Proactive customer service drives satisfaction and revenue

What is proactive outreach?

Proactive outreach is a CX strategy that initiates communication with customers based on predicted needs or potential issues, rather than waiting for customers to reach out. Proactive outreach, especially when paired with AI, alleviates inbound calling volumes.

In large part, AI has sparked the transformation from reactive to proactive customer service. With AI, a company can ensure its proactive outreach is timely and highly personalized. In fact, AI is now the top method companies use to reach out proactively, using both agentic -- autonomous and task completing -- and non-agentic AI interactions, according to Metrigy. This is a shift from a year ago, when manual, human-initiated outreach was the top method.

Year over year, improving customer satisfaction has been a top benefit of proactive outreach, Metrigy research shows. But it's important to remember that proactive engagement won't lead to happy customers if it's too intrusive, delivered in the wrong channel or serves no tangible purpose for the individual. Proactive engagement works best when it delivers value -- before it's requested or expected.

Keep the customer front and center

When plotting a proactive customer engagement strategy, keep these three goals in mind:

1. Prevent a problem before it happens. Solve issues before they escalate, such as alerting a customer to a delivery delay or a fee-triggering low bank balance. These steps build trust and loyalty.
2. Save money. Alert customers about upcoming sales or loyalty perks. This cements brand allegiance and fosters engagement.
3. Save time. Offer streamlined reordering or rescheduling options, which minimizes effort for time-conscious customers.

Set a strong technology foundation

From a technology perspective, businesses need a strong foundation to shore up their proactive outreach. Set the groundwork by integrating CX and CX-adjacent platforms, using AI to predict the need for proactive outreach and optimize communications. Also, embrace agentic capabilities to introduce autonomy into the process. And remember these three interrelated guidelines:

1. Integrate everything. Integrate contact center platforms with core enterprise systems, such customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP). Without such integration, the proactive effort may be too manually intensive. On the other hand, seamless CRM integration ensures companies can make proactive outreach decisions based on access to customer history, sales status and previous interactions. ERP integration adds financial, inventory and supply chain data. In short, platform integration is crucial to make outreach relevant rather than generic.
2. Use AI to optimize outreach. While many companies still use manual processes and rules-based automation, AI-powered proactive outreach now edges past these traditional methods. AI plays a central role in analyzing historical behavior, customer preferences and real-time sentiment by pulling data from CRM, ERP and other systems connected to the contact center to pinpoint outreach opportunities and generate messaging. AI helps determine the optimal message tone, timing and content based on context, such as negative reviews or support interactions. In Metrigy's study, 52% of companies use AI analytics to determine the next-best customer for outreach, while another 32% plan to do so. The percentage breakdown is similar for companies using and planning to use AI to personalize proactive communications.
3. Deploy agentic AI for streamlined workflows. Agentic AI, which uses advanced frameworks to make decisions and act autonomously, can manage complex tasks from start to finish. Consider outbound sales campaigns, which 43% of companies studied are already conducting via proactive communication. For this use case, agentics can identify sales leads, qualify them, send the campaign and complete a sale without human intervention.

Strategies to maximize proactive outreach

Proactive outreach can be a powerful revenue generator. The CXO study found 62% of companies using proactive outreach see revenue generation as a primary benefit. In fact, proactive outreach increased revenue 18%, on average, for some companies. Clearly, proactive outreach is proving highly effective to identify and close sales opportunities.

Proactive customer outreach increased revenue 18%, on average, for some companies.

Here are examples of AI-fueled proactive strategies that help businesses bring in more money:

• Create contextual upsell and renewal campaigns. Use AI to analyze customer history and sentiment during interactions. If AI detects positive sentiment and relevant buying patterns, it can trigger a personalized upsell offer via a follow-up channel. In action, an investment firm could use AI to learn what prompts customers to invest. Do specific news events trigger investments, or do market fluctuations, for example? Based on this data, an AI agent reaches out on the customer's preferred channel to suggest a market pick, complete with analysis tailored to the investor's typical concerns.
• Personalize product recommendations. To move beyond generic cross-sells, AI can analyze a customer's specific purchase history, style and demographics to recommend highly tailored items. Reminders to order or renew products or services are a top proactive use case.
• Accelerate cash flow and collections. Even the historically sensitive area of collections -- the effort to recover money owed -- can benefit significantly from smart proactive outreach. For collections, companies using proactive outreach technology have found a 33.6% increase in their success rate, Metrigy's research shows. With proactive outreach, use branded calling and texting, as people are more likely to respond when the outreach is clearly identified.

Similarly, proactive engagements can positively affect customer loyalty and retention, netting companies repeat business. Proactive tactics here include:

• Pre-empt churn with early alerts. Use AI to identify at-risk customers before they formally complain or churn. Given the potential sensitivity of such customers, applying the human touch would work well here. Supervisors or agents should reach out manually to address the issue at hand before it results in lost business with the customer.
• Preventative fraud notification. In financial services, 42.9% of companies studied use proactive outreach for fraud notifications. An agentic AI agent can detect anomalies in a bank account, lock the account and proactively notify the customer of the next steps, minimizing financial loss and boosting trust.

By investing in platform integration and AI, businesses can intelligently automate outreach, tailor messages precisely and engage customers in the right channels at the right time. The future of CX is proactively seeking out customers and delivering value. If these steps are done correctly, customers will reward companies with increased loyalty and revenue.

Beth Schultz is vice president of research and principal analyst at Metrigy. She focuses her research on unified communications, collaboration and digital customer experience.