Proactive vs Reactive Customer Service: Benefits and Best Practices

Customer service is central to a company’s success, brand image, and audience’s loyalty. HubSpot’s State of Service Trends Report shows that in the past two years, 75% of CRM leaders have been receiving more customer service tickets than ever before. 

In response to this growing demand, businesses are increasingly relying on two key approaches to customer service: proactive and reactive. Do you need the two? The short answer is yes. Each has their advantages, and when combined, they ensure both timely problem-solving and long-term growth. Let’s take a deeper dive for more details.

Understanding Proactive and Reactive Customer Service

The impact of customer service on brand image and customer satisfaction is undeniable, so it would be wise to make the most of both approaches, as they each serve its own purpose and deserve to be integrated into the company’s operations. 

Proactive vs reactive customer service — what’s the difference? The image below offers a brief overview.

Reactive Customer Support

What is reactive customer service? It’s the assistance provided in response to customer inquiries or issues as they arise through various channels — whether it’s technical IT support, call centers, or live chat and social media. 

Advantages of reactive customer support include: 

• handles immediate customer requests;
• preserves flexibility and reactivity to unpredictable situations;
• ensures close contact with the audience;
• remains up-to-date with the emerging challenges;
• allows businesses to respond directly to customer needs.

However, despite these advantages, reactive customer support still has some areas for improvement:

• might overlook long-term service improvement;
• may result in a long resolution time if the number of tickets is high. 

Proactive Customer Support

This approach involves taking proactive steps to prevent issues and improve the customer experience before problems arise. A company uses data, automation, and customer feedback to improve satisfaction with the brand. 

As Mukul Garg from Forbes notes, proactivity ensures personalization: 

Gone are the days of generic, one-size-fits-all support. Leveraging customer data, proactive support caters to individual needs. Imagine a travel booking platform that proactively sends weather alerts and rebooking options to customers headed to a region experiencing unexpected storms. This personalized approach demonstrates not only that the company cares, but also that it anticipates its customers’ concerns.

Its advantages are immense. Proactive support:

• reduces the volume of support tickets;
• boosts customer retention;
• positions your brand as customer-centric;
• contributes to the company’s agility and adaptability;
• enhances customer trust. 

However, here are the challenges of proactive customer support: 

• requires advanced data and regular updates; 
• can be resource-intensive, for example, when it comes to developing chatbots.

Examples of Reactive and Proactive Customer Service

To understand the capabilities of both support types, let’s examine the typical tasks they deal with. 

Examples of Reactive Customer Support

When it comes to this type of support, consultants quickly analyze and resolve emerging customer issues to maintain customer satisfaction. Let’s explore these reactive customer service examples: 

• Live chat. It’s common for companies to feature live chat assistance for users with urgent questions. A possible example could be a login error that prevents customers from using a service or making a purchase. They contact customer support, which immediately arranges a password reset and checks if any in-system breakdown was at play.
• Phone support. Support specialists offer assistance via voice calls — this is a popular option for urgent tasks. Let’s imagine a situation where a buyer had an unpleasant CX  after purchasing a low-quality product. This person contacts customer service via phone, and support arranges for a replacement item and initiates a return of the faulty product.
• Automated chatbots. Today, many requests are processed with the help of chatbots that react to keywords provided by the users. For example, a chatbot appears when a user types “cancel my subscription,” offering step-by-step guidance to complete the process.
• Email support. It’s a traditional support channel that addresses less time-sensitive issues. To illustrate, a customer has noticed a bug in the app and has sent a message via email and receives a detailed response with troubleshooting steps.

Examples of Proactive Customer Service

A typical trajectory of proactive support involves providing resources or measures that minimize the need to contact the consultants, decreasing frustration and unnecessary workload. 

