The need for speed in customer service interactions is transforming the contact center landscape. Not only do 90% of customers now rate an ‘immediate’ response as essential to a positive customer experience, but a growing number of customers now expect companies to anticipate their needs.
Proactive outreach – which involves predicting customer needs in advance to tackle issues before they escalate – can have a significant impact on a company’s success.
With a proactive approach, companies can deliver more effective service experiences and boost their chances of sales, by intuitively interacting with customers through their purchasing journeys.
Here’s your guide to the power of proactive outreach for CX.
What is Proactive Outreach?
Proactive outreach is a strategy in the customer experience landscape that involves using data to anticipate customer needs and initiate interactions with your audience, rather than waiting for them to reach out first. Proactivity is becoming increasingly crucial to customers.
More than 83% of customers say they want companies to contact them proactively to provide support or service, and 92% of consumers say proactivity positively impacts their opinion of brands.
Today’s organizations have a huge range of ways to enable proactive outreach, from delivering self-service resources to consumers, to leveraging popular channels for automated, bulk communication, like SMS and WhatsApp.
While the nature of your proactive outreach strategy can vary, the essence of proactive outreach revolves around staying one step ahead of your customers and understanding their needs.
The Impact of Proactive Outreach on Customer Experience
Implementing a strategy for proactive outreach into your Customer Experience (CX) strategy can generate incredible results. According to Gartner, receiving proactive service leads to a 9% increase in a customer’s value enhancement score.
Proactive outreach also allows companies to:
- Reduce strain on contact center employees: By anticipating a customer’s needs in advance, you can connect with customers and deliver resources and solutions before they need to contact your company. This reduces call volumes, minimizes the strain on your customer service team, and reduces customer experience costs.
- Improve their brand reputation: When organizations invest in effective, real-time customer engagement, it demonstrates a genuine focus on ensuring satisfaction. This builds confidence in your brand and helps differentiate your company from the competition. Proactivity can even help you to mitigate frustration and negative experiences that would harm your reputation.
- Enhance customer loyalty: On a broad scale, proactive outreach helps you to deliver a more intuitive, personalized, and engaging experience to your customers. It results in higher customer loyalty, which means higher customer lifetime values. It can even turn customers into advocates for your brand, increasing leads and reducing customer acquisition costs.
Top Tips for Effective Proactive Outreach
While proactive outreach can deliver exceptional benefits for companies, the right strategy is essential to optimizing your return on investment. Here are some of the best tips you can follow, to ensure your proactive outreach strategy pays off.
- Leverage Comprehensive Customer Data
A core component of a successful proactive outreach campaign is the right data. To understand the needs of your customers, the challenges they face throughout their journey with your company, and the right times to connect with them, you need comprehensive insights.
Leveraging data from your contact center software and CRM (customer relationship management) tools, map the entire customer journey. Use artificial intelligence and analytics data to identify customer sentiment at certain stages of the customer journey, and examine common challenges, requests, and topics discussed by your customers.
Consider the best channels you can use to connect with your customers, based on your journey map. For instance, SMS has the highest engagement level of any communication channel with an open rate of 98%. Additionally, WhatsApp has more than two billion active users worldwide. Both channels are excellent for fast-paced proactive outreach.
- Listen to the Voice of the Customer
Your quantitative data about your customer’s preferred contact channels and interaction volumes will help you identify which channels to use for outreach. Alternatively, voice of the customer insights will give you a broader insight into the challenges you need to address for your audience.
Only around 1 in 26 customers actively complain about a problem they encounter with a product or service. To ensure you can address issues before customers go elsewhere, you need to actively gather direct feedback. Questionnaires and surveys are a great way to learn more about the problems customers might face with your company.
Social listening tools, which allow you to gather feedback shared by customers across the web, can also help you understand what customers genuinely think and feel about your customers.
- Leverage AI and Automation
AI and automation are exceptional resources for enabling proactive outreach. AI tools, such as chatbots, built into your website or mobile app, can actively reach out to customers with product suggestions or deliver information based on the pages they visit.
Automated platforms can empower your team members to send messages to customers across a range of channels instantly, for a range of purposes. For instance, you can use 8×8’s proactive outreach tools to pre-emptively send alerts about power outages and emergencies to consumers and teams.
You can also use the same platform to notify customers about upcoming product releases and promotions, with personalized messaging. You can even use AI and automation in tandem to enable two-way messaging, allowing customers to interact with bots and contact center agents throughout their customer journey, enhancing customer experiences.
- Empower Agents with the Right Tools
The foundation of exceptional, customer engagement is a well-trained and empowered support team. Today’s teams need to take advantage of cutting-edge technology to ensure they can effectively connect with customers at the right times in their buyer journey.
Ensuring your team members have the right training to help them use analytical tools, design automated workflows, and create automated outreach campaigns will help you make the most of your new strategy. Investing in the right technology will help boost business efficiency.
For instance, 8×8 Proactive Outreach features an intuitive, web-based, no-code campaign management platform, allowing users to send mass messages in a couple of clicks. The platform even includes scheduling tools, and intelligent messaging routing strategies to boost deliverability.
- Be Prepared to Adapt and Evolve
Finally, as customer expectations and preferences continue to evolve, businesses need to be able to adapt with them. Leveraging a proactive outreach platform that allows you to access advanced reporting and analytics will ensure you can keep track of your customer’s needs and optimize your strategy over time.
You’ll be able to collect insights that allow you to create more personalized campaigns for different customer segments, adapting to changing channel preferences and requirements related to timing.
Additionally, selecting a scalable, innovative platform will ensure you can take advantage of new features and functionality that can improve your campaigns. For instance, 8×8’s tools enable access to omnichannel contact center management, conversational and generative AI capabilities, and more.
Switch from Reactive to Proactive Outreach
Ultimately, even the fastest reactive approach to customer service and support is no longer enough to separate you from the competition and earn your customer’s loyalty. Customers expect you to anticipate their needs and invest in proactive engagement.
With platforms like Proactive Outreach from 8×8, companies can leave the reactive nature of customer interactions in the past and effortlessly delight their customers across a range of channels.
