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Guest Blog: 3 Tips for Offering Proactive (Instead of Reactive) Customer Service

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post my colleague, Maureen Szlemp writes about the importance of proactive customer service and prioritizing the customer. I couldn’t agree more, be proactive. You shouldn’t wait until a customer asks for something. – Shep Hyken Consider, for one moment, the last truly exceptional experience you had […]

This week on our Friends on Friday guest blog post my colleague, Maureen Szlemp writes about the importance of proactive customer service and prioritizing the customer. I couldn’t agree more, be proactive. You shouldn’t wait until a customer asks for something. – Shep Hyken

Consider, for one moment, the last truly exceptional experience you had as a customer.  What stood out to you and what made you want to share the experience with family and friends?  And what made you inclined to recommend the company to others?

We all know how important it is to have the right kind of customer service.  Yet 84% of customers report that their last customer experience was subpar; 72% blame their bad customer service experience on having to explain their problem to multiple people.

The fact of the matter is this: The best customer experiences make issue resolution quick and painless.  Let’s take a look at three ways your company can offer proactive (instead of reactive) customer service:

Monitor & analyze 100% of calls

When it comes to quality customer service, the idea is to offer helpful advice, support, and issue resolution – on an ongoing basis.  In other words, you want to approach each and every customer interaction thinking about how you can be continuously helpful, instead of simply trying to put out fires.

To do this, speech analytics can be enormously helpful.  By monitoring and analyzing 100% of calls, analytics identifies customer service issues as they occur (as opposed to after the fact), helping managers uncover immediate agent training and coaching opportunities.

The end result?

Agents who are able to work more effectively and customers who are more satisfied with their experiences.

Keep customer preferences in mind

In today’s digital landscape, customers are no longer using just one form of communication (phone) to reach companies.  Studies show multichannel use is expected to grow exponentially over the next several years, meaning your company needs to respond accordingly.

Because it’s not uncommon for customers to use multiple channels to resolve a single issue, a multichannel speech analytics solution can help to track and analyze the complete customer journey – regardless of the communications channel used at any one point of contact.

Getting a full picture of the customer lifecycle provides you with insight into channel preferences, customer pain points, root cause of repeat contacts, and more.  In a nutshell, it helps you get to know your customers better and provide higher quality customer service as a result.

Learn from previous mistakes

No matter how exceptional the customer service you’re providing, there are always going to be dissatisfied customers.  It may not always be within your control to influence the experience (a customer may have had a previous unsatisfying experience with your company or could just be having a bad day!).

The key is to leverage insights from all customer interactions – positive or negative – to make experiences better in the future.  Whether through customer surveys, online reviews, social media posts, etc., it’s important to make effective use of customer feedback to improve performance.

After all, it pays to exceed customer expectations: The majority (86%) of customers are willing to pay up to 25% more for a better customer experience.

Final Thoughts

In today’s customer-centric marketplace, it’s not just a good idea to offer quality customer service – it’s essential.  Companies failing to prioritize customer experience efforts may find they’re suffering from customer churn as well as a negative reputation for their organization overall.

How does your organization offer proactive customer service?  What advice would you have for delighting customers?

Maureen Szlemp, Marketing Director at CallMiner, has extensive expertise in strategic planning and program execution to meet or exceed corporate growth goals; leading marketing communications disciplines on a global basis including brand research, visual identity system development and management, public and media relations, web and online marketing, events and trade shows, lead management, database marketing, new product introduction, internal communications, field marketing and channel communications. 

Read Shep’s latest Forbes Article: Five Marketing Lessons From MarTech 2016: Where Marketing And Technology Collide

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