How Proactive Support Increases Customer Satisfaction
Unsatisfied customers are three times more likely1 to share their negative experiences than happy ones. There’s also the fact that unsatisfied customers tend to cost you.
It can take up to 12 positive experiences to make up for just one unresolved negative one.
Angry and frustrated customers can tarnish your brand’s name, while satisfied customers mean more great recommendations and reviews for your business.
So increasing customer satisfaction is an absolute must, if you want your brand to succeed and stay ahead of the competition.
One solution for boosting customer satisfaction is to make things right with each frustrated customer your company encounters, through great customer service.
But what if there was a way to prevent customers from becoming disgruntled in the first place? With proactive customer service, that is entirely possible.
What is Proactive Support?
The whole idea behind proactive support is to uncover and solve customer issues before they become huge problems.
There are two different basic kinds of customer service: proactive support and reactive support.
When a customer is browsing your site and has a question about a product or service, they’ll usually find out how to get in touch with you.
From there, they’ll shoot you an email or call you and await a response. This is the box that most customer service teams typically fall into.
But with proactive customer service, you will be one step ahead all the time.
Proactive support can take the form of FAQs, forums, knowledge bases, tutorials, and more.
By creating a system that identifies and addresses customer pain points, you’ll be able to build a better relationship with customers.
Then, you can begin reaping the benefits.
The Benefits of Proactive Support
Proactive support isn’t just helpful to your customers — it can help your company become more successful overall.
Customers usually respond well when companies reach out to them first, like with live chat. The customer satisfaction rate for brands using live chat was 80.68% in 20182.
Research shows that there is a direct correlation between increased sales and proactive support.
Up to 87% of online shoppers3 say that they will abandon a purchase if they aren’t able to find an answer to their question quickly.
Believe it or not, proactive support can also be used to boost conversion rates.
For example, Intercom used proactive support to correct and complete Sender Policy Framework (SPF)4 policies with their customers to boost email deliverability rates.
They identified every customer they needed to contact and reached out to each of them. As a result, the brand was able to increase correct configurations by 300%5 within 24 hours.
With proactive support, you’ll lower your customers’ need to find support help across other channels, such as the telephone.
Service calls have been proven to decrease by up to 30% over a 12 month period6 once proactive support is introduced to customers.
This can lead to lower service costs, saving you and your brand money.
Proactive support can even lead to higher customer retention. The satisfaction and convenience related to it can boost loyalty by three to five percent7.
The takeaway? There are a million reasons to implement a proactive support strategy. But you are probably wondering where to start.
Try these Proactive Customer Service Strategies to Boost Customer Satisfaction
One of the most common methods of proactive support is self-service. Customers actually prefer it in comparison to other forms of support.
Studies show that 91% of consumers8 say they would use a self-service channel as long as it met their needs.
Along with that, 84% of consumers say that they have used a self-service channel within the last year, while 74% say they expect companies to offer self-service tools.
Create an FAQ page or knowledge base on your website that includes answers to commonly asked questions.
It helps to make your FAQ page or knowledge base searchable so that users can enter basic keywords to find the articles they’re looking for more quickly.
To get started, begin by identifying FAQs to add to your page, review call, and email logs or ask your support team which questions they receive most often.
This proactive approach can save your agents time and drastically reduce the total number of tickets you receive.
Another easy way to implement proactive support is to simply ask your customers questions to identify their pain points. Ask them for feedback and ask them often.
One way to do this is to send follow up emails after every purchase. Here’s an email example from Evernote:
The brand offers customers an incentive for their feedback – a sweepstakes entry to win a $50 gift card.
Offering a reward will make more people willing to participate in giving you their honest feedback, and will also increase your goodwill.
And you can even use the opportunity to perform some market research by asking questions about pricing or customer preferences in a feedback survey.
Feedback can help you identify recurring issues, get a better idea about how customers feel about you, find areas of your business that need improvement, and connect with clients on a personal level.
You should also track what customers are saying about your brand online. This is by far the most active place of conversation, and if don’t right, you can find many areas where you can offer proactive support.
Twitter is an excellent place to start. Studies show that more than 37% of all tweets9 are related to customer service in some regard, either positive or negative.
Monitor brand mentions and respond to people who mention your business on social media, regardless of whether the posts are good or bad.
Freshdesk’s social media helpdesk makes monitoring social media a breeze — including the posts that your brand isn’t directly tagged in.
All you have to do is enter in the keywords you want to track, to receive a customized feed of all posts mentioning your brand.
You can also use our helpdesk to convert mentions into actual tickets. This allows you to respond to every customer and boost satisfaction because you’ll never miss a complaint or any mention.
Then, you can respond accordingly. Here’s how Yelp responds to users who mention their company online:
Always respond to complaints in a similar way by offering a description of how you plan to resolve the issue.
Announcements or check-ins with customers about company changes or technical issues are another action your brand should always take.
For example, if your website is down and you send out a tweet letting customers know about it, the tweet can be considered to be a form of proactive support.
Here’s an example from Overleaf:
It’s a smart idea to continue posting updates letting people know when they can expect the outage to be resolved. That way, they won’t have to go out of their way to contact you to find out when the site will be back up and running.
Conclusion
The benefits to proactive support are seemingly endless.
Aside from boosting overall customer satisfaction, it boosts sales, lowers cart abandonment, increases conversion rates, reduces ticket and call volume, and helps you save money.
For even more tips and tricks, check out our webinar on proactive support.
Main illustration done by Sriram Govindasamy
Source:
1 – https://www.visioncritical.com/resources/cost-of-unhappy-customers/
2 – https://www.statista.com/statistics/818590/customer-satisfaction-rate-with-live-chat-worldwide/
3 – https://www.bizjournals.com/buffalo/prnewswire/press_releases/New_York/2018/08/09/UN74231
4 – https://www.act.com/en-uk/act-blog/post/blog/2018/01/09/using-a-sender-policy-framework-spf-record-to-protect-your-send-reputation
5 – https://www.intercom.com/blog/proactive-support-increases-customer-satisfaction/
6 – https://marketing.sfgate.com/blog/7-ways-to-proactively-approach-customer-complaints
7 – https://www.business2community.com/customer-experience/making-the-move-from-reactive-to-proactive-customer-support-02109830
8 – https://solvvy.com/blog/self-service-future-customer-support/
9 – http://landing.conversocial.com/guide-to-proactive-customer-service-download
