Proactive Customer Service: 9 Ways to Make It Look Easy

Have you ever had one of those days where everything just seemed to go right? You sat down at your desk and a coworker handed you your favorite coffee. Your usually full inbox was unusually empty. And you (finally) got that quarterly update from sales. 

If you can provide proactive customer service, this gives your customers the same magical feeling. 

While most customer support is reactive — you respond to issues your customers are already facing — proactive customer support identifies and deals with those problems before they happen. Solving issues preemptively feels like magic. And all it takes is the right combination of knowledge, strategy, and tools. 

In this article, we’ll show you nine ways to deliver proactive customer service.

What Is Proactive Customer Service?

Implementing proactive customer service (or proactive customer support) is when you identify and respond to issues before a customer feels the need to reach out. This can include everything from AI-powered chatbots to self-serve knowledge bases and FAQs. 

At the same time, companies are seeing spikes in contact center volume from all channels. Relying only on reactive customer service means you’re always under an avalanche of issues. But by adopting a proactive approach, your customer service team has more room to breathe (and can focus on being customer-centric).

Source: Gartner

In a nutshell, proactive customer care matters because in a highly competitive consumer with unlimited options, when you anticipate customer needs and issues before they arise, it leads to higher customer satisfaction, increased customer loyalty, and reduced support costs. By addressing potential problems early and providing timely solutions, you will prevent the frustration that leads to higher customer churn rates, and build stronger relationships with your customers. 

Customer satisfaction can also come from using contact center tools like customer service CRMs and automatic call distribution (ACD) that help your agents give the faster, more personal support that is implied in today’s customer expectations. 

For proactive customer service, first identify customer issues

To get ahead of customer issues, you first need to know where and when they’re most likely to happen. Here are a few places you can start looking.

1) From customers’ most common issues

Studies show that for every customer who reaches out with a problem or complaint, 26 stay silent.

Each customer relationship contains a treasure trove of information on their pain points. Here’s where you can start looking for common customer issues:

• Knowledge base articles: Check page views and other analytics to see which articles are most read or escalate to a phone call or chat. It could be as simple as this example from Airbnb – their clean support center layout immediately shows the most searched questions and answers:

• Chat logs: Modern business chat tools can use sentiment analysis to automatically identify issues and track the keywords that come up during negative conversations. Use this to identify the high-level topics your customers are most interested in.
• Phone calls: Voice analytics can identify customer tone and the topics discussed during complaints by using automatic conversation analysis.
• Social media: According to a Facebook study, 64% of customers would rather contact a business over social media than the phone. Using an omnichannel contact center lets you keep track of how customers talk about you online and address issues quickly.

2) From common friction points

There are common situations where your customers get confused or frustrated. These are irksome when they happen but easily avoidable with a little legwork.

Talk to your support agents about when customers come looking for help. This could include:

• Payment and plans: Look for terminology or specific plans that are confusing for potential customers. For example, your target customer might be falling between two of your plans and need help picking which one is right for them.
• Setup and onboarding: The first experience with your product or service is critical to building customer loyalty. Use automation or hands-on tutorials to walk your customers through setting up their accounts and follow up when they get stuck.
• Product pages: Customers don’t always want to have to figure everything out on their own. Address common concerns or questions head-on by including an on-page FAQ or using an AI-powered chatbot to ask specific questions.

3) From sales, marketing, and product departments

Support isn’t the only team that has deep insights into customer behavior. Sales, marketing, and product all have a vested interest in understanding customer motivations. Unfortunately, these teams — and their knowledge — often end up siloed.

Proactive support can just as easily turn into product or service updates (to make it easier to use) or marketing and sales pages (to make them easier to understand).

For example, you could surface top feature requests and customer pain points to the product team, or share common questions with marketing to update your main homepage with FAQs. Keeping the lines of communication open benefits everyone.

What Is the Difference Between Proactive and Reactive Customer Service? 

Understanding the difference between proactive and reactive customer service is key for enhancing the customer experience. 

Proactive customer service:

• Business anticipates and addresses customer needs and issues before they arise
• Messaging is planned in advance with regular communication, updates, and preventative actions
• Actively reduces support tickets which leads to higher customer loyalty

Reactive customer service:

• Involves waiting for the customer to reach out with a problem
• Responds to customer inquiries or issues after they occur and responses depend on the issue
• Focuses on putting out fires rather than preventing them which leads to customer frustration if problems are frequent or unresolved

While proactive service involves anticipating and addressing customer needs before issues arise, reactive service focuses on resolving problems after they have occurred. But the good news is that you already have the data (and maybe even the tools) you need to offer proactive service. You just need to know where to look – which we covered in the section right above!

