7 Important Ingredients to Achieve Proactive Customer Service

What is proactive customer service and how can it boost your business?

16:14 14 January 2022

Let’s say you’re a company, and you need to take care of a lot of bureaucracy. So you download a mobile app for business: You sign up, pay for the annual plan, and dive right into it. You log in, but there’s a problem: You don’t understand anything. You look around trying to find your way to use the app but nothing. So, what do you do?

 

You could hit up customer support and ask them to help you, or you could just give up, ask for a refund, and try another app.

 

And people usually give up.

 

That’s bad news for everyone. The creator of the app lost a client, the client lost a powerful tool, and both wasted some time. So, how would you fix this?

 

It’s quite simple, actually. You use proactive customer service.

 

What is Proactive Customer Service?

Prevention is always better than cure. That's why we have things like allergy medicines and sun cream. Proactive customer service is exactly like that, minus the medicine.

 

In the last example, the developer could have put a tutorial in the app. That way, the client wouldn't have to go the extra mile and email customer service asking how the app works.

 

Do you accept Bitcoin as a payment method? No? Well, maybe you should. But if your business gets asked that question often, you should consider taking action with proactive customer service and stating that you don’t accept it. 

 

Yes, proactive customer service is that easy.

 

Is Proactive Customer Service Worth it?

Short answer: Yes.

 

Long answer: Yes, and here’s why.

 

If you were the developer in the example we made, you could either implement the tutorial or not. And if you don’t, you are more likely to lose clients. You’ll waste time by replying to the same emails over and over again, too. And time is money.

 

So if you implement a tutorial in the app, customers won’t have doubts, they won’t email you, and you won’t lose them.

 

Now, the “tutorial inside the app” example is just a scenario. The best way to achieve proactive customer service is by knowing your customer.

 

7 Important Ingredients to Achieve Proactive Customer Service

 

We have introduced you to what proactive customer service is. Now it’s time to learn how to properly use it and implement it in your business.

 

1. Anonymous surveys

 

You most likely don’t know precisely what all your customers want and need.

 

However, you could let them tell you what they want and need with online surveys.

 

You could create different surveys for different parts of your business. One could be about customer service (“What was your customer experience like? What was lacking from it? What was our biggest strength? How can we improve?”) and another one about the products you offer on your website.

 

“Anonymous” is an important part of the survey. People tend to be more honest when there is no way to recognize them. 

 

2. Create a knowledge base

A knowledge base is a rich source of information: Information about the company, FAQs, and blog articles, for instance.

 

It makes sense to write an answer to a question your business gets frequently, but why not go further?

 

About us

Let’s take the “About us” page. Sometimes a forgotten page of your website. Why would you need one?

 

You need it to show who you are, who the faces of the brand are, and how you started. Your core values, your core beliefs. And most importantly, why customers should choose you.

 

Reading about your company's values, hardships, or victories helps business customers to identify with you. This creates a stronger emotional connection with your brand and can lead to more loyalty among customers.

 

Blog articles

Let’s say you have never used Updraft, “the world’s most trusted WordPress backup, restore and clone plugin”. 

 

One day, something bad happens; you‘re locked out of your WordPress panel, and you cannot access your website. Obviously, you run to Google and search how to fix it. In a matter of milliseconds, a blog post explaining how to fix the WordPress issue appears. Not only have you found a solution, but you have found a potentially very good plugin you can implement in your website. 

 

Or instead, let’s say you were a teacher at the beginning of the pandemic, and you need to start streaming to your class. You are not very young, not very old. Still, you are not THAT good when it comes to computers. 

 

So, you search on Google for a solution. Just in a click, “An educator's guide to live streams in virtual classrooms” appears, and now you know what you have to do. You have more knowledge than before clicking the link and guess what? You were also looking for a quick and simple video editor for yourself to do some montages in your free time.

 

It doesn’t matter how you put it. Information is information. And if the information you have is useful, people will be interested in it.

 

3. Start using a “products you may like” feature

 

If you have an online business, it only makes sense for you to implement a “products you may like” feature.

 

It could be based on each individual customer or on the product itself.More “raw” ecommerce websites might use the “product algorithm” one, since it’s easier than the other (every product shown in the “products you may like” section will be correlated to the products you are watching, like toothpaste is related to toothbrushes, etc.).

