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6 Ways You Can Drive Proactive Customer Engagement—And Why You Should

Published January 19, 2022

Proactive customer engagement isn’t a one-time event.

Done right, Proactive Customer Engagement makes it easy for customers to engage with your brand, and it improves customer experience in the process. Other outcomes and common measures of greater customer engagement include:

  • Value, measured by increased share of wallet, overall spend, and product usage.

  • Advocacy, measured by the degree to which customers recommend your products and services to others.

  • Retention, measured by relationship duration and customer lifetime value.

When we talk about Proactive Customer Engagement, the key word is “proactive.”

From the organizational perspective, this means reaching out to customers with the right information at the right time—and moving beyond just being proactive to anticipating customer needs, increasing relevance, and boosting engagement.

From the customer perspective, it means that they’re able to proactively engage with your brand and gain access to whatever they want and need from you on their terms: when and where they want, and how they want.

The value of more engaged customers is significant, and that’s why many organizations are developing strategies to enable proactive interactions with their customers, as well as making it easier for customers to get answers to their questions—ensuring they don’t have to go looking for them.

If your organization is interested in boosting engagement with your customers, these 6 strategies are among the most common ways leading organizations do so:

  1. Know your customer: Use tools like persona to understand groups of customers, but also use your data to better understand them at an individual level.

  2. Leverage the data surrounding your customer: Every organization has rich data about their customers. The challenge is to use this knowledge to better anticipate customer needs based on patterns, history, and preferences.

  3. Make it easy for customers to connect: Facilitate connections across channels and interactions, including offline, online, direct, and indirect.

  4. Enable intuitive self-serve options: Ensure these options are simple to find and use, making it easy to get answers and resolve issues. This doesn’t mean self-service replaces other channels, but that it provides additional ways to get what customers need.

  5. Ensure swift resolution to any issues: This “fast” resolution should be “fast” as defined by your customer, not by the limitations of your processes, systems, or structure.

  6. Show them you care: In aggregate, doing the 5 things above will go a long way towards showing customers you care. But don’t stop there.

The bottom line is that proactive customer engagement isn't a one-time event. It's an important part of a holistic customer experience. It’s about always looking for better ways to engage and anticipating your customers’ needs through proactive experiences.

In other words, proactive customer engagement is about the relationship. It’s from the first touchpoint on. It’s about delivering value at every interaction your customer has with your business, whether it’s with the front office or the back.

And it’s ultimately about helping you build a highly loyal and more valuable customer base, creating unassailable relationships at every stage of the customer journey—and driving business growth as a result.

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