Customer Care: Its Importance and Best Practices
February 26, 2024 | Read: 9 minutes
Customer care is more important than ever and nowadays the word that best describes customer relationships is “customer-centric”.
To succeed in today’s competitive landscape, businesses need to offer outstanding products and services and make customers feel special and cared for.
It’s a big ask, so let’s learn more:
This blog comes courtesy of HelpCrunch.
This trend for customer care is there for a very good reason: people no longer want to be regarded as a group or “audience”. They like to be treated as individuals and manifest this desire in their buying behaviours.
For instance: for 60% of consumers, a personalized shopping experience is a retention-driving factor!
Recognising the value of personalisation, all kinds of businesses must adopt techniques to help them target customers as individuals. A personal approach has become the central aspect of good customer service.
However, providing good service is no longer enough. Today, it’s about delivering excellent customer care.
What is Customer Care?
What do you feel when you say the word “care”? Something warm and kind? At its core, that’s how customer care experiences should be. It’s all about the emotions your brand builds into the customer experience for every unique customer journey they have with you.
Customer care, then, is about more than providing a service, fixing issues, and resolving complaints. It’s about how much you are willing to go above and beyond to leave customers happy and satisfied.
If we wanted to give customer care a simple definition, the best way to describe it would be “interacting with customers to build positive emotional connections”.
Customer Care vs. Customer Service: The Main Differences
Customer service and customer care – they are easy to mix up.
While they have a lot in common, Customer service means providing help, assistance, and support within the scope of the business. Customer care, however, is about going the extra mile to make the customer happy, and content, and build on your business relationship with them.
For example, rebooking a boiler service job that was previously cancelled is one example of customer service. It’s expected that the job will be rescheduled and taken care of. However, how your customer is given notice (perhaps via a personal touch, over the phone as well as a confirmation email/text) is an example of better customer care.
While you can’t measure the impact of care as well as other data, taking the time to provide customers care is what an lead to a customer returning to you again, or leaving a positive review. This is why showing that you care is as important as providing good service.
Best Practices for Building Emotional Connections
Good customer care doesn’t happen on its own. You have to work for it to become your trademark. Here are some tips on how to practice awesome customer care.
• Make it easy to contact you
Easy multichannel communication is the main pillar of customer service in general. It plays an important role in building a culture of care, too.
In the majority of cases, customers reach out to the business when something is not right. Already anxious and frustrated, they will not be excited to find that, for example, the only contact option is email without an immediate response.
This can be a disadvantage of customer service tools like Zendesk. While a well-known customer service system, its focus is on support tickets, with little attention to other customer-facing digital channels.
For the maximum convenience of customers, provide them with multiple ways of reaching out to you—email, live chat, phone, or ticketing system. That way, you can lower their anxiety and start the interaction on a constructive note.
You can implement all these tools independently – use a separate live chat application, contract a phone connection provider, and choose the best email client.
However, the most efficient solution is to invest in a customer service platform enabling omnichannel communication in a single interface.
• Provide personalised service
Customer care and personalisation go hand in hand because care represents the very concept of treating customers as individuals.
In addition to creating positive customer experiences, personalisation may boost your revenue by 15-30%!
Personalisation boosts the customer satisfaction score in all industries: from manufacturing to retail shopping and dropshipping.
To adopt a personalised approach to customers, invest in your audience research. Outline user personas, segment your customer base, and target your activities accordingly. And, of course, see the real person behind the issue during the service.
For example, if you provide customer service via phone calls, you can make good use of call tracking to analyse conversations and understand your clients better.
As a result, you can provide even more personalised service with time.
• Practice emotional intelligence
Emotion has been found to be the greatest purchase driver: 86% of customers with a high emotional rating are willing to shop again with the brand!
This is why it is critical to use emotional intelligence not only in service but in all customer interactions.
To increase emotional intelligence in your customer care teams, set up training sessions to help people learn listening, develop and express empathy, and control their emotions.
