Customer Service Management Training: Why You Need A Proactive Approach

Part 3: Why you need a proactive approach to Customer Service to maintain a competitive edge

Customer Service is often seen as a costly cost center: The more customers who engage with a company through Customer Service, the greater the cost to the organization. But this view is short-sighted and misguided. Thanks to advances in Customer Service Management (CSM) technologies, Customer Service can be more than the sum of its individual customer interactions. In fact, aggregated Customer Service data can deliver actionable business intelligence that can help a business maintain its competitive edge—as we discussed in our previous blog post.

That, however, isn’t where the benefits of CSM end. The greatest benefit of CSM is that it enables proactive Customer Service, where you become the one who initiates communicating with customers to improve their experience with your product. It’s the type of specific, insightful Customer Service that stands out in a competitive marketplace, and it’s instrumental for advancing your business’s marketing strategy. Let’s explore the key benefits of taking a proactive approach to Customer Service and how it can drive your marketing strategy:

1. You want to reduce the volume of customer support requests: Proactive Customer Service involves relaying key information to customers before a known service issue impacts them. It can warn them of scheduled downtimes, alert them to important product updates they need to install and identify the most likely cause(s) of symptoms reported by other customers. Because proactive Customer Service is service that is consistent and specific, it is an effective strategy for building a close relationship with customers. Proactive Customer Service also reduces the volume of Customer Service requests—a win-win scenario for both the company and the customers.
2. You want to ensure your customers are having a positive experience with your product: Under budget pressures, too many companies pay lip service to customer support. Once they earn a customer, they tend to bombard their customers with traditional marketing messages. But customers would much rather hear from you when you can offer specific information, solutions, and tips to help them have a better experience with the product they have already purchased from you. Proactive service, consequently, is much more effective at convincing your customers that you have their best interests at heart and that you care about earning their respect and loyalty. As a result, not only will they be more apt to rave about you on channels like social media, but they also will go back to your company when they are ready for their next purchase.
3. You want to create wow moments when delivering Customer Service: Customers are accustomed to reaching out to companies when they have issues. The ability to reverse the direction of Customer Service with proactive service is key to creating wow moments for your customers. Your customers understand that glitches, service disruptions, and other problems are inevitable, and they won’t hold these bumps in the road against you. That said, what they will appreciate is your ability to minimize the inconvenience and frustration created by these issues by proactively notifying them and sharing solutions and workarounds—ideally, long before they realize there’s a problem.
4. You want to more efficiently leverage analytics and insights from other departments: The source of the information, solutions, and tips that you proactively share with your customers often won’t be your Customer Service team itself. Rather, these insights will tend to come from engineering, IT, field services, operations, R&D, finance, and so forth. It’s paramount that you connect all of these departments to Customer Service, so you can effectively leverage the insights they provide to proactively deliver Customer Service. ServiceNow’s CSM platform is the optimal way to forge this interconnectivity and aggregate data from all of these other departments to inform a truly proactive approach to Customer Service.

Because Customer Service is a costly endeavor for any company, you want to be strategic about it. Proactive Customer Service is an optimal way to stretch your dollars, keep your customers satisfied, and drive your marketing strategy. That’s because proactive Customer Service will reduce the overall volume of your service requests, provide invaluable opportunities to check in with your customers regarding their experience with your product, create wow moments for your customers, and effectively leverage information from all departments across your organization.

In our next blog post, we’ll discuss essential tips for using ServiceNow’s CSM platform to create high-quality Customer Service experiences.

Helpful Resources:

Other posts in this Customer Experience blog series: Part 1  & Part 2

eBook: 10 Pillars of Customer Service Management Success

eBook: 10 Pillars of ServiceNow Digital Transformation for the Non-IT Leader (Note: Pay particular attention to Pillar 2 of this book.)

On-demand webinar: ServiceNow & CSM: Raising CSAT while Reducing Costs

Crossfuze has over 25 years’ experience in the Contact Center Management space. If you would like to discuss your CSM needs, letstalk@crossfuze.com.

For more ServiceNow resources, visit the Crossfuze ServiceNow Resource Center.