How to Supercharge Customer Retention with Preemptive Service

If you can make use of the data at your disposal, you can learn basically everything about your customers. 

And some of the most useful lessons are: what problems do our customers face? What problems do we cause that make them go to our competitors?

Once you know that, you can solve problems waaay more effectively. 

Or – you can even preempt those problems. Do that and you’ll be able to skyrocket your customer loyalty.

Post summary:

• What does preemptive service mean?
• Is it the same as ‘proactive service’?
• The key benefits of preemptive contact center services
• 3 preemptive service case studies 

What does preemptive service mean?

We’re going to start by buying an Ikea bookcase. 

We’ve got the instruction manual and you and I are pretty good at putting these things together.

It is a pretty tricky bookcase though. Should it lean over like that? Are there enough little metal round things?

I suggest that we call customer support. (Just to be sure…)

But you have a better idea. When we bought the bookcase, Ikea sent an SMS message with a link to a Youtube video. That video tells us everything we need to know. 

We watch the video, and now that instructions make more sense. 

That’s great preemptive service from Ikea.

It’s great for you because you really didn’t want to call customer support. It’s great for Ikea because they don’t want you to call customer support either!  

Is this the same as ‘proactive service’?

Proactive and preemptive service overlap, but they’re not exactly the same. 

Reactive service: Your customer finds a problem. They contact your support team. An agent solves the problem.

Proactive service: Your customer finds a problem. Your support team contacts them. An agent solves the problem.

Preemptive service: Your customer may have a problem in the future. Your support team creates a system to prevent the problem from happening.

The key benefits of preemptive contact center services

In this post we’re focusing on retention because it might be the single most important factor that you can focus on. 

Most metrics track one of two things:

• Some kind of customer sentiment like satisfaction 
• A cost efficiency measure like lifetime value

The great thing about retention? It does both. 

So if you’re retaining customers well, you’re achieving two things. You’re making sure that customers like doing business with you, and you’re making sure that they’re spending money with you. 

Is it guaranteed that preemptive service means good retention?

Yep. Recent research shows that preemptive service increases retention by 3-5%.

There are also various other ways that preemptive service boosts service and sales.

Here are three of them.

Preemptive service slashes call volume

It’s basic. If you eliminate the need to call, customers won’t call. (That Enkata research shows a gigantic 30% drop in call volume for businesses with a committed preemptive service approach.) 

You’ll actually find the basis of your strategy by approaching this backwards. Whatever is driving the most calls – those are the topics you should be aiming to preempt. 

Preemptive service is great for your bottom line  

Reducing contact volume – especially phone calls – will always save you money. 

And this may be one of those rare money savings expeditions that actually improves your service at the same time.

We’ll see in the Anglian case study (below) that the savings can be huge. 

Preemptive service improves customer journeys

Most contact centers miss something very important when they measure things like AHT.

They miss the time which customers have already invested trying to solve their problem before they call.

So well done if you hit a reliable 80/20. 

But what does that mean to customers who already tried self-service and webchat before calling (and then got stuck in your IVR?)

‘In our experience, redesigning customer journeys raises customer-satisfaction scores by 15 to 20 points, reduces cost-to-serve by 15 to 20 percent, and boosts employee engagement by 20 percent.’

Customer experience: New capabilities, new audiences, new opportunities 

3 preemptive service case studies 

#1 AT&T give you the right info when you need it

Here’s the really good news: the vast majority of your contacts are driven by totally avoidable and straightforward problems. 

That’s what US telecoms giant AT&T realized after taking a look at their calls.

Around 10% of all call traffic was from new customers who didn’t fully understand their first bill. Prepaid service costs meant that the bill would inevitably be a bit confusing, so a lot of customers mistakenly thought they were being bilked.

Not only were there plenty of avoidable calls, they were pretty angry calls too!

What was the solution?

AT&T had a simple idea. Their new customers receive a link to a short video which explains their bill in more detail. (Remember the Ikea bookcase we were putting together?)

They knew which questions they would need to answer because their agents answered them every day. 

They spent a tiny bit of money on video production, and they automated some outbound SMS and emails. They save… whatever the cost of thousands upon thousands of calls comes to. 

But this next part is far more important. They no longer start new relationships with anger, confusion and distrust.  

‘Companies recognize that securing a customer today provides no guarantee that he'll return in the future. That's why customer service is inextricably linked with customer retention – and why a lack of current technologies can be so devastating. Companies must be ready to recognize when older technologies limit that needed flexibility and progress.’

Pamela DeLoatch, TechTarget 

#2 Amazon puts you in charge of tracking deliveries 

Amazon’s biggest contact driver has historically been ‘where’s my package?’ (No surprises there.)  

Bear in mind that this is a business which increased the volume and variety of their products at dizzying speeds. So there was no way they were ever going to scale their contact centers at a comparable rate. 

Add an extra problem – Amazon noticed that some customers wouldn’t even wait until their package was late. They’d call just for an update on how far away it was. 

What was the solution?

Basically, Amazon handed over every available bit of delivery information to their customers.

They don’t want support agents reading out information that customers could just read for themselves. 

Obviously we’re a few years down the road now, and this doesn’t seem like such big news. (By the same logic, nobody is that surprised when Jeff Bezos launches stuff into space these days.)

But Amazon was behind some of the big innovations in this field, and now they use conversational IVR services, email and SMS to supply updates before customers ask for them.

#3 Anglian Water gives emergency updates

Anglian Water is a UK water supplier which noticed major spikes in contact traffic during supply disruption.  

If a pipe burst, they could get a manifold increase in calls. Callers would hear a recorded message, and that more or less did what they needed it to. BUT – only for customers who reached out.

Their other customers – often those in the most vulnerable categories – would have no information about what was happening or when it would end.  

What was the solution?

Anglian switched to taking the lead during these kinds of service disruptions. They still use a recorded message but they forward it to all affected customers.

That means a lot more reassured customers and far fewer inbound calls. They calculate the cash value of that reduced volume at around ￡100,000 p.a. so they’re pretty happy with the outcome. 

So... preemptive service is great for retention then?

Sure is. Clearly, there are quite a few ways preemptive service can help you to retain customers.

But let’s keep it simple.

‘Problems’ are why customers leave. Break down those problems and… more customers will stay. 

That’s it. 

Or… that’s it in theory. In my next post I’m going to look at how you can bring this practice into your actual daily contact center services. 

Until then, here’s a hint: it all comes down to automation. If you can’t automate these processes, you’ll never get preemptive service off the ground. 

So here’s the place to start: get ‘Your Guide to Call Center Automation’ now!