What do we mean by “proactive”?
Proactive support means getting ahead of your customers — anticipating what they’re going to need, and when they’re going to need it. This allows you to automate more workflows, reduce manual handling, and offer more self-service options for customers. Issues are resolved faster, if not eliminated altogether, and customer satisfaction stays high.
The benefits include improved ROI, increased customer retention, and enhanced brand perception — and we’ve developed a model to help you get there. Keep reading to find out how you can calculate the specific ROI uplift that a proactive approach could bring to your team.
Why does being proactive really matter?
Implementing a proactive strategy offers significant benefits that contribute to the overall ROI of your CX function. Stop thinking of CX as a cost center, and start thinking added value — or, even better, revenue driver (as you follow this guide to perfect your strategy).
- Issue deflection: By proactively identifying and addressing issues, you can deflect incoming support requests, reduce ticket volume and improve efficiency.
- Smart routing: Autorouting new tickets and assigning agents proactively based on issue priority means faster and more effective resolutions and less management time spent triaging.
- Reduced contacts: Proactively addressing underlying issues cuts the frequency of repeat tickets, minimizing touches for a seamless support experience.
- Early warning alerts: Proactively identifying spikes in support requests enables quicker responses and more efficient resource allocation, while saving valuable time in discovering emerging trends.
- Improved retention: Enhancing customer experience through proactive support initiatives leads to increased loyalty and CLTV, positioning CX as a revenue driver and encouraging future investment in your team.
So, how do you make the leap from reactive support to proactive engagement?
Rethinking the way you deliver customer support and engagement at a fundamental level can sound daunting, but with the right tools, it’s a surprisingly straightforward process. As always though, it’s important to walk before you run. Laying the right foundations at the beginning of the process is crucial to achieving a smooth transition.
We’ve broken down the journey into four main steps:
- Unlocking the value in your data.
- Anticipating customer needs and desires.
- Preventing issues before they occur.
- Enabling customer self-service.
At each stage, we’ve added practical tips that you can implement in your own business.
Use the data you have to engage proactively with customers
CX teams generate huge amounts of data, but unless that data can be properly analyzed, you’re leaving a lot of value on the table. As a first step, you need to review and understand the data you’ve gathered so far. It can be a laborious process, but it’s one that can uncover valuable insights.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Go back over your historical ticket data to identify patterns and group similar issues by tagging each one and separating them into buckets.
- Use the tags you’ve created to compare ticket volumes across types of issues and look at current resolution times and customer feedback.
- Identify where the key pain points or recurring issues are — those that are taking up the most support time or negatively impacting CX the most.
- Restructure your team, assigning CX agents to focus on clearing the highest-impact issues as a priority.
- Monitor the effect that this targeted support has on handling times, CSAT, and other key metrics.
From there, look at implementing solutions to automate this process, tagging and triaging inbound tickets instantly so you have a clear picture of patterns and trends, and can assign CX agents where they will be most effective — like with Lang ;)
Harness data and analytics to predict customer needs
Once you have a system in place to accurately tag, categorize and triage inbound tickets, you can focus on using that data to anticipate customer needs, direct resources before bottlenecks emerge, and target support toward high-risk interactions where customers may disengage or drop off.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Identify roadblocks or bottlenecks in the customer journey and assign agents to deal with them before they escalate.
- Monitor customer sentiment and thinking in real-time, spotting any negative trends as they emerge and addressing them early.
- Liaise with other teams as needed — for example notifying the accounting department if you identify a growing number of tickets related to billing, so they can address root causes sooner.
- Track product or service feedback to identify areas of concern and share common requests for improvements or updates with the relevant departments.
Now that you’re able to predict emerging customer needs in advance, you can shift your focus to preventing those issues from arising at all, by implementing targeted proactive measures.
Proactively prevent customer issues before they occur
With the knowledge gained from the previous steps, you can now make changes to your customer journey to mitigate or eliminate problem interactions altogether. This should be a cyclical process, with regular reviews of current data to identify and respond to changes in the way customers interact with your CX agents.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Monitor customer engagement to identify trends, uncover gaps in understanding, and refine the customer journey on a continual basis.
- Add proactive support for common issues to your customer communications at each stage of the journey, for example sending a detailed “What you need to do next” email at key transition points.
- Feed insights to product or service teams to fix issues identified via customer sentiment analysis early, avoiding a build-up of support requests later.
Enable customers to resolve issues independently
The less frequently that customers have to rely on contact with an agent to resolve their issues, the simpler the process becomes. Now that you have an understanding of the most common customer issues requiring support, you can design self-service tools that empower your customers to access the knowledge they need without interacting with your CX team directly.
Here’s what you need to do:
- Build a customer knowledge base focusing on the most common queries or frequent requests for information that you have revealed via prior analysis.
- Introduce automated solutions such as Lang.ai, or AI chatbots to provide 24/7 on-demand support for simple requests or issues.
- Review untagged tickets and track usage of self-service channels in order to identify and resolve any gaps in the content provided or issues with the format and interface.
- Encourage customers using self-service channels to leave feedback on their experience of the resources or content, to inform future improvements.
With all these measures in place, it’s time to look at the organizational benefits that transitioning to a proactive engagement model brings — specifically in terms of ROI.
How becoming proactive boosts ROI
It should come as no surprise to learn that as you reduce reliance on manual handling of support tickets, address common issues in advance, and provide customers with the tools they need to navigate the customer journey independently, there’s a noticeable effect on the bottom line.