• Knowledge base and FAQ. Customers often prefer to solve their issues themselves. Online resources give them the necessary information and answers to most common questions — this decreases consultants’ workload. For instance, a customer has a question about how a feature of the purchased app works and visits a knowledge base instead of contacting the live chat.
• Feature or bug notifications. A service provider notices that some of its servers don’t operate as expected, so it predicts that a portion of its user base will experience delays or crashes today. Instead of waiting for complaints, the company sends an SMS or email notification, explaining the current situation and when the issue will be fixed. 
• Detailed onboarding. New users often experience difficulties with setting up their accounts or navigating the functions of a newly purchased tool. That’s why a company can develop an interactive and personalized onboarding with a tutorial that offers step-by-step guidelines. 
• Product/feature recommendations. Users receive recommendations based on their past preferences, search history, and behaviors. 
• Feedback requests. Proactive support significantly relies on surveys and forms that invite customers to voice their opinions. For example, after interacting with support, customers are encouraged to share feedback, allowing the team to identify areas for improvement.

These examples of reactive and proactive customer service illustrate that both types have their value, and you can learn how to make them naturally contribute to each other. For instance, reactive customer support collects data that can later be helpful for new improvements, while proactive customer service focuses on steps that decrease the workload on the team. 

Proactive vs Reactive Customer Support

You can profit from implementing both types of support, but understanding when they should be used will allow for their effective collaboration. While proactive customer service is often considered the ideal approach in innovation-driven environments, it’s not realistic to predict every issue. So, you might want to consider your industry and previous experience when choosing how much to use each approach. 

When to Use Reactive Customer Support

As a rule, reactive customer support is most helpful when customers want personalized help and solutions to real-time concerns. No matter how much you invest in your proactive care and how good it is, some issues will always arise, and your consultants will need to deal with them. Reactive service is useful in these cases: 

• Addressing one-off customer requests. Unfortunately, not all customers’ challenges and needs can be foreseen — that’s what makes reactive customer support so popular even today. This can be caused by a technical bug, a delayed order, or an unpleasant conflict with a company’s worker. This is further complicated by 68% of users expecting their ticket to be resolved within three hours, with only 32% willing to wait longer than that. 
• Providing personalized assistance for complex concerns. Not everything can be solved without human interaction, empathy, and a more specific focus. Sometimes, your customers will have questions about how something works or see a gap that your proactive measures didn’t catch. This refers to all channels, from reactive IT support to call center assistance. 
• Saving costs in case of smaller-sized companies. A fully proactive strategy can be expensive for small- to mid-sized businesses because it requires upfront investment in automation tools, data analytics, and additional staffing to monitor and predict customer needs. Although you can make several proactive changes, it would be wiser to rely on reactive support more. 
• Driving sales. Reactive support can be immensely effective for sales when the opportunity arises. For example, while resolving an issue, a consultant might notice the customer’s current plan lacks a feature that would solve their problem more efficiently, which opens a chance for an upsell. 

When to Use Proactive Customer Support

Proactive customer support can be irreplaceable when a company wants to improve its performance and minimize distracting operations to ensure maximum customer satisfaction. Here’s when it would be effective: 

• Preventing recurring issues before they complicate operations. If customers frequently encounter the same problems (such as login difficulties, payment failures, or product malfunctions), it’s better to address them proactively. After you collect and analyze data indicating a particular challenge, you can start searching for a solution. It can be a self-service resource, an AI chatbot, or a detailed tutorial for onboarding. 
• Reducing workload on support teams. As mentioned before, CRM managers have reported facing an increasing number of tickets per consultant, and proactive measures can help them reduce this pressure. Quite frequently, proactive IT support for messenger platforms or assistance with common software bottlenecks can address the question of repetitive inquiries. Some standard solutions, like automated instant responses or knowledge bases, can allow consultants to concentrate on more complex tasks requiring more human attention.
• Building long-term relationships with customers and ensuring their loyalty. Proactive customer support focuses on understanding the target audience’s needs, which means it constantly collects information from interactions and examines the common trends. When your customers see that you are open to finding new solutions, and inform them about potential delays before they face them, they will become more loyal.

Balancing the Two Types of Support

A one-size-fits-all approach and choosing one support type over the other wouldn’t be a great solution. Most often, companies combine both types. Be adaptable and responsive to your teams’ and customers’ needs. Analyze the existing customer satisfaction level and consider whether you need to provide some proactive measures. Sometimes, the best thing you can do is simply preserve your best practices as they are. 

