I dislike most corporate-speak, but two words I do use on a fairly regular basis are ‘proactive’ and ‘reactive.’ You might think these words are opposites, but they are not. In fact, when you’re acting proactively you’re also acting reactively because you’re reacting to a thought or perhaps an item on a list about how to make something work more smoothly in order to prevent problems.
A minor digression: What’s the difference between an issue and a problem? It’s an issue before a customer notices it. Once a customer notices it, it’s a problem.
To clarify what I said about these words not being opposites: The opposite of reactive is dead. The opposite of proactive isn’t a word but an attitude, one that is a combination of apathy and incompetence.
One area in business that you must, simply must, be proactive about is in communicating with your fellow employees. If a project requires input and action from multiple people, each person must know ahead of time what their responsibilities are to that project.
The CIO of the parent company of a previous employer was managing a project, having some software setup for a client. The software was web-based, and it also communicated with a server located in the client’s office. It took a few weeks to complete, and there was a scheduled go-live date.
I had talked with our CIO about this client at the beginning of the project, and he assured me and other members of the IT department that he was handling every aspect of the project.
The day after the go-live date, I got a call from the sales rep assigned to this client. The client was upset because a large portion of the website was left unconfigured for them to use. Items that should have been very easy to find were simply not there. I called our CIO about this and he told me that he usually let the individual sites – referring to the location I worked in – handle that part of getting a client set up.
This incredibly important detail had never been communicated to me or anyone else at my location. He’d had ample opportunity – including my initial phone call to him about this client – to proactively share with me what my responsibilities to the project (and thus the customer) should have been. It’s inconceivable that it didn’t occur to him to share this information with me at some point during the weeks-long project. Instead he was secretive and waited until several people, myself included, were forced to react to the customer calling to complain before he did anything about it. No matter the ultimate reason, the complete lack of proactive communication resulted in a very unhappy customer.
You’re always going to have to react to issues. That’s just the nature of work. Being properly proactive and fixing issues before a customer notices them is what prevents having to react to problems. If a customer notices, someone somewhere was either apathetic or incompetent. Remember the first requirement of providing bar-setting customer service: A genuine desire to help people. An issue becomes a problem once a customer notices it. The goal is always to resolve issues before they become problems.