HomeImprove the CXWhat is Proactive customer support?
It’s easy to get swamped with a lot of buzzwords, phrases and terminology in the call centre environment (although we do have a great glossary that will help you!).
Proactive Customer Support is one that is gaining momentum as a ‘must-do’ for a great customer experience.
The article below provides some great insight into what Proactive Customer Support is, as well as providing you with some great tips on how you could implement it into your contact centre environment.
Youve heard of people with the patience of a saint, but have you ever heard of someone with the impatience of a customer?
Maybe not, but if youre in the business of providing customer service, then you probably won’t object to that description.
Customers, especially in the context of customer service, value their time to a supernatural degree.
They may be patient as individuals, but on the whole, customers become frustrated and impatient in seconds, not minutes.
In the world of customer service, time is always of the essence.
Enter proactive support, the only time-travelling form of customer support.
before their customers even knew they had them!
We’ll have you back on your way in no time.
In competitive industries which now includes any industry that competes for customers onlinecustomer service is never good enough. Customers want their support questions answered as quickly as possible.
The challenge is that communications technologies and new service strategies are constantly adding to the scope of whats possible. These approaches continuously raise the bar for what passes as great service.
Businesses have aimed to improve customer service by doing things such as shortening phone queues, offering Automatic Callback options and increasing self-service resources.
Indeed, all of these measures help.
They can ensure that a customer with a question doesnt wait too long and provide a competitive advantage.
But these and most other traditional service methods can only do so much.
The ideal scenario is to prevent that customer from even needing to ask the question in the first place. And thats exactly what companies do when they implement proactive customer support.
Proactive customer support is a support strategy in which a company anticipates customer issues.
It can either remedy them in advance or design service resources such that, when the question does arise, the customer is presented with the answer without needing to contact the company.
Proactive customer support is an approach to providing customer support.
It’s not a specific support channel and can take many different forms.
So what is Proactive Customer Support?
Even if the concept of proactive support is new to you, theres a good chance you have some experience with it. In fact, many customer support resources which are now considered standard would have seemed proactive in years past.
Since proactive support is defined in relation to customers ever-increasing expectations, whats proactive today may be standard tomorrow.
Call up a local store and theres a good chance your call will be answered first by a recording.
If you called to ask about store hours, then youre in luck, because the recording just told you what they are.
Maybe you had a question about the store location? The recording covers that as well.
The questions you intended to ask a store employee were answered before the employee even knew you called.
2. Tooltips to explain technical vocabulary are a great way to add basic proactive support to online resources.
Lets say, for example, youre reading the online instructions for setting up your new router, but you keep running into technical vocabulary such as Subnet Mask.
Adding tooltips to difficult terms helps readers better understand what theyre doing, without expecting them to look up every term.
Their questions are directly answered, without the customer needing to pick up the phone or write an email.
Lets say youre shopping online and find a shirt you really love.
You select the right colour and the right size, go to checkout and the size you selected has changed!
You go back one page and select the correct size once more.
Once again, as you try to checkout, you see the shirts size has changed.
This time, when you return to the page with the shirt, a live chat window pops up.
An agent asks if you need assistance, before you need to contact the company for support.
While many proactive support opportunities are available online, theyre found elsewhere, too.
Returning to the three examples above, lets try to imagine the chain of events that lead the business to implement proactive support.
Before adding their hours and location to their phone greeting, what types of questions do you think employees answered most often?
Thats right, questions about their hours and location!
Putting that information in the phone greeting is a simple and obvious way of saving time, for both customers and staff.
Customers love online self-service resources, such as frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages.
Lets say the company that makes your new router knows that customers often have trouble setting them up.
They create the online instruction page, and the number of questions from new customers drops a bit.
But it’s still too high; many customers are still confused by the terminology.
Adding tooltips lets customers see the meaning of challenging terms in-line and without clicking away, and improves their success rate.
How did the online store know you were having trouble selecting the right size shirt?
It probably didnt know you were having that specific problem.
the companys chat software recognised this as the browsing pattern of a confused customer.
Since it recognised a confused buyer who was trying to checkout, it created a high-priority chat request and assigned it to the first available chat agent.
Companies can find opportunities to implement proactive support when they examine the types of questions the service department answers most frequently.
Adding clarity to online resources can improve the overall success rate of self-servicing customers.
Online behaviour and browsing patterns are also telling.
They can serve as indications that particular customers are in need of immediate assistance.
Ultimately, all proactive support initiatives should be designed to save customers time or reduce the friction at a specific point on their customer journey.
By saving their time, your company appears a bit more saintly in the customers eyes.
As a result, their loyalty increases while lowering demand on your other, more costly, customer service department resources.
Search for suppliers of Proactive Customer Support solutions in our Business Directory.