Proactive Customer Service: Fix Problems Before Customers Make you Aware of Them

Your company may provide excellent customer service.  However, that doesn’t mean your company provides proactive customer service.  It’s one thing to make a bad situation better by resolving an issue.  It’s a whole different animal to completely avoid the bad situation by being proactive in the first place.

Being proactive isn’t as simple as saying, “Let’s be more proactive!”  You must anticipate future problems, needs, or changes, rather than reacting to a complaint from a customer.  Simply reacting means you’re only jumping when a customer demands that you jump.  Proactive customer service is like a chess game.  When you’re playing chess, waiting for your opponent to make a move will get you burned.  Instead, you anticipate their next move.  You must think a few moves ahead to reach your goal.

One common way to be proactive is to survey your customers.  You can anticipate future problems by understanding how your customers feel about your service by using a customer service survey.  Then, take steps to improve.  Why wait until your customers are so unhappy with your service that they tell all of their friends and family?  We’re in the age of “tell all of your business online.”  News spreads fast, especially bad news.  Your customers will not hesitate to post a bad review about your service or tell all of their Facebook friends or Twitter followers how unhappy they are with the way they were treated.  Wouldn’t you prefer that your customers told you how they feel about your service – first?

Proactive customer service increases customer satisfaction – giving you an edge over the competition.  One example: It’s likely that your customers are already upset with your service when they call your customer service line.  Would you be happy to be on hold and then be connected to someone who doesn’t know what’s going on and needs you to catch them up on your situation?  You’d be a much happier customer if you were proactively contacted and told that a problem arose, but was fixed before you even knew about it.

The customer’s perception of your company is what matters.  Find out what their perception is and improve your service before a problem arises.  The recommended approach is to discover what your customers need by simply asking them with a customer survey.  Then, resurvey periodically to gauge the effectiveness of your improvement initiatives.  Start your proactive approach by contacting us today.