February 16, 2021
• 2 min read
Proactive customer engagement is a powerful tool to increase the number, and value of customer conversations across the entire customer journey. In fact, Nuance found that found that 85% of consumers are interested in receiving proactive notifications, and an astounding 90% are more likely to do business with a company that sends reminders.
We're retiring the idea that your customers don't want to hear from you. Going forward, embracing proactive will be an important differentiator that helps your company acquire and retain customers for a lifetime.
Why shifting from reactive to proactive customer engagement is important
Shifting from a reactive to proactive customer engagement strategy should be top of mind for CX executives to stay competitive.
Targeting prospects and customers at specific points in the buying cycle has led to more valuable customer conversations, more leads, increased conversion rates, and increased revenue. In Ada’s 2021 ACX Trends report, we found from our own client analytics that when a proactive intro is shown it’s 170x times more likely to result in an engaged conversation.

A 2021 Gartner report predicts that by 2025 outbound interactions will overtake reactive interactions. The untapped potential of proactive customer engagement will set companies up to take a bigger share of wallet, grow revenue, and create more customer loyalty. Automated proactive tools also reduce human effort and the number of agents needed to sit on CX platforms. Finally, you can free time and resources for CX reps to create value with new, strategic endeavours.
Empowering your CX team
Today, it’s possible to leverage AI and service automation to offer personalized proactive messages to targeted customer groups. This way, your clients will experience the modern way of communicating and improve your overall customer service experience.
No-code solutions especially punch above their weight in value and flexibility. It’s simple for the non-technical CX teams that know your customers best - think sales, marketing, and support - to build out your most effective proactive campaigns.
Layering proactive engagement into an Automated Customer Experience, allows you to easily engage every visitor with targeted and personalized messages to increase customer engagement and drive conversions. Targeting the right customers, with the right content, at the right time.
Getting the most from proactive messaging
Maximizing the benefit of a proactive customer engagement strategy means lifting conversion across the customer journey - from Acquisition to Activation to Retention.
Acquisition allows you to drive leads and nurture prospects.
Activation means encouraging customers to take specific actions and interact with your product.
Retention involves delivering best-in-class CX to drive loyalty.
Each stage requires the ability to anticipate customer needs, which means your proactive customer conversations should also be informed by data. Plug your conversational platform into the data enrichment tools you already leverage to correctly segment your visitors and deliver unique messaging.
Proactive for Marketing, Sales, and Support
There are many ways to implement proactive customer engagement for a diverse set of use cases that span.
- Abandoned cart: Send reminders to help customers cross the purchasing finish line.
- Qualify and generate leads: Ensure leads are in your Ideal Customer Profile and capture leads with conversational form fills with proactive prompts.
- Upsell and cross sell: Offer tailored recommendations based on website behaviour, point in customer lifecycle, and more.
- Promote product education: Anticipate the questions prospects and new visitors will have and surface the content that helps your product shine.
- Sooth hesitant customers' worries: Wrinkle out any snags in your customers' buying journey.