Reactive vs. proactive CS: What do we mean? 

“Be more proactive” is easy to say, but hard to tangibly accomplish. Today, too many teams mistake activity for proactivity. So let’s start with a couple of definitions of what we mean by reactive vs. proactive CS.

Two quick definitions 

As a general rule, if the customer has to make the first move about a detail or issue you had no idea existed prior to the reach-out, you’re being reactive. Even if you’re diligently following up on a customer complaint, you’re still acting in response to a customer request rather than taking the lead. 

A reactive CS team will measure activity regardless of whether that activity is meaningful to the customer and helps them hit their bottom line. They’re measuring email response times rather than customer results. 

Contrast that with a proactive approach. A proactive CS approach is about guiding customers toward their desired business outcomes; it’s about showing up as a consultative partner to their business. 

With this mindset, you aren’t waiting for your customers to complain or struggle. Instead, you’re using your deep knowledge of their specific pain points and objectives to get them the most out of your solution. You’re there to help them see around corners, avoid upcoming roadblocks, and find real business value from your product. Every CSM becomes laser-focused on delivering positive business outcomes (PBOs), not on how quickly they can return to inbox zero. 

Proactive, but supportive: Finding the right balance 

Of course, we’re not suggesting you should just ignore customer issues. You most certainly need to be listening to your customers, responding to their feedback, and dealing with challenges that arise. 

But what we are saying is that dealing with tactical issues shouldn’t be where the majority of your CS team’s time is going. 

Ideally, your CS program should steer your customers to use your solution in a way that will move them closer to their goals as quickly and easily as possible. You’re responsive to their needs, yes, but they should see you and your team as strategic guides more than “Quick, help me solve this!” band-aid solutions. 

A 3-question self-assessment: Are you reactive or proactive? 

To shift from reactive to proactive, start by evaluating how well your team is doing today. Here are a few questions to ask yourself as a CS leader to evaluate your own team’s proactivity and performance: 

1. Is the customer or the CSM taking the first step?

When customers are leading conversations with your CSMs, you’re in reactive mode. They are the experts on their own needs, yes, but you’re the experts on your solution and how it should help them. Therefore, your team should be the people guiding almost every interaction. 

2. Are you aligning performance metrics to PBOs?

If your CSMs are being measured on activity, then you aren’t being proactive. Proactive CS teams guide customers through what they must do to achieve the PBOs they defined during discovery. (Or, in the case that those outcomes weren’t well-defined pre-sale, they help clarify those target outcomes and drive toward them.) 

That means that your KPIs need to line up with customer value, not internal activity. 

To put it another way — customers won’t care how responsive your team is if they don’t feel like your solution is moving them toward their overarching goals. 

Internally, performance metrics like “percentage of your book of business with defined PBOs” or “percentage of PBO objectives reached” are two great options to incentivize proactive vs. reactive CS. 

Note: You can use PBOs as a way to identify necessary inputs — What did your CSMs do in order to help a customer reach a PBO? — and then create some light activity tracking as a leading indicator of success in future quarters or years.

3. Do you have a clear statement about your buyers’ motivations?  

There are likely only a handful of PBOs your solution can accomplish for customers. To be truly proactive, you need to know exactly what those are. For example, if you sell a marketing automation SaaS solution, then some typical PBOs might be: 

• An increase in lead conversion rates from email campaigns 
• Lower customer acquisition costs
• Better cost per opportunity (CPO) from ads

Reactive CS teams wait to be told why each customer bought their solution. Proactive CS teams figure out why customers made their purchase sometimes before they’ve even signed on the dotted line. They then can help customers articulate their PBOs during initial onboarding, and revisit those PBOs often to make sure they remain up to date as the relationship develops. 

How to be proactive at every stage of the CS journey 

Read on to compare and contrast what reactive CS typically looks like and what proactive CS can look like instead. We’ll break it down with examples for each step of the CS process: 

Onboarding

❌ Reactive onboarding is based on teaching the customer about the tool. You’re showing them features and hacks and answering questions that come up. It feels like a massive information dump to the customer, where CSMs race to show them as many features and use cases as possible. 

✅ Proactive onboarding is about guiding the customer to what we call their first moment of impact. You start by understanding their desired end state, and then walk them through steps that’ll get them to that end state as quickly as possible.

For instance, let’s say you sell marketing analytics software. Your customer says that they bought your product because they have trouble combining data from their Facebook ads and Google Analytics to derive marketing insights. Your onboarding journey shouldn’t be about showing them every bell and whistle it comes with. Instead, you should design the onboarding experience to be about how they can combine Facebook and Google data and spot their first marketing insight with your tool. 

Account planning 

❌ Reactive account planning isn’t really account planning, in any meaningful sense. Reactive CS teams are simply responding when a customer indicates some interest in an expansion. 

