Introduction
Proactive means being prepared and on top of things before a particular development, rather than responding to it after it has come to pass.
In the context of our post, proactive customer support refers to an approach where a particular company adopts vigilance for its customers and interacts with them for the prevention of a harmful situation rather than waiting for the latter to develop.
In this post, we’re going to help you learn more about proactive customer support practices, how you can apply them, and how they can help in detecting, preventing, and fixing fraud.
Importance of Customer Support
Customer support is extremely important, especially in the domains of e-commerce and finance-related services. Customers need to have a channel where they can consult with the company they’re buying from.
With digital payments and online remittances, there is always the danger of fraud. Often, attempts at fraud are detected faster by the company than by the customers. Proactive measures by the company can protect the customer from financial harm.
Proactive Practices to Help Detect Fraud
Here are some proactive practices that can be adopted for fraud detection.
- Setting up unusual activity parameters and alerts
You can create rules and criteria for unusual activity on your platform. When the rules are exceeded, i.e., through excessive user requests or overly long sessions, it can alert your support team. Your team can then investigate the unusual activity and even alert the customer.
Unusual activity, like a higher number of requests, in this case, would indicate that the account is being accessed by someone other than the actual user.
- Tracking customer transactions and purchases
Tracking customer transactions and purchases is also essentially an anomaly-detection technique that can help you detect potential fraud.
Your support team can keep track of the transactions and purchases made by repeat customers. Subsequent transactions/purchases that don’t conform to the existing patterns (such as ones that involve a larger amount) can be flagged for review.
- Track behavioural biometrics
Behavioural biometrics, such as clicking behaviour, mouse movement, etc., can also be a way to detect fraud. If the behavior of a user is different than their normal pattern, it can indicate an account takeover.
How to Guide Customers to Prevent and Fix Fraud
Once the fraud is detected, the next thing is to prevent it and, in the event of it occurring, to get it fixed.
Here are some useful steps and tips to follow in this regard:
- Proactively educate customers through alerts and awareness campaigns
Running awareness campaigns to inform your customers about fraud attempts can be very helpful. You can tell them about the various ways in which their account credentials can be stolen and misused.
Awareness campaigns don’t have to be long and elaborate. Even a simple pop-up on a website or a push notification can be helpful.
- Create an easy-to-access fraud resource hub
You can also create an easy-to-access fraud resource hub on your website to guide your customers. The hub is more of a self-service option. Your customers can visit it when they like and educate themselves on the various types of fraud.
You can use a knowledge base software to create a resource hub like this. For example, you can use Zendesk to create a customer-facing knowledge base to easily upload and manage various informational articles. (There are also various Zendesk alternatives that you can try out as well, depending on your preferences.)
The benefit of using a dedicated knowledge base software for this purpose is that you can enjoy various features, such as access control, tracking engagement metrics, streamlined content creation systems, and so on.
- Offer real-time alerts and encourage prompt action
You can provide real-time alerts, i.e., when suspicious activity is detected, to your customers and quickly guide them to prevent the fraud. You can provide prompt email alerts or push-notifications to let your users/customers know when they need to take
- Walk them through the recovery process step by step
Even with all the efforts you take, fraud is inevitable. With the right steps, it can be drastically reduced, yes, but it can still occur every now and then.
In the aftermath of the fraud attempt, there are various steps that the customer/user has to take to recover their information and resecure their accounts.
Those steps also have to be disseminated by the support team. You have to walk the customers through the process step by step.
You can create and publish a guide for this situation on the resource hub (as mentioned in the previous heading) so that your customers/users can easily peruse it.
Here are some things to keep in mind regarding the creation of said guides:
- Make sure to use non-technical and simple language. This will help make sure that everyone can easily understand the guide.
- Where needed, add visuals and images to illustrate the steps so that the readers can easily replicate them. You can use an AI step-by-step guide maker like Wizardshot for this purpose.
- Make sure that the guide is optimized for viewing on all types of devices, such as mobile, tablet, and PC. Often, in a fraud situation, the customer/user has to make use of whatever they have on hand. It can be a mobile, and your guide should be optimized to cater to this situation.
Wrapping Up
And with that, we’re going to wrap up our article.
With proactive customer support, you can protect your customers from fraud and financial harm. There are different steps that you can take to detect suspicious activity, such as setting parameters, behavioural biometrics, and so on.
Educating customers about fraud as well as prevention measures is also important. We’ve provided some helpful tips regarding that as well.
