Customers today are far more demanding than the past and their expectation towards companies have increased a lot. Proactive digital assistance is a good solution to satisfy these expectation; if it is done in the right manner, it offers to customers the help they need when they need it, or even before!
Today there are some companies that try to exceed the expectations of their customers using different strategies; others, instead, keep on following their usual engagement and sales strategy.
It is clear that the first type of company will have far more opportunities for success and to gain customers' interest, while all the others will make much more effort.
It is proven that it requires more work to resolve problems after they occur than trying to prevent them. The proof comes to interesting data from NewVoiceMedia's research, that say 62 Billion dollars is lost by U.S. Companies each year, due to bad Customer Experience.
Who has the upper hand?
Traditionally, when it was time to decide the products, markets and trends, businesses ruled and consequently, customers followed their instructions and felt the necessity to buy everything they were offered. In this way, the customer "passively" bought everything that was put on the market.
Nowadays it is different; the interactions between the company and the consumer don't follow a vertical logic anymore, but a horizontal one. Hence, the consumer is at the same level of the company.
Now companies have to adapt to the customer's tastes, and especially if they have to discover consumer's necessities, to offer the product that fits better for them.
The increasingly high expectations of customers
This change of the paradigm has given to the customers a lot more power, and now they have more and more expectations toward a product or service. This is encouraged also by two other factors: the great knowledge spread through the internet and the enormous increase of competition in every market sector.
In customer care, customers have become very demanding, and they want a high-quality service, accessible from every channel and always ready to help them in a matter of seconds.
Expectations turn into the possibility of being able to interact in real-time with an agent through a live chat or by choosing the most convenient time to be contacted back.
Proactive service value
Let's consider this scenario: you enter in a shop and walk among the shelves for a while but can't find what you need, so you search a shop assistant and find him at the cash desk. How do you feel? Wouldn't you prefer him to come to you offering to help?
The same thing happens on digital shops, and generally on every website that offers a service. Somebody thinks that customers could be annoyed or scared by the "intrusion" of a customer service chat, for example; they are wrong.
Customers have a very positive attitude towards proactive engagement. When done right, proactive engagement can be very productive; a good engagement can transform an abandoned cart into a purchase.
While reactive chat is more typically applied to customer support goals, a proactive one is useful for improving services or segmented services to high-value customers.
With proactivity, customer care is no longer confined to post-sales support, but it can guide and support customers during the entire selling process. Offering to the customer the right answer at the right moment is a key intangible asset when it comes to closing a potential sale that otherwise might have been lost.
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