It’s always best to be two steps ahead, especially when it comes to customer service. Anticipating customer needs before issues arise helps you build customer loyalty and prevent problems that can impact your bottom line.
So, how do you adopt this type of proactive customer service model? Learn how to implement proactive customer support strategies, so you can increase customer satisfaction and retain more shoppers.
What is proactive customer service?
Proactive customer service means understanding customer behavior so well that you can anticipate a shopper’s needs before they even occur to your target audience. Proactive support involves knowing your buyers’ preferences, identifying issues before they surface, and reaching out with solutions before ever receiving a customer inquiry.
Proactive customer service is different from reactive customer service, which focuses on fixing issues after they happen. A proactive approach requires you to prevent problems from the onset and communicate with your customers early on so they feel supported at every step.
Even the most proactive service can’t anticipate everything. That’s why coupling proactive strategies with reactive service creates the best customer experience.
The benefits of proactive customer service
- Stronger customer relationships
- Increased customer loyalty
- Better organization and resource distribution
There are plenty of reasons to adopt a proactive customer service approach to meet your audience’s needs. Here are a few of the benefits:
Stronger customer relationships
By developing personalized interactions with shoppers, you make them feel heard and keep them in the loop, ultimately bolstering your relationships with them. For example, proactively alerting customers about possible shipping delays demonstrates your commitment to transparency. This builds trust and customer retention.
Increased customer loyalty
Prioritizing the customer experience builds rapport and strengthens trust. The greater a customer’s trust in your brand, the more likely they are to remain a loyal customer in the long term. In fact, 95% of customers say they’re more likely to stay loyal to brands they trust, and 90% will abandon a purchase if that trust isn’t there. Earning consumers’ trust leads to more recurrent revenue—and that boosts your bottom line.
Better organization and resource distribution
Preventing customer issues proactively means fewer support tickets and costly issues. As a result, you can dedicate your resources toward higher-priority customer service tasks like quality assurance (QA)—instead of constantly reacting to customer issues.
How to implement proactive customer service
- Communicate regularly with customers
- Implement QA processes
- Identify possible pain points and readjust
- Develop a knowledge base
- Build a capable customer service team
- Equip staff with comprehensive customer info
- Collect customer feedback
Follow these steps to launch a proactive customer service program:
Communicate regularly with customers
Transparency is key, particularly when it comes to interacting with shoppers and preventing customer service challenges. The better you communicate with your customer base throughout the process, the more involved and informed the customer will feel, ultimately strengthening brand trust. For example, you might send timely messages to alert customers about service disruptions, shipping delays, payment issues, or service outages. You can also use regular communication to provide personalized recommendations or send customer surveys to help monitor customer sentiment.
Implement QA processes
Establishing quality assurance (QA) processes helps you prevent possible issues by identifying problems with your product quality or brand experience and then adjusting them accordingly. A quality management system serves as your first line of defense against customer experience missteps, making it a vital tool in a proactive customer service strategy.
Identify possible pain points and readjust
Stay ahead of market trends to spot emerging issues and help your business foster satisfied customers.
Take locker company Mustard Made, for example. After it experienced supply chain bottlenecks and customer service headaches during the COVID-19 pandemic, customer frustration increased. In response, its founders eliminated the preorder sales format altogether. “It means that we are not making promises to our customers when we don’t actually have something, or we don’t have a firm idea of when it’s gonna arrive,” says co-founder Jess Gray on the Shopify Masters podcast.
Develop a knowledge base
One of the easiest ways to anticipate customer needs is by building a comprehensive knowledge base of information about your company. This includes an FAQ page, help center, troubleshooting guides, and explainers. When customers have access to a knowledge base, they can potentially solve their own issues without contacting your customer service team—saving time for everyone.
Build a capable customer service team
A proactive customer service strategy starts with a well-trained customer service team. Equip your customer service agents with the appropriate tools and resources to anticipate customer needs and resolve issues quickly. Communicate expectations with your team, share customer feedback, set and track metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) to identify areas that need improvement, and invest in ongoing training opportunities.
Equip staff with comprehensive customer info
Empower your team with complete customer data so they can deliver personalized, speedy service. On an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, Raven Gibson, founder of the fashion brand Legendary Rootz, explains how using Zendesk to organize customer information empowers her contractors to respond faster. The platform allows her to quickly share important details with contractors, such as customer email and contact information, order history, and shipping address. “I was able to show them, ‘Hey, you could just have all this information there versus having like five tabs open to try to locate all the information.’”
Collect customer feedback
To proactively support customers, you need to know what they want and need. Regularly collect customer feedback so you can monitor customer data and identify larger trends and spot possible issues early. This may involve regularly conducting surveys or customer conversations to better understand possible issues and get ahead of them.
Proactive customer service FAQ
What is a proactive customer service representative?
A proactive customer service representative is a member of a customer service team dedicated to preemptively meeting customer needs. This might involve designing regular communication strategies with customers, conducting quality assurance, building out knowledge bases, identifying pain points, and developing messaging to address them, among other proactive efforts.
What is the best example of proactive customer service?
There is no right or best way to provide proactive customer service. One example is a bank notifying a patron of potentially fraudulent activity before they’ve even noticed the issue on their account; this encourages the customer to trust their bank and work collaboratively to fix the issue. Another good example is ecommerce companies that send comprehensive messaging about shipping statuses, enabling customers to keep tabs on their purchases and stay ahead of any delivery issues.
What is a popular proactive approach in customer service?
There are many approaches to proactive customer service, and the best tactics will vary depending on your company’s specific needs. That said, all companies benefit from regularly collecting customer feedback and communicating regularly with customers about their orders. Building robust customer service teams and equipping them with comprehensive information about your company and your products is also instrumental in developing a proactive approach.
