A customer’s bill jumps for a reason they can’t discern from their statement. So they call.
A renewal notice sits in a customer’s spam folder for two weeks until their subscription lapses, and they can’t access the service. So they call.
A service ticket gets marked resolved without somebody ever making the fix, and three days later, the customer notices they’re still having the issue with their account. So they call.
Are any of these customers telling the company something it couldn’t have known?
No. For example, the renewal notice would have had a delivery status that a system could have picked up on and then remedied. In each of these scenarios, the information already existed. It’s just that the issue wasn’t detected fast enough for a system to act on it before the customer could (unhappily) detect and act on it themselves.
That’s the question worth asking about your own customer journeys: Where does someone have to contact you to fix something your organization could have already known about them?
Truly Proactive CX Requires Speed
Essentially, we’re talking about reactive vs. proactive CX, but we should be clear about what we mean by proactive CX. A lot of investment that brands have made toward CX over the last several years has gone into a related but different goal: finding where a step in the journey fails for a lot of customers at once (e.g., a confusing email template) and fixing that step so fewer customers experience that pain going forward. Most CX organizations already have some version of that work underway.
But knowing what a customer needs before they have to tell you is a different level entirely. It’s one thing to fix a step for the next 100,000 customers who hit it. It’s another thing to do it for this person, this moment, with a problem only their account can hint at—times 100,000.
The differentiator here is speed. The datapoint (or combination of datapoints) that tells you what a customer needs has a shelf life, and it can be very short. Suppose a banking customer has a scheduled autopay coming up, but their linked account balance dips below the autopay amount two days before the draft date. The window to alert the customer (to top off the account) might close in hours, when the draft attempt fails and a late fee posts. You can have the means to perform every step—from detecting a signal to confirming the treatment worked—but if there’s too much latency or manual work in between, it just becomes another declined payment and frustrated phone call.
The slowdown here usually isn’t a lack of tools, but old integration debts and slow (or no) handoffs. When service leaders are asked about their biggest modernization challenge, 72% say it’s integrating new technology with what they already have, according to Deloitte Digital.
The other major saboteur of proactive CX: silos. When CX executives describe what’s holding them back, they point to cross-department misalignment (43%) and siloed, fragmented customer data (38%), according to CMSWire. The data exists somewhere. It’s just scattered across systems that weren’t designed to compare notes in the moments customers need them to.
Let’s look at how speed factors into these three points: detect, decide, deliver.
Detect: How Fast Can the Signal Register?
Detecting is the moment something shifts for a customer and the moment anyone, or anything, recognizes it as worth acting on. This could be:
- A customer’s usage dropping to zero overnight
- Their payment posting short
- The delivery status of a message coming back bounced from their account
How long does it take for an occurrence to show up in your systems’ data and then get picked up?
For most organizations, it’s too long. Their support, billing, and usage data might live in separate systems that only reconcile on a batch cycle (e.g., overnight, hourly, once a shift) instead of the moment something changes. The full picture of one customer’s situation doesn’t exist anywhere until that sync runs, and someone or a separate system still has to notice it, then pull a report before anyone can decide what to do about it.
Decide: How Fast Can We Understand What It Means for the Customer?
Deciding picks up where detecting leaves off. Something surfaced about this one customer, but not yet what it means or what they need next. This is where a governed set of rules determines what to do in a given situation. Otherwise, someone would have to manually check the account against policy, escalate it for a supervisor’s sign-off, or wait for the next scheduled case review before a course of action gets approved.
In a unified system, this step can happen almost instantly—the moment the signal is understood, the right next action is already clear.
Deliver: How Fast Can We Get the Action to Them?
Delivering is the stretch from:
- Deciding what the customer needs
- That command reaching whichever system, channel, or person can deliver it
- The execution of the action
This also includes decisions that the brand should not act—like suppressing a promotional offer from going out to a customer while they’re experiencing a service outage.
Picture the autopay shortfall scenario again. In an organization running at the speed of proactive CX, the decision to send the customer a top-up reminder triggers an automated text within seconds of the shortfall being flagged. It doesn’t sit in a queue waiting to be carried out, by which point the draft attempt might have already failed and the late fee already posted.
This is a highly common lag point for brands because it often involves handoffs to different systems or entirely different teams.
Where’s Your Bottleneck?
When there’s lag in these three stages, it compounds. A slow detection eats into whatever window is left for the Decide and Deliver stages; a small delay early in the chain can compromise the brand’s chance to act before that one customer notices anything changed.
That raises a more useful question when you’re gauging your ability to execute proactive CX: not “do we have the data on this customer?” (most organizations already do) but “which of the three stages is the biggest bottleneck in our journey?”
Closing the Loop
There’s one more piece that holds the other three together: confirming whether the action actually worked. The payment posted. The renewal completed. The ticket got resolved. Without that confirmation, nobody actually knows if the intervention was executed or just added another touchpoint to the customer’s journey. Skip this step, and the same broken signal can emerge for the same customer down the line, and the organization is no better prepared to catch it and act on it the second time than it was the first.
What We’re Digging Into at CRS Tech Forum
We’ll be diving into this live September 30 at CSG’s Tech Forum session at the Customer Response Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona.
In “Know Them Before They Have to Tell You: Turning Customer Signals into Proactive Action,” we’ll work through which moments create the greatest risk to customer trust, what signals tell you a customer is about to struggle, and what action you could take before they ever have to ask for help.
If you’ve ever looked at your save rate and wondered how many of those customers never needed saving in the first place, this session is for you.
Guest post written by Brandon Sailors, VP of CX, CSG.
CSG simplifies the complexity of customer engagement, helping companies build trust and lasting loyalty across every interaction. Learn more at csgi.com.
