Proactive over Reactive: Digital Experience Value #5

In a recent XaaS Product Insights article, I established the need for a compelling and differentiated digital customer experience as a defining attribute for success in #B2B tech businesses. Today, less than a third of B2B businesses have a well-defined set of Digital Experience (#DX ) values that they can easily articulate. This is despite there being almost unanimous agreement on the benefits of having them.

Let's inspect the fifth Digital Experience value, Proactive over Reactive, in a series of eight that proves essential guidance and decision support to the teams who aspire to create and deliver great customer experiences.

Of Origins and Models

The B2B technology industry arguably started in the late 1800s with the advent of cash registers, typewriters, and adding machines, each promising improved productivity to office workers in businesses of all kinds. Products were sold for an agreed price, and the buyers owned these products indefinitely, while investing in the maintenance of their upkeep.

In the software era that emerged in the 1980s, businesses replicated the same ownership and maintenance model that had existed for over 100 years. ?With the advent of the world wide web in the early 1990s, something fundamental changed as noted the article 20 years on: Why Netscape’s IPO was the big bang of the internet era,?“Anything, and any market, that might exist in the real world, could be duplicated on, and possibly disrupted by, the Internet”. By 2000, new web-fueled software business models emerged, with companies like Salesforce and others at the forefront.

The tech industry’s business model transformation is still playing out. Every software, hardware and even industrial equipment business is going to market, or at the very least contemplating going to market, with cloud-enabled as-a-service offers. This trend is accelerated by advancements in digital technology providing businesses with deeper insights across more channels. Businesses understand customer behavior and preferences better than at any time in the past. Further, low barriers to market entry have intensified competition and accelerated innovation. All this has dramatically elevated customer expectations and placed them in the power position in the relationship with their B2B vendors.

Old Habits Die Hard

With our business lens zoomed way out, we see that, for approximately 120 years, the tech industry perfected the customer ownership and maintenance model. This model was hugely profitable, consistently generating 20-35% operating profits for the likes of Oracle, SAP, IBM and their ilk. While change is undeniably evolving away from customer ownership, the internal habits of most of the established businesses, are still to this day, grounded in the past.??

Shifting from Reactive to Proactive

The imperative to shift to a proactivity in all aspects of customer engagement, both digital and in-person, is for companies to regain control over the very viability of their business. Promptly responding to customer’s needs is essential and to be valued, however, thoughtful, and positive proactive engagement become essential to satisfaction and loyalty, leading to higher retention rates and increased business success.

Some examples might include:

• Personalized onbaording experiences while rapidly guiding the customer to their first value moments.
• Automated updates including new features, and related release information and trainings.
• Intelligent, integrated proactive chat helping with identified challenges the customer may be having.
• Timely reminders about unfinished tasks in key workflows.
• Surveys, ‘smiley face’ buttons, and other listening posts to anticipate needs, assess effort expended and determine satisfaction.
• Apply data intelligence and algorithms to provide helpful triggers to induce productive action

These days, plenty of example exist with the near ubiquitous availability of data, analytics, machine learning and generative AI. Many of these examples highlight how vendors in various industries and categories are leveraging proactive customer engagement strategies to provide value, enhance customer experiences, and build strong relationships with their B2B clients.

[Reach out to me any time for some great examples]

In this age of delivering value that is truly aligned with customers desired outcomes, the benefits of proactive engagement to improve the customers’ overall experience are undisputed, including:

• Improved customer satisfaction by addressing issues before they even become problems
• Deeper loyalty through role personalization and peer level insights
• Mitigating churn with proactive engagement with the most at-risk customers
• Better customer understanding through continuous proactive discovery of their needs and habits
• Staying ahead of cross-sell and up-sell opportunities via triggers on key consumption patterns
• Increased customer advocacy fueled by role personalized and predictive engagement.

Overall, proactive customer engagement can result in a win-win situation where customers feel understood and valued, leading to higher retention rates and increased business success.

Closing Thoughts

Proactive over Reactive must become a core value of any company that expects to deliver an integrated experience from first touch through growth. Empowering the digital experience and customer-facing employees to proactively guide customers toward their desired outcomes is key to retention and growth. Challenge your methods with these sample questions:

• How does the proposed telemetry contribute to deep customer insights for our product and customer-facing teams?
• Are we leveraging telemetry and analytics to generate cross-sell and upsell triggers outside, and/or inside, the product experience?
• How can the product expereince be personalized to best engage each user persona?
• Are we providing customer insight data to our partner community to fuel further innovation and customer engagement?
• What is the timeliness of our in-app ‘how to’ guidance to encourage deeper usage?
• How can we improve our continuous customer discovery for anticipating customers’ needs?
• Can we better track user workflows and help struggling users to complete them?

The opportunities to supersize digital proactive engagement are enormous for significant potential business scale and customer value realization.

Do you agree??What challenges do you see? Let us know your thoughts!