Customer care and customer service are very similar. You can even have the same people offering both. Although the differences are subtle, we can say that “service” refers to practical assistance, while “care” implies practical help coupled with personal connection and empathy.
Consider this from a customer perspective. It’s the difference between “They helped me” and “They cared about my needs.” Besides this nuance, serving customers includes selling, while customer care would ordinarily refer to helping people who have already bought your product.
Benefits of Good Customer Care
Showing that you are not only ready to offer advice but are willing to care about people’s experiences with your business leaves customers feeling they’ve had a positive customer experience. They have greater confidence in your organisation and feel as if they have a personal relationship with it.
This, in turn, means they will have greater brand loyalty. Why walk away from a company that has shown it cares about you in exchange for a competitor you do not know? Great customer care experiences keep people coming back for more. Respect engenders respect, and caring makes people more likely to reciprocate. This means:
- Improved customer lifetime value
- Enhanced business reputations
- More business from referrals
- Social proof in the form of positive reviews
It’s no secret that caring doesn’t just make customers feel good; it also helps your business succeed. As an added advantage, few businesses are walking the talk. They will all claim that they care, but the evidence to support this assertion is often lacking. This could be the key to outdoing your competitors.
Customer Care Tips
Do Not Be Over-Reliant on AI
Too many businesses prioritise cost savings over real customer care. AI, they say, can handle your customers’ needs beautifully, but this rarely happens in practice. Replace people with automated systems at your peril.
Automated answering services do not always understand voice prompts, and bots do not always have the answers people need. Even when AI somehow gets things right, nobody is going to credit it with genuinely caring, even if it has been programmed to say all the right things.
Choose the Right People
Being able to speak to a person will boost your image in the eyes of most customers, but choosing the right people to field their calls will be important. They must:
- Be able to listen actively and respond appropriately
- Have emotional intelligence
- Have excellent product knowledge
- Know how your business operates
- Follow up on promises made
In short, the people you choose must be able to represent your business as well, or better, than you could if you answered every customer call yourself. They are not only customer care agents but also business ambassadors.
Empower Your Agents
Caring means being responsive and solving problems quickly and decisively. Having nice people talking to customers on the phone isn’t enough. Allow them to initiate and track workflows.
Be sure they know who to refer complex problems to and how long it will take to achieve outcomes. Keep them informed about company policy so that they know what they can and cannot do.
Remember, when people call customer care, they are not talking to agents. They are talking to your company. Make sure your business is as ready to care as your agents are. There are companies that have wonderful customer care agents while still providing less-than-effective service.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Leave Them on Hold
After talking to bots (53 percent of people admit to shouting at them), being left on hold is among customers’ pet hates. If you really want to grind those gears, add a recorded message saying, “Your call is important to us” or “We are experiencing high call volumes.”
True, there will be times when call volumes are higher than expected. For example, you may be experiencing downtime due to an IT glitch. The point is that your customers do not care about your problem. They want their issues addressed, and they don’t want to wait.
To keep customers feeling cared for, you need a scalable solution. When call volumes spike, more operators come online. When it’s business as usual, you have enough people ready to help with no redundancy.
Customer Care and Customer Service: Give Your Customers What They Want
Automated and self-service options offer savings, but they are a liability if they cause you to lose customers and damage your reputation. You certainly can implement customer service automation, but you can never automate real customer care. Allow your customers to remain in control. Make it easy to speak to a human whenever they need to.
This can be incredibly difficult to do effectively in-house. Even the largest companies struggle to create and manage cost-effective yet service-efficient and caring customer support services. People must be recruited, trained, and managed. Technology helps with data gathering, performance management, and efficiency but proves costly.
That’s why businesses turn to us when they want to show customers they care. RSVP offers scalable customer support services to businesses of every size. We boost sales and customer satisfaction and create experiences that tell your customers you really do value them.
You want to offer the best to the people to take care of your company’s most important asset: your customers. We represent the gold standard in customer service and customer care outsourcing. Let’s join forces. Call us to find out more.