Such social skills can help agents to better identify with customers and provide assistance and care.
• Offer self-service resources
Letting people find solutions to their issues independently is also a part of customer care. An increasing number of customers prefer self-service to getting assistance from a support agent.
Set up a comprehensive knowledge base and/or an FAQ page with the most important and frequently requested information to allow your customers to browse at leisure and look for answers to their questions.
In addition to raising satisfaction, a self-service portal will considerably lower the workload on your customer service team and result in more web traffic.
• Allow options for human intervention
With all the automation and customer self-service tools that help you deal with clients’ issues, leave them an opportunity to talk to a human being.
For many people who are stressed out and frustrated, it will be easier to explain the situation to a person rather than choose between chatbot options or figure out help recommendations.
A skilled customer service agent with a good level of empathy can bring down the degree of anger and turn the conversation into a problem-solving dialogue.
For the customer, the issue may be resolved quicker and more effectively, transforming the problem into a loyalty-driving opportunity.
Importance of Customer Care in Business
While not clearly trackable, customer care can notably influence your business performance by affecting the way customers see your brand.
• Higher customer trust
By displaying care, you earn customers’ trust. If you practice understanding and consideration when customers are frustrated and anxious, they feel they can trust you to provide the expected level of service and assure them that they are in good hands.
Such assurance and confidence translate into a reputation of reliability. Customers who experience your care at a difficult moment are more likely to return to you for more business.
71% of customers will not buy from the brand that lost their trust.
• Stronger brand reputation
Companies going beyond the standard service procedures earn a reputation of being customer-centric and flexible in helping customers succeed. As a result, the brand is perceived as reliable and trustworthy.
Customer experiences tend to start viral loops, where people tell others about how the business treated them. When good service is accompanied by empathic care, loyal customers will surely share their impressions with others, thus bringing more potential customers to the brand.
On the other hand, uncaring and indifferent service can start the same word-of-mouth loop, bringing the brand’s reputation down and causing customer churn.
26% of people will completely avoid a brand if their friend or family tells them about a negative experience.
Forbes
• Increased customer loyalty
Positive experiences inspired by good service and attentive care are what makes customers return to the brand when they need the same product again. Even if there were issues, proactive care could balance them and create a positive customer service experience.
As a result, the business gets more regular customers, which will likely bring more sales. In turn, loyal and satisfied customers may refer the brand to their friends and relatives, generating new leads.
It costs five times more to bring new customers than to retain the existing ones.
FinancesOnline
• Lower customer churn
Churn is the opposite of loyalty, representing a trend of customers abandoning the brand and taking their business elsewhere. Lack of customer care may be the factor driving them away and forcing them to check out the competitors.
On the other hand, empathy and care can bond the customer to the company. Creating positive experiences, it reinforces their trust and lays the foundation of long-lasting relationships.
68% of customers will leave the brand if they feel indifference.
Small Business Trends
• Better lifetime value
The revenue customers generate for the business during their relationship is their lifetime value. Obviously, the higher the loyalty and retention rate, the higher the lifetime value.
Good customer care produces all the factors contributing to a high lifetime value, inspiring customer loyalty and trust. Such customers are likely to shop more often with a company that has proven to care for them, thus increasing their value for the business.
25% of marketers include customer lifetime value in the five most important metrics.
Gartner
Customer Care meets Customer Journeys
Care is an indispensable component of a customer-centered business.
It shows that you view people not only as sources of your revenue but as humans who need to be treated with empathy and friendliness.
Such an attitude never goes unnoticed, so if you truly care for your customers, they will pay you back with loyalty and positive referrals.
To explore more about you can deliver fantastic customer experiences for your service business, explore Commusoft. Our Job Management tools are focused on helping you improve each and every customer journey you provide.
Discover more about the significance of customer journeys, right here and sign up to our newsletter, below, for more helpful tips and advice.
