Proactive outreach is a valuable tool to improve customer satisfaction and increase customer retention. From appointment reminders to follow-up texts that anticipate customer needs, proactive communication helps you make personalized connections with your customers.
Proactive communication doesn’t have to place a burden on customer service departments. Businesses can use intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) to deliver responsive customer communication that improves customer satisfaction and drives profit.
What is Proactive Customer Communication?
Proactive customer communication as a business strategy involves reaching out to customers first rather than waiting for them to initiate contact. Proactive communication campaigns can include providing customers with information, updates, recommendations, and support before they have to ask for it.
In our digital age, it’s more important than ever to pay attention to how customers prefer to communicate and adapt outreach to fit those preferences. The headline benefits of proactive customer communication are twofold: a) it improves customer satisfaction, and b) it enhances the overall customer experience (CX).
Companies use proactive outreach to accomplish these goals first by connecting with customers on a personal, proactive level that anticipates their needs. Second, it connects them to timely solutions. And by using conversational AI as a fundamental tool in their CX strategy, companies can stay ready to scale their customer communications as demand increases.
Proactive outreach frequently involves follow-ups with customers who have already made a purchase. Often, follow-ups take the form of appointment reminders, policy updates, and maintenance notifications. Communication teams distribute follow-ups across a variety of communication channels, including text, email, phone, social media, and chat. But you can also use proactive communication in marketing communications beyond customer surveys to help nurture sales leads.
A New Approach to Proactive Outreach
From a CX standpoint, proactive communication offers a lot of advantages. Engaged customers appreciate when you make an effort to reach out and check in. Doing so is key to building strong, positive relationships. However, traditional avenues of proactive outreach can be both time-consuming and costly for some companies to adopt. They can consume customer service resources and have significant impacts on headcount and budgets.
Today’s businesses can take advantage of AI-driven analytics to understand how their individual customers prefer to communicate and receive support. Back in the day, surveys were the best way to gather this type of behavioral information. But they are no longer enough.
Fortunately, you can deploy conversational AI solutions that automate many forms of proactive outreach. Advanced tools, including AI-enhanced speech and text analytics, can give you real insight into customer preferences. And these insights can translate into strategies that help build connections, convert leads into sales, and improve customer satisfaction.
Let’s take a look at eight use cases of proactive customer communication. In the process, we’ll examine the benefits of proactive outreach and how your business can implement it as part of your CX strategy.
1. Use Conversational AI to Power Personalized Service
Advances in conversational AI have made it possible to reach customers on a personal level via automated tools like IVAs. Your business can provide personalized service without involving a customer service agent.
Personalized follow-up messages help customers feel a sense of connection to your brand and can help improve customer satisfaction rates. But what form should these messages take? The data strongly indicate that customers prefer to be reached by text. Only 34.1% of emails in North America actually get opened. But text messages, by and large, do get opened. And they allow customers to respond efficiently and at times that are convenient for them.
You can design conversational AI to enhance proactive messages, including appointment reminders, promotional offers, and membership rewards statements. Whatever form personalized communications take, customers want to have two-way conversations with your brand. 85% of customers want to be able to both receive and respond to messages from businesses. The ability to proactively offer the communication tools your customers want will help you gradually improve customer satisfaction.
2. Follow-ups Can Reduce Customer Service Requests
Proactive communication can help businesses educate customers and provide them with the resources they need before any issues occur. With tools like IVAs that allow you to monitor customer interactions and analyze customer data, you can identify potential issues before they become full-blown problems. Your teams can use proactive communication to support or assist your customers and prevent the issue from escalating.
Let’s say a customer has expressed dissatisfaction with a product or service. Businesses can use proactive outreach to address their concerns and try to resolve the issue before it becomes a major problem.
By enabling the self-service capability customers crave, you can use proactive outreach campaigns to help customers resolve issues before they contact customer service. This can lead to two words that are magic to any customer service manager’s ears: reduced volume.
3. Use Marketing Communications to Cross-Sell to Your Loyal Customers
Whatever your vector, your competitors try to lure away your customers – even your loyal ones. And successfully retaining loyal customers is even more important to your bottom line than converting new leads. Customers who are already in the fold will welcome new product offers and messaging.
