What Is Customer Care?
Without a doubt, customers are the lifeline of a business. They’re the one that brings in the revenue that keeps the lights on and the organization running. Therefore, customer care is an important key in maintaining strong and healthy relationships with customers.
Customer care is the process of overseeing customers to ensure they are satisfied and happy with the business and its brand, products, and services. Customer care is how well someone is treated when they interact with a brand, its employees before, during, and after they make a purchase.
Excellent customer service plays a significant role in the success of a business. Every customer call, email, social media request, all interactions allow improving the business’s reputation with customers and the brand value. If your customers get great care, you can be sure you will reap the benefits with increased revenues.
An effective customer care strategy is vital for the continued growth of your business. A customer care strategy plays a critical role in obtaining customer satisfaction, helping retain loyal customers, and increasing repeat business. The care strategy defines the standards of support and service you offer customers and sets the requirements for meeting those standards. Basically, if you want to see the revenue needle move in the right direction, you must show a lot of love to your customers.
Customer Care vs. Customer Service
It may seem like customer care, and customer service is the same, but there is a notable difference between them. Customer service is found in every business you go into, like when you're at a restaurant and your food comes out wrong. You tell your waitress about the issue, and they bring you a new plate. Sure, they corrected the problem by replacing the meal, but they may not have been super happy.
Customer care is going above and beyond to ensure a customer is completely happy, satisfied, delighted, and loving your brand at all times because of the first-class service they receive. Customer Care philosophy takes a personal approach to the customer’s journey with a brand to ensure they feel respected and cared for throughout the business relationship. Customer care is less measurable than customer service and is more concerned with each customer interaction.
Both functions aim to increase customer satisfaction; customer service does this by simply answering questions and providing support. But customer care focuses on actively listening to understand the customer's emotional needs just as much as the physical or business ones. As a result, your company creates strong long-term, mutually beneficial relationships with your customers.
Importance of Customer Care
Providing inefficient or poor customer service is likely to affect your business and bottom line negatively. You could be providing the best products out there, but if your customers don’t get the great service they need, you can be sure it will negatively affect your business.
The bitter truth is that consumers who receive poor service will tell twice as many people about the bad experience as they will about a good one. Also, 70% of Americans are willing to spend around 13% more money with companies they believe will provide excellent customer care and service.
Just one poor experience a customer receives from your brand can completely backfire on you and leave your company with a bad rap. Customers will go online or on social media, writing comments and reviews for all to see both good and bad. So, to protect your brand image, it’s essential to ensure every customer gets the best care and leaves feeling appreciated and cared for.
Advantages of Customer Care
Customer Satisfaction
The main role of customer care is trying to satisfy every customer. Even the difficult customers and we’ve all experienced them at least once. The customer support representatives should go out of their way to do what is needed to please every customer, even if some require them to go to the moon and back. Your brand image is on the line, so it’s super important. Their willingness to offer a helping hand makes them stand out and hopefully will soothe any upset and give complete customer satisfaction.
Build Loyalty
Loyal customers are what keep many businesses afloat. They bring in a steady revenue stream without the high cost of marketing to acquire a new customer. They also order more often and don’t easily stray when they see a clever marketing ad from a competitor. Loyal customers are also an excellent referral source. Referrals are warm leads who already have some sense of trust from your organization since one of their friends or family members recommended your brand. So, in essence, proving exceptional care is a form of marketing.
Build Relationships
Customer care is also building strong customer relationships. It is a customer-centric approach, and consumers respond positively.
Build Trust
Customer care builds trust by always coming to the rescue when a customer is having a problem. When you have proven to always be there with open arms when needed, your customers will learn they can trust you, and that goes a long way in the eye of a consumer.
Encourage Feedback
The fact of the matter is, you won’t get feedback from most customers, either good or bad. When you don’t know something is broken, then you can’t fix it. A customer care department encourages customers to provide feedback so that they can make necessary changes to improve. When a customer feels like you care, they’re more likely to let you know where you might be falling short so that you can repair it.
Effectively Handle Complaints
Customer care departments sometimes become the customer complaints department. But getting a complaint from a customer isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It means there’s room for improvement, and you now have the data you need to know what needs to be fixed. It’s also a great time to show the customer you really care, gain their trust, and win them over. Heck, you may even turn them into loyal customers after an exceptional interaction with them.
Customer Care Strategy
1. Set the Standards
The first step in a customer care strategy is setting the standards for the entire organization. Companies like Zappos have set high customer care standards, and the word has gotten around organically. When your entire team knows your standards and your customer-first approach, it’s easier to follow and becomes part of your company's culture. You could include it in part of your company's mission statement, so it becomes who you are.
2. Analyze
To improve your customer care, you need to know how you currently stack up. Review customer feedback, conduct research online to find reviews about your brand, ask employees their opinions based on what they have heard from customers. Learn as much as you can about your current care factor to understand areas that need improvement.
3. Identify
Identify the activities or processes that impact customer satisfaction, such as service times to respond to customer inquiries, delivery times, invoicing accuracy, or ability to resolve service problems quickly.
4. Train
Customers are indeed the lifeline of a business, and employees are the backbone. Don’t assume your customer care agents know how to provide exceptional care. Instead, train them to know how to provide the best care to every customer, including the difficult and upset ones. Also, remember that a happy employee who likes their job and is committed to the organization’s success is more likely to put in the work to achieve customer satisfaction. So invest in your employee’s happiness as well.
Develop an incentive and rewards program for your employees for them to benefit from providing exceptional customer care. Recognizing and rewarding your employees who have contributed to five-star service encourages them to keep it up. You can set targets for different departments and reward the top-performing departments.
5. Strategize
Based on the data you collected, and the areas you see need improvement, develop a solid strategy to obtain 100% customer satisfaction. It should become the main focus of every interaction your customer has with your brand. Don’t just set it and forget it. Keep an eye on your strategies to ensure they’re being used and are actually working.
To Sum it Up
Customer care is essential for the long-term success of an organization. When customers are happy, satisfied, and feel cared for, they will trust your business and be loyal to you. Loyal customers are excellent brand advocates, giving your business a good rapport online and sends you free leads by referring others to you.
The best news is, customer care isn’t costly. It’s simply going above and beyond to fix issues and provide exceptional service that makes your business stand out from the competition. Your business is on the line, so the stakes are high. It’s important to give it the proper attention it needs.
Are you ready to develop the best customer care team for your business to grow a following of loyal customers that love your brand? Then contact Awesome CX today to get started!
Sources:
Want More Customers? Get Quality Referrals From Existing Customers | Entrepreneur
How I Did It: Zappos's CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers | Harvard Business Review