What is ‘proactive service’ and why it is important for your car dealership?

There should be things consumers don't have to even think about because your business is anticipating their needs.

Don’t miss the opportunity for your organization to offer a service that is proactive as opposed to reactive. What’s the difference you may ask? Well on today’s show Joseph Michelli, CEO of The Michelli Experience and New York Times best-selling author of his latest book, Stronger through Adversity, joins us to discuss this and the importance of having proactive service. 

According to a recent study by Gartner, 87% of every interaction we have with a brand after-sales is reactive. To be proactive, Michelli says it means to: alert, avert or avoid. Alerting is allowing the company to alert you to its awareness of your problem before you have to contact their customer service.

Related: How reducing friction in the customer experience benefits car dealers

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Michelli asks where can you alert your customer to things that are coming up? Also, how can you avoid your customers taking extra steps with you, that you know are going to happen? He also says, ultimately, you don’t want to have customers call in. There should be things consumers don’t have to even think about because your business is anticipating their needs. Start building these solutions before they have to alert you or avert some other problem.

The first step to take when going from reactive to proactive service is, starting with customer complaints. Michelli says one of the greatest gifts with customer input is it enables us to look at those trends that we need to get in front of. The other step is, anticipating future needs.

It’s essential to listen to your customer in ways, you may have not, said Michelli. It’s a massive number of questions that we have to constantly change every day, in the way we respond to the people who trust us to serve them. He says trust is at a premium because we need transparency to make decisions as consumers.


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