Benefits of Proactive Customer Service

Here are a few ways that offering proactive customer support will benefit your company:

• Reduces the number of issues your agents have to deal with. A proactive strategy weeds out low-priority problems. Instead, only the most critical ones reach your agents.
• Scales up as your company grows. In a reactive world, more customers mean more issues and more agents to handle them. But proactive service and tools don’t require more agents. For example, a chatbot scales with your company so you can add more customers without additional support agent costs.
• Improves the customer experience. Proactive communication improves CSAT scores, boosts customer retention, and even increases sales. A recent study found that 87% of online shoppers abandon their carts due to confusing or difficult checkout processes — a perfect use case for proactive service.
• Improves your brand’s reputation. Consistently taking proactive measures positions a brand as attentive and reliable, an advantage in today’s market where anyone can start a business, but truly valuing and caring for the customer seems to be a lost art.
• Higher sales and revenue. This is a no-brainer, but satisfied and loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the brand to others, driving sales growth.

Fewer issues. Lower support costs. Happier customers. What’s not to like about the proactive approach? Now let’s take a look at some proactive customer service examples.

3 Examples of Proactive Customer Service

Here are three real-world examples of businesses that have successfully implemented proactive customer service.

1. Amazon

Amazon is well-known for its proactive customer service. For instance, if a delivery is delayed or lost, Amazon reaches out to the customer before they have a chance to complain (or even notice, in some cases). They always offer several solutions to choose from, such as a refund or a replacement, a discount, or free shipping on future orders. 

2. Delta Air Lines

Delta Air Lines is great at providing proactive customer service through their Fly Delta app, that will “help you save time, explore new destinations and manage your travel even when the unexpected happens.”

The app allows you to track your bags and receive alerts in real-time, and navigate any airport with an interactive airport map. It notifies passengers of flight delays, gate changes, or potential disruptions well in advance. Plus, in the event of flight cancellations or missed connections, you can use the app to quickly rebook your flight without needing to wait in line or contact customer service.

3. Spotify

Spotify implements proactive customer service by sending users personalized updates and recommendations based on their listening habits. For example, they may notify users of new releases from their favorite artists or suggest playlists that match their preferences. 

And, by using machine learning to monitor app performance, it can detect patterns indicating potential issues, such as frequent app crashes, and will proactively push updates or provide troubleshooting tips to users. This minimizes disruptions and enhances overall user satisfaction by resolving issues before they escalate.

These are just a few examples of how proactive customer service can lead to increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and a stronger brand reputation.

How to Implement Proactive Customer Service

So now that you have a good idea of why proactive service is important, which problems you can solve before you lose you a customer, and the benefits to your business of a proactive approach, it’s time to put together your toolkit. In fact, most modern contact centers and customer support tools are well-suited for taking a proactive customer service approach. 

Funnel Stage	Proactive Support Tools
Preempting issues Before customers know they have a problem.	FAQ Automated messages Chatbots & IVA Customer journey Social listening
Self-serve When customers have issues and go looking for resources themselves.	Knowledge base AI-powered chatbots IVR
Contact center If self-service options don’t work and customers directly reach out to the support team.	Live chat Customer service CRM Screen pop
Ongoing feedback Using customer requirements and recurring issues to improve proactive support.	Surveys Automated check-ins Conversations analysis

At the top of the table just above, you have all the opportunities to address common issues before a customer even knows they need help. For example, FAQs and knowledge bases, product announcements, or automated messages. 

One level down is when a customer knows they need help. At this stage, you can proactively supply resources through AI-powered chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR). 

Finally, for those customers who need a personal touch, you can use contact center tools like customer service management (CRM) software or screen pop to help agents resolve issues quickly. 

Throughout the entire funnel, you can collect customer feedback and use feedback loops to understand problems and improve your approach.

1) Knowledge base articles and FAQs

Knowledge base articles and FAQs are one of the best low-tech tools for proactively helping customers. According to research from the team at Vanilla, 79% of customers expect organizations to provide self-service tools (and want to use them before reaching out to customer support). 

Unfortunately, too many companies let their knowledge bases fall out of date. Remember, organized and in-depth knowledge base articles are a massive opportunity to delight customers. 

Here are a few tips:

1. Organize your knowledge base around the customer journey. Use categories and topics that quickly tell your customer where to go. For example, you might break up your knowledge base into sections on “Getting Started,” “Pricing and Plans,” and “Account Setup.”
2. Use a standard structure for all help articles. Most customers will end up reading multiple help docs to answer their questions. By using a standard structure or template, you reduce their cognitive load and avoid unnecessary follow-up calls.
3. Add videos whenever possible. Not every customer will sit and read through a long or complex help document. Instead, a Vidyard report found that 68% of people would rather watch a video to solve a problem than speak with an agent.
4. Audit your content regularly. Set a regular schedule to check your content for accuracy, readability, and relevance (as well as update screenshots and images).