 

Either way, both types of algorithms make sure the customer doesn’t spend any time looking for other products, since the products are already there for them to see.

 

4. Track your social media

Social media is incredibly popular these days, as everybody knows. If your business is popular on social media, you can use it to your advantage as a powerful tool to see what’s going on with your customers.

 

You should always be listening to what your customers say about you on social media. You should also take a look at the hashtags and keywords associated with your business.

 

If the word spread on social media about your services is good, it will lead to more clients and eventually more sales.

 

5. Be honest about mistakes

This may sound obvious, but it’s really not. Your business should keep in mind that every mistake made, if it’s your company’s fault, should be noted.

 

In every case, honesty is paid well. If there is something wrong with some of your products or services, tell your customers. It’s better for them to hear it from you than from other customers.

 

For example, if the service you offer is great at doing X but isn’t good at doing Y, say it. If there’s a problem with some of your products, acknowledge it. A lot of people tend to not buy items that sound too good to be true. Listing one negative can help increase sales (and notifies the client, too).

 

Make sure your clients aren’t the first ones to tell you that there’s something wrong with what you have to offer.

 

Honesty is clearly a value that people love. Take advantage of it and be honest with your services.

 

6. Start a newsletter

 

 

This is closely connected to the knowledge base idea. When you publish a new blog article or release a new product, you want your prospects to know about it. And if someone has already bought something from you, they are more likely to do it again.

 

To start a solid newsletter list, you can start by automatically adding every email of every client that has previously purchased from you. That way, you are 100% sure those emails are from clients that already know you and are therefore more likely to buy again.

 

Creating a lead magnet is also a good choice when it comes to newsletters. It works like this: You give your client a “freebie”, and they give you their email. 

 

Let’s not forget that newsletters can also be used to tell your clients about news, errors, and fixes. Try this when a problem comes up. Tell your customers.

 

7. Have a team ready to connect with your customers

Having a team of people ready to interact proactively with your customers is the best way to achieve all the previous suggestions.

 

A team of professionals can write stunning blog articles, beautifully written FAQs, and gather some very insightful data about your customers. 

 

Managing a team of professionals might be tricky. Luckily for us, there are different types of software you can use to help, like call center workforce management software, for example.

 

Time is money

If you have a team ready to work for you, you want them to be as productive as possible. It just makes sense.

 

To make your team more productive, you can let AI and technology take care of the boring and repetitive tasks, meanwhile your team works “on the serious parts”.

 

This is just one of the strategies used in the industry of high velocity sales. And if you’re wondering “what is high velocity sales?”, it’s a technique that integrates B2C selling techniques to the B2B sales process. And as the name suggests, its sole purpose is to sell, fast.

 

Another key component we haven’t talked about is how powerful emails can be. With all the data you can gather through your website, you can make sure the emails sent to your customers are targeted, and your customers will read them. Targeting emails isn’t always easy, but to get you started, here are some remarketing email examples.

 

Two more steps you can take

We talked about ways to increase proactive customer support such as surveys, social media monitoring, and newsletters. Most of the steps recommended here have one key component in common: Customers. 

 

If you don’t have a lot of customers, surveys might not be that useful. So, for the most successful proactive customer service, you need effective marketing to earn customers to take care of. This is where advanced marketing tools come in.

 

The other important step you need to take into consideration is innovation. Meta (formerly Facebook) has recently announced the Metaverse. Of course, that attracted a lot of attention, since the concept of Metaverse has a lot of potential. So, something you could do is start to adapt to the Metaverse and make sure your business will be accessible in this new reality.

 

Conclusion

We’ve covered everything you need to know to get started with offering proactive customer service. Now it’s your turn. Put this advice into practice and grow your business.

 

Remember this one thing, though. It's better if you have both proactive and reactive customer service. If a customer has a problem that cannot be found in the FAQs, make sure there's someone to assist them. And make sure your customer care is great, and the customer feels cared for.

Bio:

Grace Lau - Director of Growth Content, Dialpad

Grace Lau is the Director of Growth Content at Dialpad, an AI-powered cloud communication platform for better and easier team collaboration. She has over 10 years of experience in content writing and strategy. Currently, she is responsible for leading branded and editorial content strategies, partnering with SEO and Ops teams to build and nurture content. Here is her LinkedIn.