Four Steps to More Proactive Customer Service

March 8, 2011 - PRLog -- Does your service staff need to be more proactive?

According to recent research by TARP Worldwide, for most customer service centers, a little proactive service could reduce calls (and the costs related to those calls) by 30 percent.

Yet, in an interview in the March issue of industry publication "Customer Service Newsletter," John Goodman notes that very few companies make the effort to proactively educate customers on how to avoid problems. The result is that, "they are dooming themselves to always being in a fire fighting mode."

Goodman, the vice chairman of TARP Worldwide, suggests some simple actions that customer service providers can take to become more proactive. These include:

* Ask frontline reps to identify preventable time-wasters that might be eliminated by proactively educating customers.

* Identify preventable problems and proactively educate customers to avoid them.

* Give phone reps the extra time they need to introduce customers to self-service options.

* Measure self-service success by type of issue and continuously update customer tools and FAQs.

Additional strategies for enhancing service with a proactive approach are covered in the March issue of "Customer Service Newsletter."

# # #

About the Customer Service Group

For more than 20 years, the Customer Service Group has helped customer service, call center and help desk managers increase productivity, improve service quality and boost customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. The Customer Service Group publishes "Customer Service Newsletter" and "The Customer Communicator."

Website: http://www.CustomerServiceGroup.com