A delivery is running late, portal maintenance is taking longer than planned, an appointment has to be moved: in moments like these, the company almost always knows before the customer does. Yet customers often only find out when they pick up the phone themselves. Proactive customer communication reverses that order \u2013 the company gets in touch before the question arises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That sounds like a reliable way to avoid calls. The data tells a different story. In a Gartner survey of more than 4,800 customers (late 2021), 66 percent of B2C and 82 percent of B2B customers still contacted the company after receiving proactive outreach. Ten percent of B2C and 24 percent of B2B customers got in touch purely to make sure the message was genuine. At the same time, the same research shows that customers who were informed proactively rate their effort with the company more favourably and see more value in the relationship. Proactive service pays off \u2013 but only when it is done well. With Black Friday and the Christmas season approaching, this is a question service teams should settle now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A message such as “Your delivery has been delayed” answers one question and raises three new ones: Until when? Do I need to do anything? Can I cancel? Leave those follow-up questions open and the contact is simply moved forward \u2013 sometimes it is even created, because without the message the customer might never have noticed that something had gone wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Gartner’s conclusion is clear: two elements do the most to reduce customer effort \u2013 conveying confidence that the company has the problem under control, and giving clear directions on what to do next. A good proactive message is therefore not a heads-up but a small, complete answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Not every event justifies a message. Customers who are flooded with status updates soon stop reading them. The right occasions meet three criteria: they affect the customer directly, they are urgent or consequential for them, and the company knows about them first.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Gartner findings support this selection: customers value proactive alerts most when the issue is urgent \u2013 they report lower effort than those who discovered the problem themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A practical rule of thumb: the message should already answer the customer’s second question. That leads to a simple structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Authenticity matters too. If one in ten consumers calls only to check that a message is not a scam, the message should be recognisably from the company: a familiar sender, a reference to a specific order or case number, and no request to enter login details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Because some customers will get in touch anyway, follow-up contacts belong in the plan. Gartner recommends two things. First, send messages during periods of low contact volume where possible, so that questions do not land at peak time. A delay notice to 3,000 customers at 9 a.m. on a Monday is a bottleneck of your own making.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Second, the phone system should recognise callers who have just received a message and offer them relevant options. Someone calling after a delay notice is very likely to want to talk about exactly that. The IVR menu can address the topic directly, repeat the information and only hand over to an agent if needed. For that to work, the phone system needs to know who received which message \u2013 one more reason to manage outbound messages and inbound contacts on the same platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Agents need the context as well: which message went to whom, and with what wording?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The obvious metric \u2013 “How many calls did we save?” \u2013 is hard to measure because there is no baseline. These figures say more:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It helps to treat every message template as a small product in its own right: with an owner, an evaluation and regular revisions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Proactive customer communication demonstrably improves the customer experience. It only reduces contacts, however, if the message answers the follow-up questions, is recognisably genuine and arrives at a time when the team can handle the questions that come back. Bringing notifications, telephony and customer context together turns the announcement of a problem into proof of reliability.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With myContactCenter<\/strong>, service teams manage telephony, email, chat and WhatsApp on a single platform \u2013 a solid basis for connecting outbound notifications with the handling of follow-up questions. If you would like to explore how proactive notifications can fit into your service processes, book a consultation with ilogixx through the online calendar at ilogixx.de<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two in three customers still contact the company after proactive outreach. How service teams announce delivery delays, outages and rescheduled appointments so that the notification answers questions instead of creating them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":57355,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_il_seo_titel":"Proactive Customer Communication in Customer Service","_il_seo_beschreibung":"66% of customers still get in touch after proactive outreach. How notifications about delays and outages can actually prevent follow-up calls.","footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-operations-and-metrics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilogixx.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilogixx.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilogixx.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilogixx.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilogixx.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57358"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ilogixx.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57358\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57364,"href":"https:\/\/ilogixx.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57358\/revisions\/57364"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilogixx.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/57355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ilogixx.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilogixx.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ilogixx.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}