Around here, we believe in Proactive Customer Engagement. It seems like few people use this term. To us, it’s a constant attitude. In fact, Proactive Customer Engagement is essential to reaching the “holy grail” of customer satisfaction.

Isn’t the best customer experience the one that surprises you, because the brand knew what you needed before you realized it, and they were right there offering it to you? There are many ways to exceed the customer’s expectations, but engaging her at the right time is probably one of the least expensive ways.

I came across an interesting article by Frost & Sullivan on the topic of Proactive Customer Engagement, and I wanted to share some of its ideas with you.

Nancy Jamison of Frost & Sullivan wrote about insights contributed by business leaders to a forum on the topic. Speaking of proactive outbound campaigns, she said this about the opportunities they saw: “The opportunities centered around doing the unexpected for the customer, which has a direct impact on customer satisfaction and retention.”

That rings true, because positive surprises for customers always seem to have a favorable impact on satisfaction and retention.

To create a positive surprise—we also call it a WOW experience—one has to know what the customer needs; the strong implication is that individual customer data must be available, and it must be analyzed intelligently.

Another key insight is that Proactive Customer Engagement can occur through a number of different channels: text, email, outbound center calling, and agent calling.

Whatever the medium, it’s an attitude that looks for ways of getting ahead—strategically—of what the customer is thinking.