Customers anticipate that every interaction is a personalized one. There are countless ways to implement personalization throughout the customer journey, with proactive support having the potential to fill the largest bucket. Proactive support, which focuses solely on reaching out to your customer before they reach out to you, is driven through proactive messaging.
While this might sound like a tall order for service teams, proactive messaging can be implemented on a large or small scale. The true balancing act is making a large number of customers feel personally engaged, while also benefiting the customer experience as a whole. These proactive strategies make customers feel seen and valued in such a way that they engage with and stay loyal to your brand.
In this blog, we’ll talk about the types of proactive messaging that can be deployed and the five benefits that CX teams reap throughout the customer journey.
What Is Proactive Messaging?
Proactive messaging is the customer service strategy for reaching out to customers before they reach out to your company across each and every communication channel. With proactive messaging, you can influence the customer’s purchasing decision by presenting them with new products or services or by providing guidance on a product or service they’ve interacted with. By connecting with customers in this way you’re able to create a longer- and stronger-lasting impression.
Choosing Your Proactive Messaging Strategy
There are two primary strategies to choose from when establishing proactive messaging. Let’s explore your options:
Trigger-based messaging
This proactive messaging strategy is based on predetermined criteria. When the customer takes an action that meets said criteria, they will receive a message encouraging them to take the next step; whether it be to complete a purchase, provide feedback, or provide other content to explore.
A perfect example of trigger-based proactive messaging is requesting feedback from a customer that just completed a customer support interaction. In this instance, your criteria would be commencing and completing a support agent via the chat. The messaging that they would receive once completed would ask them for feedback on the support experience provided to them by the agent.
This style of messaging furthers the personalization strategy of the brand. By meeting a customer — even a dissatisfied one — where they’re at, you can produce a higher level of engagement and a positive mindset towards your brand.
Broadcasted messaging
Broadcasted messaging is usually seen in the form of a banner or pop-up in a high-traffic area such as the homepage. This strategy is a more blanketed approach to messaging. Rather than being pushed out to customers by an action, broadcasted messages can be targeted to specific customers through strategic placement.
5 Benefits of Proactive Messaging
Proactive messaging’s success hinges upon identifying high-value customer interaction points. This strategic implementation allows you to engage with customers in a way that resonates and causes them to take action. Here are five benefits of proactive messaging:
1. Acquire
Proactive messaging allows you to more effectively push your customers through the sales funnel. New customers can feel encouraged to take an action, such as create a profile or shop a sale, while unengaged customers can be incentivized to shop for user-specific discounts or deals to re-engage them.
2. Influence
It’s hard to ignore a well-placed product suggestion with great imagery. Get customers interested in popular products or services, or entice them with similar products to ones they have already interacted with, with the use of proactive messaging.
3. Support
With the help of an internal support database, you can set up proactive answers to frequently asked questions on product-specific pages. For example, if you often get questions on the sizing availability of a certain product, set an automatic message to go out to customers answering the question before they even have a chance to ask.
4. Educate
New or unengaged customers can benefit from strategically timed trigger-based messages. These messages can show them a world of helpful content or unknown features, making it hard to not take action.
5. Retain
When you see that a customer has not logged in or made a purchase in a number of months, utilize proactive messaging to gather feedback on why they are unengaged or to tease a highly-asked-for feature.
Proactive Messaging with Kustomer
Kustomer provides an opportunity for seamless proactive support. Don’t fall behind on the future of customer support.