✅ Proactive account planning is about the CS team actively identifying expansion opportunities, without waiting for the customer to notice that they’re maxing out their licenses or hitting a tier limitation. Proactive CS teams work closely with AEs, conducting monthly or quarterly account reviews to align on growth opportunities and next steps to secure the upsell.  

Account management

❌ Reactive account management is pure fire-fighting. The customer raises their hand, and a CSM responds. The relationship is purely transactional; they have a question or a tactical issue, and you help resolve it. 

✅ Proactive account management is about building a partnership. Your approach to customer outreach shows that you’re taking an active interest in their company’s success. You regularly check in on whether each customer’s initial PBOs are still relevant and how they’re progressing toward them. Great CSMs also celebrate milestones with their customers, spotlighting the customer’s hard work and usage of your product.

Proactive CSMs are always mindful that a personal, trusted relationship with each customer goes a long way. For instance, if a customer tells a CSM that they’re going on the vacation of a lifetime or that they’re grieving the loss of a loved one, top CS orgs have mechanisms in place to capture that information and follow up with a thoughtful message or a well-timed gift. 

Measuring success 

❌ Reactive success measurement means hosting the same old QBRs. Even though QBRs might seem proactive, they’re expected and status quo. They are reactive to what customers expect. 

✅ Proactive success measurement means that CSMs are recognizing customer progress when they see it — not on some arbitrary quarterly cadence.

To take this a step further, be sure you’re not just sharing the success with your main point of contact; establish a process for sharing wins with key decision-makers, too. For instance, let’s say your customer hits a major milestone in their progress towards their PBO—they’ve increased their leads by 10%, for instance. You should be emailing your contact, but also, ideally, sharing it with their manager. 

You’ve not only made your contact look good in front of their boss, winning yourself a solid champion in the account, but you’ve also given that manager a useful win that they can share with leadership.

Again, it’s worth restating that this approach to measuring success relies entirely on whether or not you’re working toward PBOs that are meaningful to your customers—and whether you’re proactive in building relationships with multiple stakeholders. Otherwise, you’re just sending spam. 

Renewal

❌ A reactive approach to renewals is to simply wait for the renewal date to roll around, then set up a call to discuss next steps. 

✅ A proactive approach to renewals is to tie that call to the customer’s business processes and budget timelines, not your renewal date. After all, your renewal date could easily fall in the middle of their business cycle, so a lack of proactive planning could mean they push you off. 

What you need in place for proactive CS 

If you’ve read all this and realized that you’re still stuck firmly in reactive mode, don’t panic. You can make the shift from reactive to proactive in incremental stages. Here’s what you’ll need in place as you get started: 

A fresh mindset

For many CS teams, the mindset shift is the most important aspect of becoming more proactive. Most CSMs have spent so long fighting fires that they aren’t used to thinking in a strategic commercial way. 

Start by having a conversation about what customers are typically trying to achieve with your platform. From there, you can create specific statements about buyer motivation. 

This is also an opportunity to identify and clarify your moments of impact with the broader CS org. (We’ve written a guide on exactly how to do that if you’d like to take a look.) 

The goal here is to help your CS team embrace their role as a Customer Success partner, not a slightly more relational customer support rep.   

A new playbook to upskill your CSMs 

Developing a fresh mindset will take training, but predefined workflows can guide your team to take the right actions at the right time. For instance, you can use Catalyst Playbooks to automate alerts, assign tasks, or trigger emails at key moments, like when a customer hits an adoption milestone or when renewal is coming up. 

Compelling customer data 

You need to make sure that you’re tracking the right performance metrics — those that measure your contributions towards customer outcomes, rather than your activity levels. 

You’ll want intuitive analytics features that make it easy for non-technical users to measure customer activity and track whether or not their customers are seeing compelling business results. 

Up-to-date information 

Most CSMs are flying blind. They don’t have the resources, time, or attribution data to know whether their hard work is actually driving NRR and GRR. They don’t know where they should focus their efforts. And if you’re looking at old data, then being reactive is inevitable.

With Catalyst, you don’t just set up workflows — you have data at your fingertips to see which playbooks result in renewals and expansions. 

The ability to see around corners 

Proactive CS teams need automation tools to make sure they’re consistently anticipating their customers’ needs.

Catalyst users can automatically customize workflows and actions based on changes to a customer’s unique data or behavior, so they’re never forced back into reactive mode by unexpected events. For instance, if your customer is close to maxing out their licenses, you can create an automated expansion playbook before they’ve even hit their threshold. 

What’s the first step towards proactive CS? 

To become a proactive CS leader and team, the first step is to think about customer outcomes more than anything else. You need to be three steps ahead of your customers, understanding what they need before they even know to ask for it. 

Catalyst can help. Our software equips hundreds of SaaS CS teams with the customer data, actionable health scores, and repeatable playbooks they need to work proactively. This method works; our customer base is seeing results like:

• 2x the number of previous expansion leads
• 16% increase in retention
• 20% customer revenue growth

If you’re ready to take the first step toward proactive CS, we’d love to hear from you. 

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