No matter what type of industry or market your business is in, or whether you sell products or services, the distinguishing feature that sets businesses apart is the type of customer service experiences you provide current and new customers. Most businesses have followed a reactive customer service approach for years, while others have started to adapt to proactive methods to further distinguish themselves from the competition.
What’s the Difference Between Reactive and Proactive?
Reactive is where you wait for customers to contact you through your call center and alert you to a problem, issue, or concern. Proactive, on the other hand, is where your business takes the initiative to alert customers to potential problems and issues, and addresses concerns as soon as you are aware of them, rather than waiting on your customers to point them out.
Key Elements of Proactive Customer Service
The driving factors behind proactive customer service are to provide experiences where you anticipate your customers’ needs and respond to those, without waiting for them for to contact you all of the time to report an issue, problem, or concern, including:
- Encourage customer feedback on your products and services. Gaining feedback allows you to identify potential issues and take steps to resolve them before they become major problems.
- Provide multiple ways for customers to obtain help quickly and easily. From answering phone calls by a live person and enabling online chat to setting up a FAQs web page and self-service customer portal, you need to offer customers an array of options.
- Reward customer loyalty with a special program, sales offers, or incentives. Reward your repeat and long-time customers for their continued business.
- Respond to negative experiences in a positive manner. For instance, you discover a customer’s order did not ship as promised. Rather than waiting for them to call you, take steps to resolve the matter first, such as upgrading to priority shipping. Then, contact the customer, make them aware of the problem, apologize, let them know what you did to resolve the issue, and offer them an incentive on a future order.
Adopting proactive customer service strategies does take time and effort. However, the payoffs are well worth it in the long run. Always Answer is here to help, and we offer a variety of different customer service options and solutions to help make your business more proactive. Contact us today by calling 1-800-606-9898 to learn more!