But when it comes to earning repeat business, one of the most effective means of proactive communication is members rewards messaging. 69% of customers are influenced by loyalty programs when shopping. Loyalty programs are key pillars to help improve customer satisfaction. If you reach out via personal messaging and proactively let them know they can use their rewards points to upgrade or renew, you can keep them in the fold before the competition has the chance to lure them away.
4. Send Follow-up Messages That Provide Updates on Orders and Shipments
Another way to take advantage of proactive communication is to give customers regular updates, so they know the status and progress of orders or requests. Order status updates might seem like a basic standard of service, but when something goes awry, giving your customers timely updates is incredibly valuable to keeping that customer’s trust.
Businesses can not only help alleviate customer anxiety but improve overall CX. And they can accomplish this goal while reducing the number of incoming inquiries they receive about the order status. All told, proactive communication around order status and delivery can help you meet customer expectations.
5. Send Appointment Reminders
Appointment reminders are another type of valuable proactive communication. Businesses that provide services that require appointments or tickets use appointment reminders to secure customer confirmation. Customers report that they prefer receiving appointment reminders via text.
For businesses, one tangible benefit of appointment reminders is that they reduce the number of missed appointments. In healthcare, for instance, every no-show appointment requires the provider to reschedule the patient. Additionally, the doctor misses an opportunity to see another patient who could have taken the original time slot and benefitted from the visit.
6. Issue Customer Surveys to Solicit Feedback
Proactive marketing communication via surveys is a great way to secure customer feedback and reviews. But it’s essential to make sure the survey asking for feedback doesn’t produce too much work for customers. Yet another benefit of proactive communication via conversational AI is that it allows you to customize how you solicit responses from your customers.
Further, proactive communication is a highly effective means of getting surveys into the hands of the customers you want to target. And from their perspective, feedback requests demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction. Internally, companies can share survey results across teams and use the data to update their CX strategies.
7. Send Preemptive Maintenance Notifications and Policy Updates
There’s nothing more frustrating than getting a limited-service notification right when you expect and need full access. Whether the cause is an unexpected outage or a scheduled maintenance, all that matters to customers is they don’t have service when they need it. You can use proactive communication to flag potential delays or disruptions in service for your customers.
Proactive outreach offers a similar advantage when it comes to informing your customers about important policy updates. By giving customers guidelines that help them fully understand the impact of policy updates before they go into effect, companies can measurably reduce the friction that results from customers feeling surprised.
8. Use Follow-up Texts to Earn Long-term Loyalty
Text is a medium that gives customers a positive sense of control over their brand interactions. Fortunately, conversational AI products like intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) allow businesses to create personalized recommendations and offers for individual customers. These recommendations can then be shared with the customer via follow-up text, increasing the likelihood that they will make a purchase.
Follow-up texts give customers helpful tips and resources related to the products or services they have purchased, which enhances their experience and satisfaction. They can also provide customers with personalized recommendations and suggestions based on their previous interactions with the company. These personally tailored efforts can further drive revenue and build engagement with your company.
Proactive Communication to Improve Customer Satisfaction
Businesses can build stronger relationships and improve overall customer satisfaction by connecting with customers personally, which helps drive retention. And there’s little that affects the bottom line more directly than customer retention. Indeed, just a 5% increase in retention produces more than a 25% increase in profit. Return customers are often motivated to keep coming back.
The numbers are clear: One net effect of proactive communication is a 9% increase in customer value enhancement scores. But to be effective, that communication must be responsive and accurate. If a company’s proactive outreach raises more questions than it answers, the benefits quickly evaporate.
Because of these factors, automated marketing communication tools that use conversational AI offer a significant advantage. They give businesses a way to create proactive outreach messaging personalized to each customer and responsive to their needs.
Mosaicx Conversational AI Powers Proactive Communication
The value of using proactive outreach to improve customer satisfaction is overwhelming because the math is quite simple. It costs five times as much to attract a new customer as it does to keep an existing one.
Remember, inbound customer service in a contact center is just one piece of the CX puzzle. Proactive outreach allows you to share important information with customers. Personalized and contextualized messaging helps create lasting bonds, just as proactive service options increase customer satisfaction and help drive brand loyalty.
Mosaicx is a cloud-based, AI-powered customer service platform that can help you create or elevate your proactive outreach strategies. The platform helps businesses across a wide range of industries to improve customer satisfaction and modernize customer experience. Whatever your industry, Mosaicx can help your business create personalized CX that makes your savvy customers feel included, important, and personally invested.