Why Proactive Customer Support Is Such A Game Changer

Implementing proactive customer support is more than just offering a new service. Click through to see how it can help your business.
Published on: Oct 21, 2022
Last updated: Feb 26, 2024

TL:DR

  • Proactive customer support is a strategy that involves reaching out to customers before they ask for help.
  • This proactive approach can be a game-changer for your business, making customers happier and saving you time and money in the long run.
  • The two main ways to proactively support customers are to reach out to customers to gather feedback or to use data to see how customers use your product.

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Proactive customer support. It's a mouthful, but it's a concept that can be the game-changer your business needs. So what is proactive customer support?

Simply put, proactive support is a strategy where you take steps to prevent customer problems from happening in the first place, or solve them before users reach out. This might include things like proactive outreach, preemptive problem-solving, and more.

While it might seem like extra work upfront, proactive customer support can save you a lot of time and headaches in the long run. Not to mention, it can be a massive differentiator for your business, especially because 87% of customers want to be proactively reached out to by a company for customer support-related issues. If you're not proactive, you're already behind the eight ball. 

In this article, we'll discuss how you can implement a proactive customer support strategy at your business. We'll also touch on the many benefits of proactive customer support, so you can see just how impactful this strategy can be.

Benefits of proactive customer support

There are several reasons why proactive customer support is such an effective strategy, both for businesses and customers. Here are a few key benefits to consider:

  • It helps prevent customer churn
  • It wows your customers
  • It reduces support costs
  • It increases the likelihood of future purchases
  • It improves your product in general
Take a look at what leaders from Dixa, Partner Hero and Assembled have to say about proactive support

Helps prevent churn proactively

Customer churn, or the rate at which customers leave your business or cancel their subscription to your SaaS business, is one of the biggest costs for companies. In fact, it can cost up to five times more to attract a new customer than it does to keep an existing one.

One way proactive customer support helps is by preventing churn before it happens. By taking proactive steps to prevent customer problems, you can keep them happy and engaged with your product or service, which reduces the likelihood of them canceling their subscription or leaving your business.

Think about it this way — if a customer is having a problem that's not being addressed, they're more likely to churn. But if you reach out to them proactively and solve the problem before they even have a chance to think about it, they're much more likely to stick around. It's a simple but effective way to keep your customers happy and reduce churn.

Wows your customer

Having a client sign up for your product or service is just the beginning of the customer journey. Once they're on board, it's your job to keep them happy and engaged with your product.

One way to do this is by impressing them with proactive customer support. If you take steps to prevent problems before they even happen, it'll leave a lasting impression on your customer. They'll be impressed with your proactive approach and the extra effort you've put in to keep them happy.

This is a great way to differentiate your business from the competition. After all, most businesses are reactive when it comes to customer support, so being proactive will make you stand out. Your customers will remember the great experience they had with your proactive customer support, and they'll be more likely to recommend you to others.

Reduces support costs

Another big benefit of proactive customer support is that it can help reduce your overall support costs. This is because proactive customer support helps you address problems before they become full-blown issues.

For example, let's say you have a customer who's having a small problem with your product. If you reach out to them proactively and solve the problem before it escalates, it'll save you time and money in the long run. But if you wait for the customer to reach out to you, the problem will likely become more complex and expensive to fix.

Increases likelihood of future purchases

Being able to wow your customers and give them a great experience is important, but it's not the only reason to implement proactive customer support. Another big benefit is that it can increase the likelihood of future purchases.

When customers have a positive experience with your business, they're more likely to do business with you again in the future. But if they have a negative experience, they're much less likely to come back.

Proactive customer support is a great way to ensure that your customers have a positive experience with your business. By taking proactive steps to prevent problems, you can give your customers the best possible experience and increase the likelihood that they'll do business with you again in the future and buy more from your company.

A lot of companies are still lagging behind when ti comes to implementing proactive support workflows. Source: Fullview webinar, 2022

Improves your product in general

Regardless of whether your product is B2B or B2C, chances are that you're always looking for ways to improve it. And proactive customer support can help you do just that.

By taking proactive steps to prevent customer problems, you can get feedback about your product early on and make changes before the problem becomes more widespread. This feedback can be invaluable in improving your product and making it the best it can be.

For example, let's say you have a customer who's having a small problem with singing into your service. If you reach out to them proactively and solve the problem before it escalates, it'll give you valuable feedback that you can use to improve your product. Maybe the error is happening because of a technical issue that you weren't aware of. Or maybe there's something confusing about the sign-in process that you need to change.

Either way, you wouldn't have known about the problem if you hadn't reached out to the customer proactively. However, if you wait for the customer to reach out to you, the problem will likely become more widespread before you have a chance to address it.

Proactive Support Statistics: 1 in 26 users reaches out
According to research from John Goodman, only 1 in 26 customers experiencing issues ends up contacting support. Proactive support helps reaching the other 25 (or whatever the number might be in your industry).

How to offer proactive customer care

Now that we've gone over the benefits of proactive customer support, let's talk about how you can actually offer it at your business. There are two main ways you can offer proactive support:

Reaching out to customers for feedback

The first way you can proactively support your customers is by reaching out to them for feedback to see what type of experience they've had with your product. This is typically a task that an account manager or success manager will conduct via surveys. 

It has the limit of relying only on feedback from one specific person in the organization (which may not always be the end-user) and on what they remember. Also, this feedback happens only at specific points in time, so it is never in real-time, which is the moment customers actually experience an issue.

Using data to see how customers use your product

An easier and more efficient way to proactively support customers is by using data to see how customers are actually using your product.

For example, with Fullview, you can watch recordings of user sessions in your product and see all sessions containing console errors for any customers.

You can then investigate the issue and reach out to the user experiencing it. Plus, with the ability to monitor how your most important accounts are using your product, you're able to create better experiences for your VIP customers, reducing the likelihood of them churning. 

While there are other ways you can see what your customer experiences, such as social media, reviews on G2, or Capterra, they're all quite limited in scope and don't provide the luxury of real-time data. Using a dedicated solution like Fullview is what will transform your organization into a customer-centric one that proactively solves problems.

Conclusion

Great customer service should be proactive, not reactive. By being proactive, you can address potential issues before they become actual problems for the customer. While you may assume that this approach will require more work upfront, using tools like Fullview will actually save you time and energy in the long run.

Not to mention, proactive customer support is quickly becoming the norm, so if you're not offering it at your business, you're already behind the competition. Implement a proactive customer support strategy today to reap all the benefits it has to offer!

Author

Shifa Rahaman

Content Marketing Manager

Contributor

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