17
Agents report they’re most likely to engage proactively with customers over email and phone. This is consistent across support team sizes, structures, industries, and target audiences.
tickets—is still an emerging practice. Only 13% of customer support teams that engage proactively are doing so to anticipate customer issues or reduce tickets.
Which channels does your customer support teamuse to proactively reach out to customers?
Why does your company proactively reach out to customers?
50%
To help prospective customers learn more about our products (e.g. newsletter sign-up, promotions)
31%
42%
Phone
17%
SMS
To boost sales or oer deals and discounts
29%
Messaging apps (FB messenger, WhatsApp, etc.)
15%
24%
To provide order updates
To help customers understand how to use a recently purchased product
13%
Chat
21%
10%
Mobile in-app
To reduce customer support tickets
13%
8%
Web push notification
% of surveyed customer service agents 0 20 10 40 30
% of surveyed customer service agents 0 10 20 40 30 50
While these channels work well for one-to-one interactions to resolve individual customer issues, it’s unlikely they’re being used in a systematic way to preempt customer problems. And connecting proactively with customers via one-off interactions poses a new challenge for support teams, as busy agents face the burden of having to support customers in a new way. In particular, the low adoption of channels that can be easily used programmatically—including push notifications, in-app messages, and chat—represents an opportunity for support teams. Lower costs and free up your agents Support teams are mainly engaging proactively as part of sales and marketing efforts. They’re doing this by offering deals or discounts to current customers and helping prospective customers learn more about products through newsletters and promotions. But proactive engagement designed to help with customer support—like communication to reduce customer effort, prevent customers from having issues with a product, or help reduce
Given customers’ comparative wariness toward being contacted to anticipate questions, companies face a higher standard for this kind of communication. That means this outreach needs to be based on robust data on customers’ preferences and behaviors. One example of where this works well: An agent could reach out to address players’ frustration when a popular video game crashes. In fact, Entertainment and Gaming, alongside Social Media and Software, are the industries where companies are most likely to reach out proactively, according to agents. This makes sense—these industries are likely to be more data-savvy. Companies in the Media and Telecommunications, Marketing and Advertising, and Government and Nonprofit industries are least likely to engage proactively. Companies in two out of three of these industries—Media and Telecommunications and Government and Nonprofit—were cited by customers as providing the worst support. Not offering proactive support could be symptomatic of a lack of customer focus or a lack of data on the part of companies in these industries. So what should companies do when it comes to proactive engagement? We recommend adopting a programmatic solution that automates proactive engagement, preventing costly manual outreach and freeing agents to handle more complicated requests.
The Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2019
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