What is proactive support?

Why it matters

Proactive support is the only intervention that removes a contact without the customer having to do anything. It also carries the highest goodwill return per message sent, because telling someone about a problem before they notice reads as competence rather than as marketing.

What to know

• The best triggers are behavioural and specific, such as a failed payment or a stalled onboarding step.
• Outage communication is the highest-return proactive channel and the one most often done too late.
• Every proactive message is an interruption, so relevance has to be high or it becomes noise.
• Measure the contact rate on the triggering issue before and after, or you cannot tell if it worked.
• Proactive support blurs into marketing quickly, and customers notice the moment it crosses over.

An example

Example: a payment fails and the customer receives a message explaining exactly why and how to fix it, before the account is suspended. The alternative is a suspended account, an angry ticket, and a much longer conversation.

Common mistakes

• Using proactive messaging as a channel for promotions
• Announcing an outage after customers have already reported it
• Triggering on weak signals, which generates noise and opt-outs
• Not measuring whether the proactive message reduced contacts

Questions