How do you respond to your customers when they need support? Do you wait for them to reach out and contact you? If so, then you are using reactive customer service. While it is perfectly acceptable to make yourself available when customers need assistance, reactive customer service is not as effective as proactive customer service.
A proactive customer service approach is where you attempt to anticipate your customers’ needs before they need help or have questions. There are several effective methods for implementing this type of customer service.
- Enable the customer with self-help tools. Part of predicting when a customer will need help involve providing them with essential tools before they ask for them. This could involve creating a FAQs section on your website, featuring online chat support, or text message support.
- Make outbound calls to your customers. A call to thank a customer for a recent purchase or to verify their previous customer service matter was resolved is a great proactive method to implement.
- Track which methods your customers prefer using for support. This could include knowing when they last called customer support, accessed online chat, used text-based support, or visited your business’s FAQs web page.
- Gather customer feedback through surveys. Rather than waiting for a poor review to show up online or on one of your social media pages, conducting regular surveys is an effective way to further enhance proactive customer service. Surveys can help you identify potential problems before they become major issues.
- Listen to what your customers are telling you. Customers may not always be direct when they have an issue. They may provide clues and hints to the problem without ever coming out and saying what is wrong.
- Make customers aware of problems before they become an issue. If you discover a problem or issue, let your customers know about it and how you intend to resolve it. Taking this proactive approach is much better than waiting for them to contact you.
For more tips and help on implementing cost-effective proactive customer service, please feel free to contact Always Answer at 1-800-606-9898 for more information today!
