your company’s bottom line in the long term. A tool like a customer satisfaction survey could be a good conduit for detecting an issue or pain point ahead of time.
The second kind of proactive support is education regarding your product or service – it’s created in advance, and it helps customers prevent issues through knowledge bases with articles and FAQs, along with video tutorials.
One of the most classic of the proactive support methods that they use is sending a regular newsletter to your customers by email telling them about the latest features and discounts – which will both decrease their irritation and improve the user experience, which in turn will create you a solid base of loyal clients, and ultimately improve the journey of becoming your customer. Likewise, it will make sure that you stay on top of the commonest problems and tackle them before they can develop into a real problem.
Letting Customers Know About New Features
Proactive support can help create customers that will act as promoters, keep existing customers and win over new ones. Furthermore, proactive customer service can aid in reducing the chance of minor customer problems growing into serious customer problems that are going to cost your company time and money.
So, by reaching out and looking for any opportunity to be helpful before customers choose to get in touch about anything, you show them that you care, and are not going to wait until something goes wrong before deciding to fix it. This can improve your customer satisfaction levels, rates of first contact resolution, even rates of churn.
A good tactic when being proactive in the area of customer service is to provide your customers with the tools they can use themselves to help resolve their problems, without them having to call your support team. This could be in the form of video tutorials, or articles and knowledge bases, which GetFit have created a resource centre for on their website, helping their customer to troubleshoot before the need arises for them to send tickets or wait for responses; this in turn decreases the phone calls to your support team by your customers, helping to cut down costs involved in this aspect of the customer care service.
Admitting Mistakes
Errors and bugs that derive from a poor user experience potentially save companies millions in employee time costs. In proactive customer service, support agents don’t have to waste time and energy on trivial inquiries.
Give in-app guidance to help them understand new features, and you’ll spare them from reaching out to your company for extra help – a move that will help to reduce churn, and keep your product sticky.
You could be open about mistakes that have been made, and let customers know when they have reached your team and that they are working hard to identify solutions. Your customers will trust you more to deliver quality experiences and resolve any problems they experience if you make them feel that you care and that you are invested in fixing things. This will probably make the customer feel appreciated, and you will probably end up with a stronger relationship with your customers: advocates for your brand. Preventing negative word of mouth will also increase your sales – this is important because a negative experience is more likely to be shared than just a regular experience. Your customers will trust you more to deliver quality experiences and fix anything that goes wrong. They will feel that you care and are making a diligent effort to learn from mistakes to provide the best possible experiences in the future, and they will tell others.
Providing Solutions
Often customers reach out to your knowledge base or support team to get answers, so if you map out their customer journey, you will know which information they need at what stage so you can prepare resources to meet those needs.
For example, if a help request comes in for a particular application, put in-app tips or walkthroughs to explain the feature so that customers don’t need to contact you later, and so that the average response time gets lowered.
Fess up. If there’s a customer complaint, explain it then, listen to the customer, and express genuine concern, as it’s the fastest way to let them know you value their feedback and care about the customer experience when something goes awry – as it inevitably does. Make it a practice of letting customers know promptly they’ve been heard, that you sincerely apologise for the mistake, and if there’s any compensation to be made, that compensation is on the table. More likely than not, it’ll foster brand affinity, as in Brooks Brothers polling patrons about their in-store experience.
