Proactive Customer Care

The notion of a proactive customer care has been around for many years and taken many forms from the airline calling about a canceled flight to current SMS alert notifications from any number of devices, products and services. The goal is simple. Customers do not want to have to tell you there is a problem.

How do you solve that challenge? Not to sound too much like a consultant, but it depends. Really. To solve the challenge today, a combination of e-mail and/or SMS alerts with some RSS capabilities for issue tracking and resolution would be my first recommendation. The process would have to be fully understood.

Most of the time an enterprise customer is calling because a service is down and they want it back up — fast. This customer does not want to collect log files and send them. They want you to already know the issue. Think about how to be proactive. You may find out that it improves your customer care metrics and support process at the same time.