Proactive Versus Reactive Customer Service
In today’s business world, consumers expect more from brands than ever before. Consumers prefer brands invested in their needs and wants and committed to offering a first-class experience. Around 87% of customers anticipate proactive reach by brands for customer service-related issues. By implementing a proactive customer service approach, your business can resolve customer issues in the preliminary stages, putting less pressure on the support team and increasing brand loyalty.
And taking this initiative shows that your business is proactive and understands the clients’ problems before they become real. It implies that your business quickly identifies, resolves customer problems, and ensures great customer experiences. However, few small businesses can provide proactive customer care due to a lack of executive, managerial or employee understanding, improper equipment or trained customer service representatives, and the failure to create a proactive customer service culture.
This article explains the difference between proactive and reactive customer service and how a virtual receptionist can facilitate proactive customer service.
The Difference Between Proactive and Reactive Customer Service
Proactive customer service, also called proactive support, involves taking the first step to assist customers before they reach you for assistance. This can include making glitches and errors known as they happen, introducing new services or products they may like, or improving a client’s experience.
The main idea behind proactive customer service is ensuring your company goes above and beyond for its clients past the purchase point. You look to prove your trustworthiness and improve customer loyalty, so you provide your customers with everything they require for the best possible customer experience.
On the other hand, reactive customer service is like providing over-the-counter medication where a representative steps in once an issue has already occurred. This implies that the customer is the first to reach out once a problem has occurred. So, neither strategy is better or worse than the other, and it’s advisable to use both strategies.
Advantages of Proactive Customer Service
Prevents Customer Churn Proactively
Customer churn is the rate at which customers cancel their subscriptions or leave your business. It is one of the major costs for businesses. Customer churn can cost up to five times more to attract a new client than to keep an existing one. So, proactive customer service can help prevent customer churn before it occurs. By taking proactive initiatives to prevent customer issues, you can keep them happy and engaged with your products or services, reducing the chances of them leaving your business or canceling their subscription.
Reduces Customer Support Costs
Another advantage of proactive customer service is that it reduces overall customer support costs and helps you solve issues before they become full-blown problems.
Increases the Chances of Future Purchases
Wowing your customers and giving them exemplary services is crucial as it can increase the chances of future purchases. When clients have a positive experience with your products or services, they’re more likely to do more business with you in the future and vice versa.
Improves Your Product in General
By implementing proactive steps to avert customer issues, you can get feedback about your service or product early on and make the required changes before the issue becomes full-blown. This feedback can be crucial in improving your service or product and making it the best.
Other benefits include the following:
- Establishing an upfront connection
- Earning trust and credibility
- Data collection
- Increasing loyalty and conversions
- Improving organizational productivity
On the other hand, reactive customer service has several drawbacks, such as the following:
- It is less engaging
- There’s a negative correlation with customer retention
- There are additional operational costs when handling minor issues
- The burden is placed on the clients to solve issues with your service or product
So, proactive customer service can help businesses anticipate customer needs and provide a more personalized experience.
How a Virtual Receptionist Can Facilitate Proactive Customer Service
Regarding your business, your front desk serves the frontline, and you can hire a virtual receptionist to achieve proactive customer service. Your hired virtual receptionist is the key to building and maintaining your customer relationships and solving issues even before they occur. Virtual receptionists can improve customer service because they’re always available, set a welcoming environment, speed up customer intake, find opportunities in customer interactions, and are trained for complex interactions.
Virtual receptionists offer customer support via various email, phone, chat, and social media channels. Unlike conventional customer service receptionists who work as in-house employees based in brick-and-mortar locations, virtual receptionists work remotely. They usually have more flexible hours compared to their conventional counterparts.
Also, a virtual receptionist can help businesses implement proactive customer service strategies by:
- Collecting customer information & scheduling appointments
- Anticipating customer needs & and handling customer inquiries
- Providing personalized recommendations
Best Practices for Battling Against Reactive Customer Service
Stellar customer service is crucial for any business’s survival, such as increased customer loyalty, which leads to business growth, referrals, and repeat business. So, your business must focus on fighting customer issues before they occur. Some of the best practices for battling reactive customer service include:
- Asking the customers for feedback
- Announcing your mistakes before the customers report them
- Rewarding loyal customers with discounts and offers
- Anticipating the needs of your clients
- Making every client feel appreciated
- Noticing what your clients are saying online
- Creating content that’s able to answer the common customer issues
- Including live chat on your website
- Always being available
- Initiating check-ins
- Analyzing complaints for patterns
- Creating a follow-up system
- Understanding your customers
- Sending out periodic surveys
- Maintaining regular points of communication
- Getting to know your clients
- Empowering employees
- Be transparent and honest
- Offer self-service opportunities
You can achieve all the above benefits by using virtual receptionist services. They are trained professionals who can handle all the services remotely and help you save on operational costs.
Top Reasons Why Successful Businesses Hire Virtual Receptionists
- Time is your goldmine.
- You need affordable business scalability.
- You need to maintain entrepreneurial sanity.
- You need to escape the admin jungle
- You need to streamline your business operations
- You need to improve your services and products
- You need to offer 24/7 business or customer service
- You need to maintain a stellar online strategy
- You need to avoid selling your soul to your business
- You need to increase the asset value of your business
Say Goodbye to Reactive Customer Service with a Virtual Receptionist
Excellent customer service should be proactive and not reactive. By employing proactive customer service, you can address probable issues before they become real for your customers. While you may assume this approach will need more upfront work, you can outsource the services of a virtual receptionist to save you time and energy in the long haul.
Besides, proactive customer service is fast becoming the norm in the modern and competitive business world. It is crucial to reap all the benefits the strategy has to offer. Avoiding reactive customer service and implementing proactive customer service can help avoid turning issues into painful pain points, save your customer a huge time amount, build customer loyalty and retain the loyal ones, create valuable customer feedback for better decisions, lower the need for support calls and get ahead of customer conversions among other benefits.
So, if you’re already considering switching from a reactive company to one that gives your customers proactive customer service, you can hire a virtual receptionist to help your business provide proactive customer service. Interested in using a virtual receptionist for their business to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty? Click here to learn more, or contact us to get started.