5 Ways to Wow – The Power of Proactive & Predictive Customer Care

Earning a customer’s loyalty is the name of the game with customer experience management today. It’s a highly competitive marketplace – with a fickle customer landscape. Nowadays it’s so easy to shop around and compare offerings for the best deal. In an instant we can get multiple quotes from different sources – all without even having to speak to anyone. And we can simply hop onto social media to review honest feedback from real customers about a brand before we commit to spending our hard-earned dollars with them. It’s difficult enough for an organization to break through the noise and be heard – let alone win the business. And it’s a positively herculean undertaking to make an impression that keeps customers coming back. 

So – How Do You Wow?

Here are 5 ways to use proactive and predictive CX strategies to wow your customers into a relationship that is long-term, profitable, and grows with your business.

1. Make it Effortless

This is a no-brainer but must be mentioned as it is arguably the most important “wow” factor to deliver on. If you don’t make it easy for your customer, someone else will. Here are some of the things you can do to simplify the customer experience. First – meet them where they are. That means if they call you on the phone, answer them. If they send you a Facebook message, reply to them. Whichever channels your customers use, accommodate their preference with your omnichannel contact center and offer them a consistently great experience. 

Another way to give the customer an effortless experience is to be aware of what’s happening in the contact center and use that knowledge to better manage your interactions. For example – customer Steve calls because he sent in an email earlier in the day that requires a response and he hasn’t heard back yet. Instead of Steve having to repeat his question or tell the phone agent about the email, the agent can already see that there’s an email in queue from Steve and get to it before he has to say a word. The agent is helping reduce the effort required by Steve, while effectively eliminating extraneous contacts in the queue.

2. Anticipate Need

Take “effortless” a step further and anticipate what your customer needs. The first step is having access to Interaction History and context in an omnichannel agent desktop so that you have a reference point and transcripts of previous conversations. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can truly anticipate the customer’s need by properly leveraging the data you have available to you. Upstream Works for Finesse (UWF) provides agents with NCP – Next Contact Prediction – almost like a crystal ball (but arguably more accurate) for letting the agent know what’s coming next. Let’s say Steve has contacted his bank with a question about his credit limit. The agent receives a heads-up on his screen that Steve is likely to ask for a limit alteration next – and is even given a percentage of likelihood. The agent can now proactively ask Steve if he’d like to consider a limit alteration. Not only is the agent providing a fantastic customer experience, he’s also eliminating an additional contact – improving operational efficiency and increasing the value of the interaction.

3. Build Trust

There are a multitude of ways to earn (or lose) a customer’s trust. Providing consistent, correct information is one way – either through a customer-facing knowledge portal or through a contact center knowledge base to support agents. UW Assist offers both in its native knowledge management solution. When you ensure that the information you’re sharing is up-to-date, accurate, and consistent no matter how it’s delivered, you’re elevating the status of your brand to trusted expert. 

Security of information also has a big impact on building trust – so be sure your contact center is GDPR compliant and that your call center software has the features you need to stay compliant. Let’s talk security gone awry – fraud. Did you know that you can use your contact center data to proactively identify fraud attempts? UWF can detect behavior patterns as potentially fraudulent, alerting the agent so that the fraudster can be handled accordingly. What better way to build trust than to offer a safe and secure omnichannel customer experience? 

4. Personalize the Experience 

With the volume of customer data available these days, especially through extensive contact center software integrations, there’s really no excuse for not personalizing and tailoring the customer experience. Whether it’s proactively starting a web chat with a visitor to your site based on the page they’re browsing or sending a caller to the agent they spoke with last. In today’s vast marketplace, establishing a sense of being known and recognized is critical. 

Earlier we mentioned that having Interaction History and context at your fingertips can help agents anticipate customer need. But this information can “wow” your customers in another way: it provides the foundation for a highly personalized experience. When the agent is able to greet the customer with not only their name, but also their full history, engagement preferences, recordings of previous conversations, and more – they can tailor offers and be more successful with cross-selling and up-selling. From the customer’s perspective, it’s like you’re reading their mind and truly understand them. From the brand’s perspective, it’s just smart business.   

5. Erase Boundaries 

Earlier we talked about the importance of meeting customers on whichever channels they prefer – effectively erasing the boundaries between these contact methods. But there are also internal boundaries to consider – silos of processes and information that are often related to departments, job functions, hierarchy, locations, and more.  With the right solution in place, not only are the external boundaries removed, but also these internal ones. Take social media as an example. A forward-thinking organization might have already implemented routing of Facebook Messages to the contact center – but how tightly integrated is that with their marketing team’s social listening application? In other words, it’s great to be able to queue an inbound message and report on it as you would a phone call, but what about when your brand is simply mentioned as a comment on a page? The social monitoring application might be aware of it but is it being addressed in a way that is consistent with the contact center? Think of the “wow” that the customer would experience if their passing comment on your product was picked up and routed to a contact center agent who could proactively solve their issue, make them an offer, or otherwise turn an experience into a memorable, positive one.

If you are ready to wow your customers with proactive and predictive experiences like these, be sure to learn more about the latest release of Upstream Works for Finesse with a personalized demo.