Customer Care Excellence: Keys to Happy and Loyal Customers
Customer service has become a critical component that can make or break a company’s success in today’s fast-paced and cutthroat corporate environment.
Customer numbers on a spreadsheet are a thing of the past. Customers are more aware, picky, and empowered than ever before in the digital age. They need a unique and unforgettable experience in addition to goods and services.
Beyond the typical idea of addressing complaints or responding to inquiries, customer service has advanced significantly.
Now, it’s all about forging deep ties, encouraging trust, and establishing lasting bonds. Businesses that excel at providing excellent customer service are more likely to prosper and have devoted clientele.
In this article, we’ll examine the fundamentals of customer service, the reasons it’s so important, and how you can master this skill to pleasure your clients and advance your company.
What Is Customer Care?
Your target audience becomes your customer once they make a purchase for your product or service. In that respect, it can be understood as taking care of your customers, post sales of your product or service.
This can come in the form of providing support, help or maintenance or any other kind of post sale service concerning the product or service.
By the definition and understanding, it might seem like not that a big deal to pay much attention to but that is not the case.
It is much more than just taking care of your customers. It is also about building an emotional relationship with your customers and this is something that should be checked by everyone and not just the representatives.
You can build a respectful and long lasting relationship with your customers if you are heartily willing to treat them, the way they would like to be treated.
In today’s generation a lot of innovation has taken place in customer care services also. In earlier days, a typical interaction with a human representative of the customer service desk was involved in the form of phone calls and messages.
But with all the technological development, FAQ sections, self service portals and the AI chatbots are also a part of it, along with the typical interaction.
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Real Life Examples Of Customer Care
In the previous section we tried to generate its basic understanding. It might seem that it is an everyday thing and what possible impact it can have on the business.
In this section, we will look at the different real life examples, taking its understanding a step further.
- Its very first example we will be looking at is of the famous online music streaming platform – Spotify.
Spotify even after its success provides a personalized customer service experience with the help of their social media team.
They are so careful of their customer care that they have a separate twitter account which only looks at solving problems and clearing queries of the customers who are facing issues or have a doubt relation to their product and service. Not only this, the way they respond to their customer’s query is so innovative that it makes the customer feel actually listened to and not just like any other customer issue case that needs to be closed or resolved.
- Another real life example of customer care is Hertz, a company that provides cab services to the people.
The Hertz driver faced an issue when the flight of the customer was delayed by a few hours. But the driver waited, which was more than what the customer had expected.
The customer was extremely happy with the service and complemented Hertz on social media to which the customer care social media account handler responded immediately making the customer feel customer respected, listened to and engaged.
These were just two examples to give you a deeper understanding on customer care and the idea as to how customer care can be helpful. There are many such cases in relation to customer care service. To mention a few are –
- Trader Joe’s
- Zappos
- Glossier
- Tesla
- Virgin Atlantic
These are some of the companies which provide extremely good service. So much so that some of the incidents are quite famous and you can look around and read about them, if it interests you!
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Importance Of Customer Care
By looking at the different examples of customer care, you might have gotten that yes it is important for a business and it’s something that needs attention similar to all other aspects of a business. But even after this understanding, it might be unclear to point out the clear value that it can bring to the business.
In this section we will be focusing on the importance of customer care and the different benefits that it can add to the functioning of a business.
Helps in Building Brand Reputation
There are many multiple products of the same type and industry for customers to choose from and apart from product and service that you provide to distinguish your business from the rest, customer care can stand to be the most distinguishable factor.
It being the interactive part of the customer with the business creates a lot of difference.
The way you handle and look after your customers when they are not happy with your product or service or facing any kind of difficulty will make them remember the experience and there is a high possibility that they will share that experience with others through word of mouth and can be willing to give another try to your product or service even if they did not have a very good experience with your product or service previously.
A good customer care experience makes people respected and heard which makes a good brand reputation and vice versa.
Helps in Reducing Customer Churn Rate
If a customer experiences good customer care when they reach out to your business for any complaint or issue with the product or service, they might be willing to continue using your product for some more time and give it another chance to see if their issue is resolved.
On the other hand, if a customer feels unheard, then they will want to look at the other alternatives. So in this manner, having good customer care will help you in reducing the customer churn rate for your business.
Helps in Gaining Customer Trust
Good customer care helps in gaining trust in your business. This is so because when a customer feels that they are being heard and their issues and problems are being looked at, it makes them feel that yes, they can trust your business to look after their problems and issues in the future as well.
Increased Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
With a good product or service, a customer also wants good customer care in order to stick with your business. This is so because there can be many alternatives to your products and services but it’s the way you deal with your customers that makes a difference.
A customer with a good experience with your product or service as well as customer care then they will prefer sticking with your business for a longer period of time, increasing their overall lifetime value and hence the revenue.
On the other hand, a dissatisfied and unhappy customer will just increase the churn rate for your business, which is not a good indicator for your business performance.
Different Elements Of Customer Care
Now that you have a clear knowledge of the importance or benefits that customer care can bring to your business, you might want to pay more attention to it.
