Tips for creating a proactive customer service strategy

Customers today expect fast responses from businesses on all of their preferred digital channels. They don’t want to have to change channels or repeat themselves over and over to get their issues resolved. To provide a good customer experience, you must ensure that wherever and whenever your customers reach out to you, they receive helpful responses with conversational consistency, and an efficient resolution.

But to provide a great customer experience, you should aim to provide the resources and communication that make it so they never need to reach out to you for help in the first place.

The best care experience is one your customers never need to have

One of the most important things a modern call center can do to keep customers happy is to anticipate possible issues — and engage proactively with the customers to eliminate the issues that would cause them to reach out for help before they actually arise.

Organizations that use a contact center software solution to listen to, analyze, and proactively communicate with customers are at a big advantage over the competition and can easily set themselves apart — cultivating brand trust and customer loyalty. By harnessing AI-powered customer insights to identify potential issues early on, you can be more proactive with your outreach, alerting customers to issues before they become aware of them, and well before they ever feel the need to reach out to you for help.

Look for a solution that offers AI for speech and text analytics. This technology (which is advancing rapidly) can be extremely helpful in preparing your agents to respond appropriately to individual customers — by identifying their mood, sentiment, and intent — right from the outset of their conversation. The best contact center software also provides AI-driven analytics that can give your managers real-time actionable insights to help your team spot trends and early warnings.

Find the right software to easily provide proactive customer service

With the right tools in place, you’ll be able to meet customer expectations at every stage of the resolution journey — even before that journey officially begins.

To provide helpful proactive customer care, look for solutions that offer the following features and capabilities:

AI-powered social listening

This lets you know when customers are discussing your brand or products across a variety of digital and social channels in real time, even when your brand isn’t @mentioned in the conversation.

The best AI-powered social listening tools help businesses instantly identify the trends, topics, and voices that matter most to their customers — so they can apply those insights to influence their strategy and ultimately drive better business decisions.

Contact center intelligence

Good AI-powered contact center intelligence can help your team identify the most common reasons that customers are reaching out to you — and it can surface actionable insights that will help you address those issues so future customers don’t encounter them at all.

Many companies have limited or missing sets of conversation and customer experience data. This is a huge challenge because their existing contact center systems weren’t designed to understand unstructured conversation data.

The power of contact center intelligence is that it uses advanced AI models to analyze customer conversations and agent responses in real time, and then provides actionable data to deliver proactive and more personalized care.

Automatic alerts

Get ahead of issues when they do arise by sending automated and personalized messages at scale. For example, real-time conversational analytics can inform you if customers are having issues processing payments on your website. With this information, you can then proactively send out messages informing customers about the issue, and provide updates until the issue is resolved — avoiding spikes in contact center volume, and most importantly, building trust with your customers.

Sprinklr Service is built on the industry’s first unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform — leveraging advanced AI listening across 30+ modern and traditional channels. Sprinklr’s AI-powered listening gives your teams the insights they need to proactively create better customer experiences at every touchpoint.

To learn more about the importance of taking a proactive care approach, and for tips to create a contact center built for the modern customer, download our Strategic Handbook for Sprinklr Service.