Every conversation with a customer has the potential to deliver benefits to your company!
Proactive communication is all about getting ahead of something, rather than responding once it has occurred, i.e., reactive communication. Proactive communication techniques involve actively reaching out to your customers and having a conversation about important issues, stimulating engagement, and building a stronger connection. This approach can help prevent problems before they ever happen and can even spot opportunities for improvements.
Proactive communication has been shown to accelerate customer engagement for businesses across all kinds of industries. Improving customer loyalty is about reducing customers’ effort levels and working hard to address their problems first-hand.
Benefits to being proactive:
It shows that you care: making your customers feel cared for goes a long way to making them feel connected with and a part of your business.
You can address needs your customers may not even know they have: deeper-level engagement means you can identify problems and opportunities early, helping customers to get more out of your service. Can even make up-sell or cross-sell services possible.
It improves your efficiency: issues are often much more straightforward to solve when dealt with before they become serious.
It builds trust and loyalty: trust is at the foundation of any strong customer relationship. Being transparent and honest helps build long-lasting relationships.
This is how you can proactively communicate with customers:
Don’t run before you can walk: give yourself the time to put the right pieces into place. Look at your existing communication, e.g., integrating your service with software allows for omnichannel customer support at all times of the day.
Identify low-hanging fruit: find the areas with the most significant room for improvement and identify straightforward ways of injecting proactive communication into the customer relationship.
Test it, track it, and improve it: ask your customers what they’re enjoying and what they’re struggling with. Be honest when you’ve made mistakes and respond positively, rather than waiting for another complaint.
All in all, regularly assessing your customer communication strategies is an integral part of any relationship-building campaign, and it’s clear there are many benefits from getting on the front foot with your communications. Anything you can do to make a customer feel supported and cared about is sure to increase your loyalty, boost your engagement, and improve the bottom line.
