Build loyalty through proactive customer experience

From reactive customer contact

Most customer services have traditionally been mainly reactive. They solve problems and only meet customer needs after the customer has expressed them. As a result, you run the risk that customers are already dissatisfied before they contact you. For example because they had to put in a lot of effort to get their problem resolved and/or had to wait a long time. This has consequences for the customer experience, perception and loyalty.

Towards a proactive customer approach

In recent years this has been changing. Customer services and organizations are increasingly aware of the needs and wishes of customers through all the data that is collected, and can better anticipate them. Which makes this the basis of the proactive customer approach. No more waiting for questions or problems to arise, but preventing them. And also anticipating customer needs, even before customers are aware of them.

Important elements

The proactive customer approach consists of a number of key elements: personalization, predictive analytics, proactive support and learning from feedback and continuous improvement.

Benefits proactive customer approach

The use of a proactive customer approach provides various benefits, such as:

• Improves several key customer service KPIs. Think of NPS/customer satisfaction, CX/customer experience and customer lifetime value. (See also this Gartner article)
• Reduces interactions and pressure on customer service and agents by proactively resolving questions and issues
• Reduces costs due to shorter wait and calling time and less tickets
• Increases conversion and sales because customer service can respond more quickly to problems during these processes

Build step by step

Switching to a proactive customer experience does not have to be done in one go. You can build this up in small steps. See which journey you want to improve first, which data is needed for this and whether it is easily available and which quick wins you can realize. You can often reuse existing tooling and data for this. When the first step has successfully been made, you can then define and pick up the next one. This also makes any necessary investments for new tooling, for example, manageable.

Customer first approach

Proactive customer approach is therefore mainly about understanding and insight. Knowing and understanding what is going on with (potential) customers and responding accordingly. It is therefore easy to combine with the customer first approach . In this way you create a 5* experience that customers expect from organizations nowadays, so they remain customers longer and which brings customer service and marketing even closer together.