Proactive support and engagement can help build customer trust and long-term relationships, but what exactly do they mean? Proactive support means getting in front of a customer issue before it escalates or even happens. Proactive engagement means identifying ways in which customer experience can be enhanced without the customer asking for it or even knowing that it’s possible. For example, a text letting a customer know that her flight has been delayed, an email informing a customer their issue or requested feature is now available, or a phone call checking to ensure that the shipping address on file is correct.

Proactive support and engagement go above and beyond standard reactive support. Reactive support means waiting for a customer to reach out with an issue—but by that time, a customer is likely already frustrated with your brand. Waiting for a customer to reach out with a problem is like waiting for your houseplants to start wilting before you water them.

How AI can Help

Today, artificial intelligence can assist your team in providing proactive support automatically. Cx MOMENTS uses natural language processing and Machine Learning to automatically tag all of the tickets in your Helpdesk based on why a customer is contacting your support. From connecting your Helpdesk to Cx MOMENTS in a few clicks, our AI analyses and tags all of the tickets in the history of your Helpdesk based on a range of keywords and reasons to contact. Providing you with a detailed and highly accurate support dataset.

Turning your qualitative customer conversations into quantitative data is the first step in taking advantage of your support data and using it to improve your support productivity and your customer experience. From here you can start using tags in your business rules (automation, macros, and triggers) to segment your customers, build custom workflows and proactively help your customers.

The Benefits of Proactive Engagement

Increased customer loyalty When you engage customers, you have a better chance of retaining them. In a brick-and-mortar store, a salesperson makes a sale by connecting with customers individually—they use everything they know, including information about the customer, the types of products they’re interested in, and their own sales experience. In the age of e-commerce, proactive engagement lets salespeople build a personal connection with customers, creating loyalty online.

Increased CSAT 92% of chats receive a positive CSAT score. We like attention—it’s human nature. That’s why reaching out to customers, for example via live-chat, is generally well-received. And when customers are happy, they’re more likely to make a purchase with your brand.

Increased sales With research indicating that 55% of online shoppers will abandon a purchase if they can’t quickly find an answer to a question, proactive support and engagement have become necessary. If a customer is hesitating on your checkout page, a simple check-in could solve a problem they might have, or a question they might need to be answered. According to Forrester, reaching out in real-time and offering proactive support can increase sales by up to 29%.

You can also use your tagged data to segment customers calling into your support. Create microsegments based on highly specific issues customers may have had like users complaining about high salt content in their food, or a faulty light on their new drone. These customer issues will be automatically tagged as they come into your Helpdesk. Using these tags you can then build proactive outreach campaigns targeted specifically at these users to notify them of any improvements or offer them personalised offers to stimulate win back and prevent churn. This is an interesting way of using your tagged data to build automated outreach campaigns to add a personalised touch to your support and keep upset customers from churning.

Freshly Builds Proactive campaigns with Cx MOMENTS

FreshlyFreshly’s team uses the data provided by Cx MOMENTS to advance their customer retention and win back outreach efforts by treating each customer as an individual with individual concerns. The granular analysis of all customer conversations enables Freshly to initiate well-targeted and proactive outbound engagements via Zendesk’s product “Connect.” The tight integration between Cx MOMENTS and Zendesk creates target customer segments that can then be used by Zendesk Connect outreach campaigns to follow up with specific users based on their specific concerns.

Cx MOMENTS helps the team solve future problems as well. With the detailed insights into target customers, the web or marketing teams can gather feedback from customers who have had issues or comments in their area in the past and work on improvements and new products. Freshly is now on the road to providing some of the most proactive and individualised customer services around. In a world of increasing customer service expectations from consumers, this will surely act as a strong differentiator and help to retain and win over customers as they grow—and Cx MOMENTS is happy to be a partner in that journey.