There are basically two ways you can go about it if you want to help customers on your website. On the one side, you can sit comfortably and answer any customer questions, either by telephone, chat, or email. This is client service that is reactive. On the other hand, before customers ask for it, you can show initiative and offer help. This is proactive service to the customer.
When you are questioned, there is certainly nothing wrong with responding. However, reaching out to a customer and solving a potential problem before the customer asks for help is much more powerful.
Proactive Customer Service Definition
Proactive customer service is a customer support approach where companies make the first move to help customers. These companies are going out of their manner to discover prospective issues first and then solve them before clients have to ask for assistance. If your company is doing reactive or proactive customer service, an easy way to tell is to ask yourself: who is making the first move? You or the client? If unless they ask for help, the customer will not receive help, you will be doing reactive customer service. It is proactive customer service if you tend to give alternatives to issues before forcing the client to ask for assistance.
Why Proactive is Better Than Reactive Customer Service
Proactive customer service will allow you through incredible customer service experiences to create customer loyalty. Second, all the tools that you use to monitor customer activity can provide valuable customer feedback. You can make more informed choices about product design based on customer feedback. You will also be able to create resources without the need to involve an agent to solve the problems. Finally, proactive customer service enables you to create an optimal way on your website to seek help.
How to Implement Proactive Customer Service
When switching from reactive to proactive customer service, the biggest challenge you need to overcome is to find situations where a customer needs your help before they even ask for it. You need to understand what on your website is the greatest pain to cope with or what causes clients to scratch their heads and ask questions.
There are two methods you can do that: by collecting feedback and tracking user activity.
Collecting Feedback
First, you can begin to listen more carefully to what your clients are saying. If a group of clients are experiencing a certain issue and they are telling you about it, the same issue likely occurs to a silent majority of users.
You can identify common customer pain points and fix them by gathering customer feedback. You can gather the feedback in many ways: surveys, emails, at the end of a chat or a phone call. For businesses using live chat, another feedback-gathering alternative is live chat. Many live chat solutions provide a way to collect feedback during chatting.
Tracking User Activity
You understand what’s even more compelling than providing useful equipment for self-service? Step in when a client faces a difficult issue. You need more than just a feedback platform for that kind of assistance. You need to monitor the activity of clients on your website in real time. A live chat is one of the fastest ways you can get something like that on your website. Most live chat offers a way not only to get in contact with your clients, but also to see what they’re up to when you visit your website.
Overall
Proactive customer support is certainly a major step forward from the simple reactive handling of instances. Going the extra mile for clients and dealing with a lot of issues before they can even manifest makes clients come back for more.
