To keep up with consumers’ rising expectations, today’s companies strive to provide a connected experience across an expanding number of digital, telephone, and physical channels. These expectations are why it is essential to shift from a reactive approach to a proactive model that focuses on cross-channel customer journey success.
The Cost Of Bad Experiences
It’s important to think proactively about CX because the cost of bad experiences is putting revenue at risk. Bruce Temkin, Head of Qualtrics XM Institute, shared a recent Qualtrics global study that examined how consumers respond to a bad experience. On average, 18% of consumers report having a bad experience with companies, and 34% decreasing their spending with those companies. These numbers put a potential of $1.86 trillion in sales at risk in the US. Check out the complete study to learn their methodology.
Proactive CX
With proactive CX, you help your customers realize that you have their best interests in mind. Feeling valued is essential in building trust and loyalty. Customers aren’t simply retained; they become your champion in the marketplace, extolling the virtues of working with you.
When you start thinking about a personalized and proactive CX strategy, you’re prompting customers and their needs at various points across their customer journey. For example, during the exploration phase, you might offer short product videos and testimonials. But it’s important to realize that your customers don’t see phases in their journey. And importantly, the customer journey is rarely linear anymore. To them, it’s a “Loyalty Journey,” and it’s essential to think like them and be proactive.
The CX Loyalty Journey
If you’re a retailer, you know all about the unique touchpoints of mapping post-purchase Customer Loyalty Journeys. However, for broader customer experience strategies, the CX Loyalty Journey is about more than perks or points. It’s about showing you know them; you value them and proactively seek to deliver extraordinary experiences.
If you’re like most companies, you may have silos in your data and processes across different departments. Those silos are often the cause of fragmented customer experiences. Breaking down these silos enables you to craft a unified and proactive CX strategy for a consistent level of service that creates trust and loyalty.
Proactive CX Messaging
For your customers, the CX Loyalty Journey rarely has a beginning, middle, or end. It’s a constant cycle of proactive, consistent, and helpful messaging.
Reminders: One of the easiest ways to gain trust is to send friendly reminders for things like appointments, payments coming due, scheduled maintenance, and more. And when you send out reminders by text, make sure your customers can respond and confirm the appointment, make a payment, or reschedule.
Updates: Keeping customers well-informed is another important tactic. Let them know of new locations opening their them, changes in your company, restoring service after an outage, and more. Keep it short when sending updates by text; email updates can include things like maps or important links.
Alerts: When something critical happens, it’s essential to notify customers immediately, especially utility customers. If there’s a power outage, text affected customers and be sure to continue texting as service crews arrive on the scene and when power will be restored.
Promotions: Arrange customers in target groups to send specific offers or promotions by text message. You can even test different offers across segmented groups to learn what motivates your customers the most.
Surveys: For CX Loyalty Journeys, your surveys need to be more than just NPS or CSAT questions. Use frequent, short, and specific surveys that demonstrate your genuine interest in their feedback.
When you’re messaging your customers to build trust and loyalty, engaging them on their platform of choice is essential. Today, many consumers prefer 2-way text messaging for interacting with companies. And since most people read text messages within the first hour of receiving them, it’s an ideal modality. However, you still need to be mindful that many customers might prefer email or phone.
Proactive CX: More Than Messaging
Companies who adopt a Proactive CX strategy as a pure revenue play rarely experience the results they need. A proper Proactive CX strategy begins with caring about your customers’ relationships with you and nurturing persistent and consistent positive experiences.
When you are ready to consider how an outbound messaging campaign fits into your Proactive CX program, we can help. Our Compass Automation Platform can integrate into your siloed data systems and be the foundation for unified messaging across voice, text, and email.
about the author
Bill Irvine
CMO, IVR Technology Group
An avid User Experience Evangelist and design junkie, Bill oversees all things marketing, design, and social media for IVR Technology Group. When he’s not doing that, he “unplugs” as a gentleman farmer, carpenter, and executive chef to his wife.