Need a hand with maintaining this balance? Consider outsourcing to a reliable partner to provide you with a tailored support model. Businesses often opt for outsourced technical support, help desk, or call center services, so they can focus on their core tasks without compromising support quality. 

Maximizing Performance of Reactive and Proactive Customer Support

How can you maximize the benefits of using reactive and proactive customer service? We’ve compiled a few tricks to help you tap into the potential of your customer care and maintain a high customer service level. 

Tips on Improving Reactive Customer Service

Building better customer care with reactive support is all about training, timing, and empathy. 

• Provide training for your consultants. Whether industry-specific or soft skills-related, regular learning opportunities for your customer service team will ensure the best efficiency and up-to-date knowledge. Offer coaching based on what your team needs and what gaps you’ve identified. This can be a decisive factor for the quality of your support. 
• Diversify customer communication channels. Your customers want you to meet them where it’s most comfortable for them, so it’s always a good choice to implement email, phone, live chat, and social media options for contacting you. 
• Set performance benchmarks. Strengthen your customer support by setting clear key performance indicators (KPIs) and implementing a reward system based on consultants’ contributions. Be sure to review these KPIs regularly to ensure continuous improvement. Below, you may find a number of KPIs you can use to evaluate your support’s performance.

• Build a feedback-based culture. Encourage your consultants to share feedback and offer insights about their colleagues’ contributions or the work environment. This will boost the team’s motivation to grow, which, in turn, will positively impact your customers. 

Tricks for Boosting Proactive Customer Service

Developing proactive customer support requires a specific cultural approach, in-depth insights, and an improvement mindset. 

• Encourage a proactive culture. Most businesses today still have limited perception of how crucial proactive attitudes are in customer support (“If no one notices it, it’s fine”), but times change. A new strategy is required. Adapt proactivity into your values, and regularly reinforce such an attitude with real-life illustrations and motivation. Today, CRM leaders often struggle with quickly adapting to customer needs and expectations, which can be addressed with proactive services.

• Use data for growth. Regardless of what you see as essential, your vision of what can be improved in support should depend on facts — customers’ input and external trends. Collect data from support interactions, analyze their efficiency, and implement changes gradually. Analytics is one of the most potent sources of information for every team. 
• Create self-service options and a knowledge base. Giving your customers the opportunity to find the necessary answers themselves has noticeable perks for your company’s performance and workload. Hubspot mentions that up to 71% of CRM leaders think that a customer’s experience with support is time-consuming. Offer detailed tutorials and onboarding to minimize the number of inquiries they submit later. Plus, provide them with self-service options such as chatbot assistants which can offer answers triggered by keywords in the customers’ questions.
• Emphasize continuous improvement. Customers’ demands change and become more specific every year. Your business is an evolving organism as well, however, and you can adapt to external environments, meeting your target audience’s increasing standards. 

Important note: Before implementing reactive and/or proactive customer support, evaluate your resources, including your budget, staffing, and operational capacity. If you find it challenging to manage all aspects of customer support internally, consider outsourcing customer service to a reliable partner.

Summary

Combining proactive and reactive customer care is crucial for boosting your brand image and developing positive customer relationships. However, to achieve good results, it’s essential to identify your priorities and align them with your available resources. In this article on proactive vs reactive customer support we explained how neither type of support is superior. A hybrid approach will help your team use its strengths to the fullest and minimize the drawbacks of a ticketing overload. Ultimately, your best support system predicts your customers’ needs but responds swiftly when necessary. 

FAQ

What Is Proactive Customer Service?

Proactive customer service analyzes data about interactions, external factors, and the company’s operations to create self-help materials or automated chatbots for customers to find answers themselves. It takes initiative in minimizing the potential concerns or improving the quality of the current support, which allows it to preserve customer loyalty and reduce redundant tickets for the consultants.

What Is Reactive Customer Service?

Reactive customer service focuses on addressing customer inquiries and issues as they arise, prioritizing urgent and complex concerns. It is essential for handling unpredictable situations and providing personalized assistance.

What Is the Difference Between Proactive and Reactive Customer Service?

The main difference between proactive and reactive customer service is that proactive support works to prevent issues before they happen, while reactive support responds to issues as they come up.

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