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Customer Experience
Products and features
3 min read

Proactive customer service – Why you can’t afford not to.

Jeanine Desirée Lund
Content Marketing Manager | Senior Content Specialist
proactive customer service

A family with young children browses a pre-school website, searching for information on fees. Most of the time they’ll be greeted with an automated, reactive message from a chatbot asking “How can I help?”. 

Puzzel Digital Engagement enables you to adopt a proactive approach to your customer support interactions. Instead of asking a question that can be answered through the context of the navigation, it leverages the information it has to understand intent and bring up relevant results. 

In the case of the family’s research on pre-school fees, Puzzel’s Digital Engagement will forward the contextual parameter “pre-school” to the chatbot. This will then present common intents linked to the parameter – like fees.

Understanding the customer journey 

The first step to delivering proactive customer service is understanding your digital customer journey – the who and the why come into focus.  

Most organisations adopt a reactive and disconnected approach to their customer support strategy. Poor integration between self-service and assisted service creates a gap in the customer journey. This can impact both the quality of the customer experience, as well as agent productivity. 

Implementing a unified, proactive service strategy across all channels means following and understanding the customer behaviour on the website – and immediately acting on it.  Puzzel Digital Engagement can track, follow and analyse the customer’s behaviour on the website. Through the process of monitoring key information within the navigation, such as behaviour, web events and shopping baskets, it’s possible to understand when they need help. It is therefore possible to configure how and when you want to offer proactive help and assistance. 

Bridging the gap between browsing and support 

With 90% of journeys beginning online it’s becoming increasingly common that the first service touchpoint is the chatbot. Implementing a chatbot solution that is connected to the underlying digital context and is either a part of or tightly integrated with your contact centre solution, is key to creating a proactive and connected experience.  

Leveraging Puzzel Digital Engagement’s integration with the Puzzel Contact Centre means that contact interactions are routed based on real time information shared between the two solutions. As a result, the invite to engage in a human support interaction is not only proactive, but also dynamic. 

A simple example is to invite the customer to chat with an agent or if the queues are too long to chat with the bot. More complex scenarios can include self-service through the Puzzel Smart Chatbot or a conditional workflow that authenticates and collects relevant background data on visitors before escalating them to agent chat. 

Puzzel Digital Engagement enables you to orchestrate how and on what channel to serve customers in the digital space by connecting self-service, digital and voice channels. Meanwhile, the context of the navigation follows the customer along their interactions in the support journey, from self-service to agent support. 

Proactive and contextualised experiences

There is great potential to improve both service and customer experience – while optimising how contact volumes are managed. 

The customer experience improves when relying on an optimised service strategy. Offering a proactive customer experience sits alongside assisted service and self-service – although the latter can also be part of your proactive customer service solution. 

What does a proactive approach translate into? The answer can be acting on behalf of the customer even before they have contacted the brand – or registered the need for a service. It can also mean acting proactively on a problem or event that might occur on the website. 

It’s like making the first move. The difference is that in the first case you actively reach out to them with automated messaging – for instance with an SMS or e-mail. In the second case, you offer support through proactive digital engagement.  

To quote Kate Leggett, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester, “Customers expect more from customer service organizations. They expect you to value their time, to make engagement easy, and to deliver answers and resolutions in a highly personal manner and in the context of their actions and journeys.” 

Tapping into the who and why of the customer’s digital journey allows you to proactively guide customers to the most effective channel – while staying focused on your organisational priorities. Bridging the gap between the digital journey, the context of their visit and the live support experience empowers you to bring to life a true, connected experience.  

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Explore how Puzzel’s Digital Engagement can build on your proactive service strategy by chatting with our team – book a demo here.

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