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The phrase ‘Proactive Customer Support’ hasn't been the most familiar in the customer support world. This strategy might sound overwhelming at the first glance, but it’s a rather simple approach to adopt and implement. Companies like Amazon, Netflix and Lenskart have delightful customer success stories to share by using the proactive customer support strategy.

Companies that take extra efforts to make their customers feel special have a special place in their customers’ heart. But what do these companies do differently to stand out of the crowd? Do they offer special discounts and offers? Or, do they offer other freebies?

The secret element to the success of these companies is not the glamour of discounts and offers. It’s a simple shift of approach – from reactive to proactive support.

What is proactive customer support?

Proactive customer support is when you take a step forward to help resolve issues for your customer before they occur or before the customer realizes. This means, you address a customer issues even before they run into one, by identifying or anticipating the issue in advance and extending support to resolve it.

For example, Amazon anticipates questions on delivery schedule. So, even before the customers start asking about their delayed deliveries, they update their customer with new delivery date. If the customer is an Amazon Prime Subscriber, Amazon will sometimes compensate with one-month free service for the inconvenience, all without the customer ever asking for it.

This contrasts to reactive customer support, where a customer only gets in touch with your support team when they encounter a problem. Now that you know the difference between the two approaches, let’s have a look at why you need a proactive customer support approach.

Why you need to adopt a Proactive Support Strategy?

• Improves retention rate:  Proactive customer support strategy increases the retention rates by 3-5% which increases customer loyalty towards the brand. As it is proven fact that, it cost 5 times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain your existing customer base. The improved retention and loyalty rates increase customer satisfaction which in turn increase average CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scores.
• Boosts brand reputation: Recent customer support statistics states that loyal customers are five times more like to make repeat purchases and four time more likely to recommend it to others. So, taking the proactive support strategy can help you develop a better brand image too.
• Frees up your team: you will also have fewer support instances to attend as your proactive support initiatives will help customers resolve issues on their own.

Keeping all this in mind, let’s look at how you can create a proactive customer initiative for your organization.

Steps to implement proactive customer support in your organization

Implementing a proactive customer support requires combined efforts of your team, customers and company. Here are some pre-requisites that one should keep in mind –

1. Know you customers

It is vitally important for you to know your customers’ needs so that you can anticipate their requirements and design a proactive support. Understand who they are, what issues they encounter, what they need, and you will able to support them proactively. Here are few more ideas on how you can gather the information:

• Analyze customer behavior
• Find out customers’ pain point, if possible, interview few of your current customers.
• Use information from the ticketing systems to identify common issues. Address them first.

2. Build a strong support team

Proactive support strategy works best with a solid team behind it – and this does not just depend on the support team alone. Everyone in in your organization can contribute to building a strong proactive strategy based on their experience and skillsets. That means you will need to get a great mix of people from different departments and functions.

However, you will need a great support team to back it up. You will need to evaluate new hires and train staff who can think proactively and implement ideas from across your organization.

3. Build a strong wiki article

FAQs, forums and self-help portals are great tools for proactive support but they work only if you populate them with engaging, helpful and easy to follow content. Well-documented wiki articles that has FAQs can go long way in helping your customer proactively.

Summing it up –

Proactive customer support is a great way to ensure that service instances are not pilling up and is proving to help boost customer loyalty and their willingness to purchase again. To know more on how to implement this strategy to reap these benefits, write to me at Kishor.kulkarni@aress.com and I can connect you to our customer support experts who will explain the best methods to implement them.