87% of customers want to be contacted proactively by companies.

Proactive engagement is the art of anticipating customer pain points and providing help before they even ask for it. Besides showing your customers that you’re paying attention and are always there to help, proactive engagement can also benefit your business by increasing conversions.

Convince Customers They Matter

As a business, being there for your customers before they even realise they have a problem means you’re one step ahead. To new customers, this form of proactive engagement shows that you’re committed to providing quality support.

Whether you’re sending out post-purchase email tutorials or offering help while a customer is browsing, initiating contact before they do shows that you’ve thought hard about the customer experience.

Increase Sales and Conversions

Consider this scenario: a customer visits your site and identifies an application he’s interested in. However, he’s not sure whether the application will actually work on his laptop. Using proactive engagement, you can start a conversation with the customer and help him figure it out.

Proactively engaging customers in conversation helps them during the purchasing process so they don’t abandon their shopping carts.  57% of customers will give up on making an online purchase if they can’t find help.

Further, proactively pushing out customized offers – such as discount codes – to specific customers can make it more compelling for them to purchase.

Understand Your Customers

With proactive engagement, you’re finding opportunities to engage your customers in conversation. Whether you’re asking if they need help or offering a specialized discount, this conversation allows you to collect important customer information.

For example, keeping an eye on the number of customers that actually use the discount codes offered via proactive engagement can tell you if this particular strategy actually works. Also, if customers frequently ask similar questions about a particular product, perhaps you can consider adding the information into an FAQ page.

Increase Customer Retention

Besides increasing sales and conversions, proactive engagement can also help increase customer retention. The key to this is to constantly engage your customers even after they purchase.

Businesses can provide tips on how to better use a product or offer tutorial videos to keep customers engaged. Besides marketing your products, you can also drop an email to ask about the experience they’ve had. This way, you are reminding your customers that help is always just a simple email away.

Spread The Good Word

Provide your customers with a great support experience and they’ll share it with others.  Proactive engagement is about going one step further to ensure that your customers never have a negative experience.

Often, these acts of proactive engagement make customers feel pampered and respected. Thus, they are more inclined to share their support stories, effectively promoting your brand and becoming an evangelist for your business.

Abhiroop Basu is an opinionated tech and digital media blogger. In the real world, he works as Content and Product Marketing Manager for Zopim.