New growth strategy for online businesses: Proactive customer service

The traditional concept of customer service often makes business owners think of a team of agents helping their customers resolve their queries and sorting their issues. Well, when customers reach out to your company, the nature of customer service is reactive. Unless you are proactive with your customer service to offer a better experience to customers, the latter would miss out on a gratifying experience. 

In this blog, you will come to know how a proactive stance to offer adequate customer support can leverage your business.

Have you considered deploying any of these measures as a proactive customer care strategy?

•   Developing FAQ pages and knowledge resources as self-service options
•   Integrating live chat options for your customers for instant response
•   Providing discount codes, tutorials, and recommendations to customers to help them purchase confidently

A proactive approach to customer service ensures that your clients would have realistic expectations from you. This will also foster positive engagements and boost your conversion rate.

What is customer support and what are its two types?

Support, assistance and guidance provided to customers, whether before the purchase, during the purchase, or after they make the purchase comes under the category of customer support. Customer support is broadly classified into: proactive and reactive customer support. You need both these approaches to deploy your customer support strategy effectively.

What is Reactive Customer Support?

Reactive customer support involves interacting with customers to resolve issues that they bring to your attention. Some instances of reactive customer support include:

•   Responding to phone calls of your customers
•   Providing support to your clients through emails and SMS
•   Live chatting with your customers

What is Proactive Customer Support?

While your customer reaches out to you in the case of reactive customer support, it is you who makes the first move with the proactive approach. So, rather than waiting for the problem to arise and your customer to reach out to you, you contact your clients to address possible issues. 

You can integrate self-service resources on your website like knowledge base, help center, FAQs, along with dedicated agents reaching out to your customers.

Here are some instances of proactive customer support that would elucidate this concept better.

• • Using a live chat widget to assist your customer before they make a purchase to offer customized support through the process and thereby close the sales.
  • Automating pop-ups for product recommendations that get triggered when your customer makes certain actions depending on their interaction with the website or app.
  • Offering a knowledge base to customers in the form of a help center or customer portal where they can get answers to their questions.
  • Engaging on social media posts and resolving queries through omni-channel support.

What makes proactive customer service the right option for more online businesses?

A proactive customer service helps online businesses strengthen their operations in several ways. As much as 73% of customers who receive proactive customer support enjoy a positive experience. This also portrays the respective brand in a better light.

Here are some reasons that explain why online businesses are being proactive with their customer service.

1. Get better opportunities to drive your sales

Do you know what can make the difference between your customers placing an order and abandoning their cart? It’s proactive customer service which ensures that your customers have adequate information. While proceeding with the purchase, customers often look for production details like sizing guides and refund policies. Unless they find all these details, they might be reluctant to check out. This is where your proactiveness can cater to their information needs and they can confidently check out.

When you reach out to your customers through live chat and inquire whether they are facing any difficulty, they can inform you about the same. Besides, some eCommerce platforms automate this process where chatbots interact with customers and assist them. They also provide offers, discount codes etc before customers make the purchase based on their user journey. The use of a 360-degree view of customer interaction helps in offering personalized service through automated customer support and live chat. With a proactive approach, you can speed up this process. As a result, you benefit from higher sales and conversion rates.

2. Reduces tickets and workload for your agents

When you have a proactive customer service mechanism in place, customers wouldn’t be reaching out to you for resolving common problems. Therefore, your agents would have to deal with fewer tickets. With reduced workload, they can be at ease. Also, you may consider reducing the number of agents when the tickets are lower. This will help you curtail costs like salaries. With self-service resources, customers would be able to find answers to their questions.

It is estimated that by 2023, self-service bots would save around $11 billion for global companies. With reduced workload, your agents would be able to focus on high-priority tickets.

3. Deliver better customer experience and enhance their loyalty

The sole concept behind proactive customer support is to provide your customers better value. You don’t wait for them to reach out to you. This proactive stance on your end can deliver a better customer experience and enhance their loyalty.

When you are proactive with your customer support, the buyer knows that your business is concerned about their needs. Simply providing quality products or services won’t work amidst stiff competition. Customers prefer sticking to brands that ensure a customer-oriented approach while selling their products or services.

Conclusion

While you strategize a proactive customer service for your clients, make sure that you chat or communicate with them throughout their purchase journey. Apart from focusing on sales, work towards retaining new customers or followers on your social media profiles. It is critical to work on their feedback and celebrate important moments of your business with your clients. Lastly, provide adequate self-service resources that can resolve common issues before your buyers contact you.