A few years ago, I wished I didn’t have to be put through the IVR before talking to a real human. Now, I wish I didn’t have to talk to a real human; I prefer finding solutions or troubleshooting an issue myself. As a customer, I have not stopped purchasing products and services, but my expectations from companies and brands have not stopped evolving either.

When a company stops at answering a question, I thank them for their Support and move on with my life. But if a company gives me a refund when I experience poor video playback even before I ring them up, I wouldn’t stop at just a ‘thank you’. I’d talk about it for months to my peers and friends. The experience will stand out for me as will the company.

So, in a recent webinar that we hosted, Arun Mani, the MD at Freshdesk, talked about the different ways in which you can provide Proactive Support to your customers.

When you resolve an issue for the customer though they didn’t want to report it, you’d have wowed them.

Typically, Proactive support is to firefight issues even before the customer raises the alarm, right? But that isn’t the case always. Data shows that nearly 94% people don’t call support when they have a problem. This could probably be due to the shift towards self-service tools, people don’t prefer talking to customer care about the issue, or due to low friction channels like chat. They ignore the issue and go on about their day. Whatever be the reason, this opens up a lot of opportunities for companies to reach out to customers proactively and sort their issue out.

When you resolve an issue for the customer that they aren’t yet aware of, you’d have wowed them.

Let’s say there was an issue or a bug in your product but your customer didn’t know about it. This could be because the issue isn’t impacting the customer’s experience directly or immediately. For example, when a flight gets canceled or delayed. The airlines is aware of the delay even before the passengers can get to the airport. However, the message is not relayed to the passenger. Consider this—if the airlines proactively reached out to the passengers and informed them of the delay, it would have saved the passengers their time and frustration and saved the airlines their reputation.

When you anticipate issues and solve them even before they occur, you’d have wowed your customers.

 So far, we’ve discussed two scenarios where the customer doesn’t care enough to tell the support team about an issue or when the customer is unaware of the issue. Now, here’s a third scenario—let’s say there’s a potential issue that hasn’t occurred yet. This has everything to do with how you anticipate roadblocks in customer experience and have a solution in place for them. This way, you can fix the potential issue at the first sight of it, you know how to troubleshoot when the issue presents itself, or you have pre-empted the issue by fixing the product or service. For example, Caratlane, an online jewelry store, anticipates people having trouble with perceiving the size of the jewelry they’d like to buy online. They compare it with everyday objects so that customers have a better idea of whether the pendant is too big or too small for them. This can not only help them improve their conversions but also delight the customer with a friction free shopping experience!

In the webinar we hosted yesterday, we discussed these scenarios in detail and plenty of other important things around proactive support. We finished it with a very informative Q&A session as well. If you missed our webinar, don’t sweat it. Watch the recording of our presentation on our webinar page and find out how you can implement proactive support right away.

Meanwhile, we are looking for stories of proactive support from you, our readers. If you have interesting stories where you delivered proactive customer support or a support agent proactively helped you resolve an issue, send them to us at [email protected]

Top 3 interesting stories will receive a $50 Amazon gift card from us.

The post [Webinar Recap] A Deep dive into Proactive Support appeared first on Freshdesk Blogs.