As you transition from a reactive support model to becoming a proactive CX organization, it’s therefore important to accurately measure and track ROI uplift in order to justify further investment in the process. Here we’ll look at the three main areas in which proactive engagement positively impacts ROI and the metrics you can track to demonstrate this.
Decreased support costs
The most immediate benefit experienced by organizations that pivot to a proactive engagement model in their CX teams is the reduction in support overheads. Eliminating or automating common interactions, and encouraging customers to access self-service resources means that you don’t need to grow your headcount as quickly as you would under a reactive model.
Strategies to measure and prove ROI
To accurately track how the changes you’ve made affect ROI in terms of support overheads, here’s what you need to do.
- Track key metrics such as ticket volumes, time-to-response, time-to-resolution, and total handling time month on month.
- Measure any reduction in manual handling of tickets and calculate cost savings based on agent and management time saved.
- Use a model like the one below to predict how further changes, such as introducing automation will affect ROI moving forwards.
We developed this calculator to show what different CX setups can save in support costs by going proactive — down to the dollar.
Here’s a Google Sheets template that you can use to calculate the ROI impact of building a proactive CX team in your organization. Head to the link below and make a copy for your own use.
For a basic idea of the added value you could unlock, edit the yellow cells on sheet 1, as below.
If you’d like to get a more in-depth understanding, you can also tweak any of the values in the yellow cells on the second sheet to customize them to your business.
Increased customer retention and lifetime value
As customer satisfaction improves, you’ll begin to see parallel improvements in your churn rate and total revenue per customer. It’s important to track these improvements so you can demonstrate a direct link between the changes you have made to your CX process and the tangible outcomes for the business as a whole. This helps position your CX function as a revenue generator, rather than a cost center.
Strategies to measure and prove ROI
To track the ROI impact of increasing retention and CLTV, here are some metrics to focus on.
- Track CSAT, NPS, or CES scores to visualize improvements in customer sentiment and loyalty over time.
- Monitor customer churn rate over time and the reduction in acquisition costs associated with higher retention.
- Analyze the increase in customer lifetime value resulting from improved customer retention and satisfaction.
- Map the specific CX measures you’ve taken to demonstrable outcomes to prove ROI on a case-by-case basis.
Enhanced brand reputation and positive word-of-mouth
As well as increasing the value of your existing customer relationships by improving retention and lifetime spending, the changes you’ve made will have a positive impact on new customer acquisition, as the increase in customer loyalty translates into more frequent referrals and better reviews/ratings. At this point, your CX function is not only driving revenue growth but is embedded as a core element of the brand experience.
How Lang.ai helps Ben Segal, Senior Director of CX at Pair Eyewear:
“With Lang, every service interaction is a teachable moment to further educate the customer on the values and benefits of our products.”
Strategies to measure and prove ROI
At a brand perception level, ROI can be harder to track in real terms, but here are some areas you should focus on to demonstrate positive change driven by the CX team.
- Track social media mentions, online reviews, and other sources of customer feedback and relate them to specific CX initiatives.
- Monitor any change in referral rates associated with increased customer satisfaction and track the conversion rate of those referrals.
- Measure changes in customer acquisition cost attributable to improved brand perception or word-of-mouth.
- Calculate any reduction in marketing costs that emerge as you become less reliant on paid campaigns or adverts to reach new customers.
OK, that’s the theory. Now let’s look at how it can be applied in the real world, with three insights from organizations who’ve worked with Lang.
What does a proactive CX Organization look like in practice?
At Lang, we’ve worked with a range of businesses that are already seeing tangible benefits from adopting a proactive approach to CX. And they’ve been more than happy to share their stories.
OEP awesomeness at Stride Health
Lang empowers Stride Health to achieve what they call “OEP Awesomeness” — by deflecting, routing, and automating routine communications, and allowing their skilled agents to focus on conversion-eligible contacts. The result? Substantial improvements across a range of key metrics, including email volume, resolution times, closure rates, and staffing costs.
Key results
- 21% reduction in email traffic
- 50% increase in closures
- 40% faster response times
- $25k/week lower staffing costs
Want to know more? Read the full case study here.
Faster, more efficient support at SimplyWise
Since adopting Lang, SimplyWise has reduced response times by almost 40%, cut final resolution times by 65%, seen an uplift of 10% in trial users converting to paid plans — and on top of this gained access to invaluable customer insights which now drive their product development strategy.
Key results
- +10% trial account conversion
- 38% quicker response time
- 65% shorter time-to-resolution
Want to know more? Read the full case study here.
Clear insights into customer thinking at Novo
Lang gives Novo’s CX team clear sight of customer sentiment and intent in real-time — across 20,000 conversations a month. That data has helped reduce handling times while feeding critical insights to the product, marketing, and finance teams to drive continuous improvement and boost retention.
Key results
- 2-minute reduction in handling time per ticket
- 60% of inbound tickets automatically triaged
- 95%+ of fraud attempts eliminated automatically
Want to know more? Read the full case study here.
What’s your next move?
If you want to build a truly proactive CX organization and reap the benefits we’ve discussed in this article, the best starting point is to make an honest assessment of where you are now, and where you want to be.
Head over to the Lang.ai website and check out our CX Operations Maturity Model to see where you currently fall on a scale of reactive to predictive, and find out what you need to do to move forwards.
And if you need practical advice on tools and strategies you’ll need to become truly proactive, we can offer you a free consulting session with our CX experts.
PS: If you want to read more about proactive customer support, Eli Weiss — Senior Director of CX & Retention at Jones Road Beauty — has published a great background piece over on LinkedIn. Check it out here.