2) AI-powered chatbots

Chatbots have become more sophisticated in the past years and can now resolve many common customer issues. However, chatbots and intelligent virtual agents (IVA) can also get ahead of problems by detecting subjects and making real-time suggestions. 

For example, an IVA on your pricing or plan page could suggest a plan based on company size or needs. While a chatbot on a product page could ask questions and then offer relevant paths, help docs, or knowledge base articles.

3) Live chat with skill-based routing

Intelligent virtual agents are great for handling routine customer queries, but many support requests still require a human touch. When you hand off a question to a live agent, you want to make sure your customers are getting the help they need right away. 

Skill-based routing is when you match a customer’s needs to an experienced agent. Using context (what page the customer is on) and analysis (scanning the conversation for topics or keywords), you can route the customer to an appropriate agent. Making the right match means less idle time for everyone and a quicker resolution time.

4) IVR with update announcements

Your contact or call center is still the first place most customers reach out to when they have a problem. The good news is that you can use your company’s phone system to address known issues proactively. For example, a customer might call in because a feature they regularly use stopped working. 

While interactive voice response (IVR) can help them navigate to the right agent, it can also keep them informed. It might seem obvious, but a simple update message can let customers know you understand their issues and are working to fix them — all without talking to a live agent.

5) Support CRM and screen pop for support agents

At some point, customers will always need to talk to a support agent. There’s no getting around that. However, you can still bring a proactive approach to phone calls. 72% of customers expect you to know who they are, what they’ve purchased, and their past interactions before they call. This context is what allows you to pre-emptively offer solutions instead of making customers repeat their issues. 

To give your agents this data, use a tool like Nextiva’s screen pop that instantly highlights important customer data before they even answer the call.

You can customize screen pop to show the data that matters most to your business, including:

• Customer name and company
• Recent customer survey responses
• Overall experience score
• Last interaction sentiment
• Account value

6) Surveys and real-time feedback

A critical part of any proactive customer service strategy is listening to your customers and understanding their needs. Set up automatic surveys or real-time ratings for after each interaction to get continuous feedback on how you’re doing and where you can improve. You can create automated messages based on these responses. 

Alternatively, use survey data to proactively identify customers who need additional help or are facing bigger issues. If someone leaves a one-star rating or angry comments, you can escalate to a call from an agent or support manager.

7) Support automation along the customer journey

Exceptional customer service feels like it happens right before you need it. But it’s impossible to manually monitor every customer interaction and jump in at the right time. However, you’re constantly gathering data about your customer from interactions, surveys, and feedback. All this data creates a customer journey — a “map” of their current feelings about your company and brand.

Customer journeys are powerful tools for support (and sales), and one of their best uses is for triggering customer service automation. Customer service automation is a process where you reduce human involvement in support by automatically supplying resources at the right time. 

Here are a few examples of how you can use customer journey data and automation to provide proactive support:

• Automatically send welcome emails and educational materials when new customers sign up.
• Follow up with customers who have been inactive for several days or who haven’t finished their onboarding.
• Send a ‘free offer’ to loyal customers (or whenever you get lower than a 4-star rating.)
• Automatically escalate conversations to a support manager when you’ve received multiple support tickets.
• Send resources and videos on specific features your customers haven’t been using much.

8) Product and feature updates

Every new product or feature update changes the customer experience — both for better and worse. In a reactive world, you’d wait for customers to interact with your new service or tools and reach out. But that’s rarely the case. Instead, you can be proactive about upcoming changes and how they’ll impact your customers. 

For example, you could set up automated campaigns before launching with links to resources or information on how they can get in touch. Or, for high-value customers, you could reach out personally using your VoIP call center to walk them through the changes. Even if a change negatively impacts a customer, they’ll appreciate that you set expectations early on and were ready to help.

9) Social listening

Social media is where you’re most likely to hear the rumblings of an incoming support crisis. It’s impossible to monitor every conversation that’s happening about you. However, an omnichannel contact center like Nextiva organizes your social media (and phone, SMS, email, and chat) into a more manageable way. 

When a customer mentions your brand name or sends you a message, you’ll be alerted and can see what they wrote and respond. Those customer interactions are visible across your omnichannel contact center. So if the conversation moves from Twitter to chat to phone, you’ll have the history and context to provide excellent and proactive customer support.

Nextiva Helps You Deliver Proactive Customer Service

Every great magic trick relies on misdirection. You need to understand how your audience acts so you can distract them while you fill your sleeves with cards or hide a rabbit in your hat.

Proactive support follows the same process. Once you know how your customers act before they come looking for help, you can be there ready with the right tools and resources. And just like a magic trick, they’ll leave feeling excited, delighted, and inspired.