We recently asked our members if they thought their customers were more demanding of customer service today than they were a few years ago. A whopping 80% said ‘Yes’.

So while there are many implications for these skyrocketing expectations, one opportunity as we see it includes moving beyond reactive-only contact.  But…our research on Proactive Contact and Alerts found that only 60% of companies offer proactive service to customers.

So, what are some of the barriers that prevent companies from offering proactive contact?

• Strategic barriers: Building the business case for proactive customer service can be challenging since returns appear ambiguous or delayed. Moreover, faced with innumerable options at which companies could send proactive information, they struggle to identify meaningful opportunities at which they should send proactive messages.   Read More »

Some time back, I wrote about CCC’s latest research on proactive contact and alerts. Our research indicated that most companies focus on providing critical proactive alerts, but hesitate to extend proactive contact to value-added (seemingly “non-critical”) areas. But…our research found that two kinds of value-added messages can create tangible value for the customer AND the business:

• Proactive messages that pre-empt inbound calls
• Proactive messages that increase the utilization of products and services

Since we have already highlighted how companies in developed markets are using these two kinds of value-added alerts in our research, I thought it’d be interesting to see similar execution in emerging economies. Here are my favorite three uses of value-added messages from India. Read More »

A few recent events—such as the Yahoo Mail outage, a round of power outages following the earthquake in Japan, and a string of flight cancellations due the extreme winter in New Zealand—illustrate one thing in common: the need for companies to provide proactive information and service to affected customers.

Given the buzz around proactive service over the last few years, it’s easy to imagine that most companies proactively provide information and solutions to customers for critical issues as a minimum service standard. However, CCC’s latest research on proactive contact and alerts indicates that 45% of companies do not leverage proactive contact, even for critical issues. But maintaining a strictly reactive service strategy can cause an influx of costly inbound calls, negative publicity, and customer effort.

So, if you’re trying to move away from reactive ‘firefighting’ to proactive service, what are the things that you need to keep in mind? Read More »

The buzz around proactive service has been increasing across the past few years. But….most companies focus on providing critical alerts – think flight cancellation messages or power outage alerts. Fewer companies extend proactive service beyond critical to value-added areas — such as helping customers forward resolve issues or educating customers on how to use products. We found that most companies are just not convinced that offering value-added contact is a viable business strategy.

However, our latest research indicates that, implemented correctly, value-added proactive contact can unlock substantial efficiency and effectiveness gains for the business, and also improve customer experience and lower customer effort.  That said, implementing value-added contact is complex, since customer preferences of the right contact reason, frequency, and channel can differ widely.  

Here’s how you can make value-added contact relevant to the customer and profitable for the business: Read More »