3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

Amazon recently revealed that it is going to start shipping products to regional depots in anticipation of customer orders for those products. Not pallets of products—we’re talking single items it suspects individual customers are going to eventually buy.

Not only is this a sign of increasingly complex customer data usage, it also reveals the trend toward proactive customer interaction.

One firm that advocates strongly for such proactive communication is Rapide, a customer specialist firm in the U.K. It recently released an infographic that argued forcefully for engaging with customers on an ongoing basis, not just when orders are completed or marketing campaigns are in motion.

The devil is in the details when it comes to such approaches, however. If proactive is code for many ongoing sales pitches, customers in general and Millennials in particular will pretty clearly walk away from a brand. But if multi-channel, proactive communication is harnessed properly to create a better back and forth between a company and a customer, there is real opportunity.

That’s because the relationship between business and consumer is changing. While every generation says there is a revolution, those alive today can pretty convincingly argue the point. Is there any time in history when business has changed so dramatically so quickly? From the mobile workforce and the knowledge-worker to Internet marketing and a more empowered customer, business is being shaken up in a big way.

One of those ways is what the customer expects from business in 2014. One-way, impersonal communication no longer cuts it. Consumers are increasingly looking for a relationship with the businesses they use, and all the aspects of that which comes from dialogue.

Rapide pretty clearly spells it out. It argues that businesses must talk with customers at every touch point, make it easy for customers to reply to communications, proactively serve info to the customer instead of waiting for the customer to initiate, personalize and be available for inquiries, match the communication style to the individual customer, and time communications appropriately.

In a word: Be human, not corporate.

When talking with our friends, we all know that there are certain times when we’ll get a favorable response and times when we’ll just be annoying them. We know they prefer text messaging, or calls, or if they only respond via Facebook (News - Alert). We know our friends want to be in the loop if we have something planned or a major life event.

A business needs to start thinking like a human, not like a corporation, if it is going to win the next round of business evolution. The technology exists now to make the connection between consumer and business much tighter and personalized, and consumers are now informed enough to know it. In fact, they expect it.

They are also increasingly receiving it from innovative firms that are already personalizing the customer experience. Businesses that fail to adapt to this shift will lose business, no question about it.

While not every firm must go as far as Amazon in being proactive and personal with its customer care—there is something to be said for what Amazon is doing in general.

Businesses need to realize the customer landscape is changing. We are in a business revolution, and having a better interaction with the customer is part of that revolution.