Predict and Resolve Customer Issues with AI
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe proactive self-service.
- Explain the benefits of using proactive self-service.
Meet Proactive Self-Service
We all know the typical self-service portal experience: You have an issue, you go to a website, and you search endlessly for a knowledge article that can solve your problem. It’s a reactive, clunky process that can leave you feeling frustrated. What if that changed? What if your service portal or other channels could anticipate your needs and offer a solution before you typed a single word?
That’s the magic of proactive self-service. It’s a brand-new experience that uses data, CRM, and AI to transform the entire service lifecycle from reactive problem-solving to proactive customer success. Authenticated portals are the first supported channel where you’ll see proactive self-service in action. Eventually, proactive self-service will be the intelligent machinery working underneath every channel to anticipate customer needs. The goal is to gently guide customers toward the right answers or actions in real time, 24/7, without the need to contact support. Proactive self-service is a new foundation for support that helps service organizations continuously monitor data, anticipate service needs, and initiate self-service resolutions.
Proactive self-service is a suite of data, CRM, and AI tools that work together to create a smarter, more helpful customer experience.
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Agentic self-service: Integrate Agentforce directly with your self-service site. Instead of bots or AI agents working in a silo, fully integrate agentic AI with your self-service content and automations to deliver more actionable, personalized support in a unified experience. For example, imagine landing on a knowledge article that’s six pages long, and you instantly get a concise, useful summary so you know what it’s about without having to read the whole thing. In addition, when chatting with Agentforce, the portal can deliver real-time navigation, refreshing the portal page to take you directly to the right article based on your live AI agent conversation.
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Knowledge Q&A: Use the collective data from Data Cloud to anticipate questions customers would most likely ask. With Knowledge Q&A, you can dynamically order and show the most popular questions at the top of each knowledge article, helping you surface immediate answers and reduce time spent searching through tedious FAQ pages.
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Proactive campaigns: Use customer profile data and recent activity to automatically predict upcoming service events. For example, if a customer recently searched for how to add a person to a subscription plan, proactively offer them the form to sign up for that plan.
Improve Customer Service with Proactive Self-Service
The goal of proactive self-service is to make customer service so seamless that you barely think about it.
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Solve problems faster: By using data and AI to anticipate what a customer needs, proactive self-service provides resolutions—like a prepopulated return request form—without the customer ever having to call or search for a solution. This saves everyone time and hassle.
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Create a smarter experience: Proactive self-service improves your experience by remembering your past actions and providing context. It won’t start from scratch and ask, “What are you here for?” It knows who you are and what you’ve been doing on the site, making every interaction more efficient and personalized.
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Reduce costs: When you resolve issues before they escalate, you reduce the need for human intervention. This prevents issues from becoming costly support cases involving service reps or teams.
Transform Your Company with Proactive Self-Service
Proactive self-service is for any company ready to transform its customer service. If you’re tired of being reactive and want to solve problems before customers contact support, proactive self-service is for you.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Is your self-service portal experience confusing?
- Are you struggling to provide a personalized self-service experience?
- Do you want to reduce the need for customers to contact a service rep?
- Are your current customer channels unable to recall past customer actions and context?
- Do you want customers to resolve issues on their own without needing to search through articles?
- Do you want to move from fixing individual issues to preventing them from happening in the first place?
If you answered yes to any of these, you’re the perfect candidate for proactive self-service.
Access Proactive Self-Service
To access proactive self-service, contact your account representative. Some features are available in a beta program for Winter ’26, and you can implement them by simply dragging and dropping new intelligent components on your site from Experience Builder.
Ready to get started?