Contact us The Future of Customer Service in 2022: Proactive Is the New Reactive
When you think about customer service you might think of how a company deals with customer complaints and queries. For example, a customer having trouble with their internet connection may call their broadband provider and speak to a customer service representative who would help resolve the issue. In 2022 this scenario will become a thing of the past.
Reactive customer service – where a company reacts to problems that customers face – is slow and frustrating for customers. In an ideal world, customers won’t have to encounter these problems in the first place. But we don’t live in an ideal world, so the next best thing is to ensure customers can already resolve the issues they might encounter without having to endure hours of hold music. This is why proactive customer service will take the lead in 2022 and beyond.
What Is Proactive Customer Service?
It is all about anticipating customers’ needs and predicting problems that may occur. This enhances both the customer’s experience and the business’s productivity by solving problems before they become complaints.
What Does Proactive Customer Service Look Like?
There are a few different ways to implement a proactive customer service model. The best models are based on a mixture of the following:
- Upstream solutions: predicting and resolving issues at the source. For example, if you’re selling a product that relies on battery power, you could include a spare battery in case the original wears out or experiences a fault.
- Customer service automation. For example, using data from previous years to determine a set of frequently asked questions and developing a virtual agent on your website to answer these questions for customers. The majority of customers now want a response as quickly as possible.
- Keeping customers informed. The most successful companies don’t hide problems when they occur; they let their customers know immediately. For example, if there’s a widespread ongoing issue you could put a message on your website or use email or a virtual agent to inform customers of the issue and direct them to the relevant troubleshooting page.
All these methods let customers know that you’re aware of issues and provide them with proactive solutions. This gives a better experience to your customers and prevents your customer service team from getting overwhelmed with inquiries when problems arise.
How To Make Proactive Customer Service Work
You can’t predict everything. At some point, unforeseen issues will occur, and customers will call for information and fixes. Using a proactive customer service model ensures that the issues that are predictable are already taken care of so your team can focus on keeping customers happy while they resolve any unforeseen problems.
The more issues you can predict and solve at the source, the better. The best way to achieve this is to integrate your customer service team with the rest of your business. With this integration, you can use tools like AI analytics to predict when problems might occur and solve them before they do.
Applying Proactive Customer Service In 2022
We’ve now seen why proactive approach and customer service automation are great for your business. It can change potentially negative experiences into overwhelmingly positive ones, which not only reduces complaints but increases brand loyalty.
With 50% of consumers likely to turn away from brands that don’t anticipate their needs, get ahead of the trend and switch to a proactive approach with our applications today.
Roman Kučák, Partner
