I mentioned the other day that proactive customer support would be one of the things we.d be looking to implement here at Webmail.us. I thought it might be useful to explain what I meant.

Reactive Support

This is your normal, everyday technical and customer support. You realize you have a problem. You get frustrated. When you get frustrated enough, you send someone an email or pick up a phone and call.

Providing this kind of support is a necessity for many businesses. Phone-based support has earned a bad reputation.deservingly low according to many. That.s why we all wait until our frustration with a problem is greater than the frustration we think we will experience when we call the technical support line. I think that our phone-based support at Webmail.us could be stronger, but that.s not what I.m writing about today.

Proactive Support

Often a company is in a position to either predict or notice a problem in behalf of a customer. When that happens, the company can move to resolve the issue in the customer.s behalf and notify the customer about what was done. Or perhaps the company makes contact with the customer to explain what the customer might need to do to prevent or resolve their problem.

For us, this means watching our email log data. If we see a lot of sending errors from a certain IP address it might tell us that kaverett@notreal.webmail.us hasn.t set up his email program to use SMTP authentication properly.required on our system. There are a dozen other customer problems that we might detect with the right automated tools. Once we know about a problem we can contact our customer.s email administrator and give them a head.s up. We.re working now on the back-end tools that will help us be proactive. Give us a few weeks and months and you.ll hear some great stories.

Who Else Should Be Doing This?

Any company that has a product .wired. to the customer. On-Star(R) should tie in to a modern car.s computer system (using ODB-II) and call me when I.m starting to get bad gas mileage and need to get a tune-up. ISP.s should notice when their customers are infected with a virus or are acting as spam zombies and help them disinfect.

The Future

I don.t think Webmail.us will be alone in this effort. I just think we.ll be one of the very first. Someday, this type of service may be so commonplace that it will be expected in the same way we now expect a fast-food restaurant to upsell us to a large size drink.

-Kirk