Proactive Customer Service: From Experience to Empathy

by Ginny Perkins

Determining how to implement or improve proactive customer service at your organization is a big swing. Inspiring the buy-in and adoption of a proactive customer service model across your contact center takes trust and patience.

Making fundamental shifts in how you approach people and processes to provide standout service? It has a profound impact on your customers. And in today’s competitive market, any chance to re-wire the connections with your customers to spark more brand loyalty is a chance you have to take.

Don’t begin the strategy with a purely cost-cutting or cost-saving mindset. Start implementing a plan for more proactive customer service by thinking about the customer.

Put your empathy shoes on to understand what their customer journey is like and where they can get lost in it. There’s no doubt that infusing your brand with proactive service is one of the foundations you need to build the best customer experience and customer journey.

One of the best places to start when assessing your customer’s journey is looking at the post-purchase experience. When the information your customer likely will need after purchase is hard to find or use, you’ve made it clear that they are only a priority during the sale. Even worse?

You’ve made it clear that they are an afterthought once the transaction has taken place.

Here are just seven examples of where your customer’s journey can go awry in the post-purchase period:

1. The time spent bouncing through a poorly routed call center just to wait on hold has hijacked a part of their day.

2. If their issue is too complex for the chatbot, and they can’t easily connect with a live agent using the same chat feature.

3. The company is not active on its social channels, so there’s no shot of getting a quick reply on them.

4. They have to search high and low for their serial number, order number, or account number.

5. The web content they might need on the go is, in fact, not mobile-friendly.

6. Their user manual is relegated to a remote corner of the site, impossible to pull up in a quick search.

7. Their return or exchange becomes a laborious chore/errand.

When any of these examples occur, you’re losing an opportunity to build brand loyalty within your customer. You’re also putting your business at risk for customer churn.

But after putting your empathy shoes on to understand these moments of post-purchase frustration, your team can think about how to build proactive customer service measures from the ground up. Here are a few pre-emptive solutions your team can put in place to begin that process:

1. Make customer satisfaction surveys a part of every contact center interaction. This allows you to collect unbiased feedback and deliver immediate, comprehensive voice of the customer insights across all channel interactions.

2. Ensure that your contact center offers intelligent live agent escalation through chat—so that, if the customer’s issue is too complex for the chatbot, they can be seamlessly transferred to a live agent who can assist with moving them toward a swift resolution.

3. Equip your contact center with a platform that helps you deliver proactive service to your customer across 30+ digital channels of their choice using omnichannel routing.

For more information on how you can build a more proactive customer service model, check out our webinar, “Making Customer Experience a Competitive Differentiator.”