In this section, we will include different ways or elements that make up for the customer care. However, you must keep that in mind that these elements of customer care might differ depending on the type of industry you operate your business in.
On-site Visit
On site visit, as the name suggests, is an element of customer care where a executive visits the customer in person to solve the issue. This is usually done when your business operates in services relating to televisions, internet service providers, cars, motor bikes any many more.
In-store Experience
In store experience is the element of customer care where customers themselves come to you regarding any issue with the product. This element can be seen in many industries but it widely takes place in the banking industry where customers go by themselves for any issue or complaint with the service.
Phone Call
Phone call is the element of customer care that we as a customer frequently use in our daily life where we get connected with the executive over the phone call and the executive guides us in resolving the issue. Not only this, there might be cases where the issue is grave and cannot be resolved. In such a case, the customer care executive helps customers by guiding them as to how they can reach out to higher authorities which would be the right team to get the issue resolved.
Live Chat
Live chat is an element of customer care which is similar to phone call but the only difference is that instead of talking with the customer care executive, you chat with the agent in real time.
Chatbots
Chatbots are an element of customer care which is a result of change in technology. They are a trained self service feature, more like an AI, which helps in resolving everyday queries of customers. They save an ample amount of time and resources and prove to be very useful for the executive team.
Self Service Portals
Self service portals are an element of customer care where customers can help themselves. These portals again come very handy in the finance sector as it allows customers to look after themselves. For instance, customers can check their balance or have their transaction history for the desired time period and many more things.
Help Section
Help section or FAQ page is an element of customer care which comes first in line. These are the pages that are present at the end of a website which contains frequently asked questions by other customers and the answer to those queries.
User Forums
User forums are again a result of constant improvement. In this element of customer care, users or customers help each other by giving out the solution to queries that they might have faced previously and some other customer is facing the same issue now. This element of customer care does not involve a direct interaction with the executives.
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Challenges In Customer Care
Now that you understand the importance of customer care and the different elements which you can use to provide it to your customers, you might think it’s enough to get started with it. Not yet! It apart from its benefits and easy implementation comes with some challenges which you should be aware about before actually jumping into it. In this section we will look at the challenges that customer care brings with itself –
Budget
You might wonder how the budget is a challenge to customer care. This is so because most of the executives choose to take up easy issues and queries to improve their resolution rate. But in doing this they purposely delay or neglect the queries and issues that are difficult and time taking to solve. This results in over-hiring of people putting a pressure on the company’s budget.
Workforce Management
There is often high agent turnover that is seen in almost all the companies with customer care. This happens because the agents are judged based on the efficiency gains and targets which are compared with that of an already set unrealistic operational target.
This also results in increased cost as hiring and training new agents also cost the companies more than it seems.
Technology
With a large customer base, the number of customers facing any issues and difficulty also increases, resulting in more and more customers reaching out to customer care.
To manage the queries of each and every customer efficiently, it becomes very important to have an improved technology like chatbots and others to reduce the load on customer care agents and to manage the work effectively. This comes in as a challenge as technology is something that is constantly changing and comes with a high cost to always make a change or improvement of any kind.
Ways To Measure Customer Care
Customer care is not something quantifiable that can be tracked easily and analysed. There are different metrics, especially designed to keep a track of performance. This section will cover some of the ways in which you can manage the performance of customer care for your business.
CSAT Score
CSAT score stands for Customer Satisfaction score. This score records the happiness scale of the customers with your product, service or the customer care experience. The data for this score is collected with the surveys, floated across the customers.
CSAT = (No. of satisfied customer/ Total number of responses)* 100
The score is taken on the scale of 5 where 5 indicates most satisfied and 1 indicates the least satisfied customers. In your survey, apart from the score, you can include other qualitative questions as well. For instance, you can ask why they liked or disliked your product, service or customer care experience.
CES Score
CES score stands for Customer Effort score. This score records the efforts a customer has to put in to get what they were looking for. The data for this score is also collected through surveys filled by different customers.
CES = Sum of CES score / No. of survey responses
A high CES score is an indicator of low efforts for customers which is a good indicator for your business and a low CES score indicates higher efforts from customers which is not a good sign for your business.
NPS Score
NPS score stands for Net Promoter score. This score analyses the likelihood of a customer to recommend your product or service to others. A higher NPS is good for business as it indicates a higher level of brand loyalty which is the ultimate goal of every business. The vice versa goes for the lower NPS score.
NPS = % of promoters – % of detrackers
Conclusion
With the sufficient knowledge of customer care with its importance, elements, challenges and the different ways to measure it, you are all set to provide customer care or improve service for your business.
There are different tools like Fynzo that can help you in collecting and analysing your customers’ data. This will reduce a lot of workload and will help you in focusing on the required areas and how you can improve it.
FAQs
What is the difference between customer care and customer support?
The functioning of customer care and customer support is all the more the same. The only difference that pertains is that customer support focuses on product while customer care focuses on the service to customers.
What is the difference between customer experience and customer care?
Customer care is about one aspect of the business where the customer reaches out incase of any query or issue. However, customer experience includes the overall experience that a customer had throughout the customer journey.
