Understanding what Customer Care is and how it differs from Customer Service is key to creating all protocols and writing up a good strategy. Mastering the power that an emotional connection has in customers is necessary to give the proper training and guidelines to the agents that will care for them.
The Concept of Customer Care
Customer care describes the way your customers are treated when they interact with your brand, it includes all the experiences with all employees and all the interactions with the company. From a call to a direct purchase at the store, all these interactions at touchpoints need to be taken into consideration when talking about customer care: it’s all about the well-being of your customers, helping them carry on with their day and satisfying them to establish an emotional relationship with them.
Customer Care is an important part of Customer Service, as it relates to connections established through the brand and their representatives, though it can’t be measured in the same way as loyalty and success, because there is no loyalty or success if you haven’t been able to build a trustworthy emotional connection with your customer base.
It involves going the extra mile while ignoring actual metrics, and instead it’s goal is to fully invest the time to satisfy our customer’s needs, all their needs not only the business related ones, and this is what makes a big difference.
A Big Part Of Customer Service
So Customer Service is simply the advice or assistance your business provides the customer before and after a purchase, and Customer Care is the process of building an emotional connection with that customer, it is all about one-on-one customer interactions.
They are both related and are needed to achieve and increase customer satisfaction, but Customer Service does this by answering queries and providing support, while Customer Care is based on the actual understanding of the customers emotional needs as much as the physical and business related ones.
Customer Care is about making your customers feel appreciated, understood and respected by all the company’s employees. By doing this you will create a long-term and mutually beneficial relationship with your customers.
Similar Concept, Different Goals
Customer Relations is the closest concept to Customer Care. They are both relevant to Customer Service and they both deal with long-term relationship building, but there is a big difference between them. Customer Relations aims to quantify these relationships with the target audience to create loyal customers that will eventually become brand advocates. Customer care has a similar goal but this goal it’s not measurable. It pursues assisting customers just for the sake of helping them even if the customer’s goal it’s not related to our business.
This provides the trust necessary in the eyes of your customers to achieve good word of mouth recommendations and increase your fan base.
These are 3 rules to better understand Customer Care:
Rule No. 1: Know What Needs to be Done
Understanding how to provide proper guidelines to all employees in order to transmit clearly how vital to your business and their willingness to help our customers is, even without expecting a business related goal from the customers.
In Customer Care every detail counts and the non-business related issues sometimes are more meaningful than the original query. Having the courtesy of showing where the restrooms are, or the ATM, picking up something a customer drops, asking during a call how was their day, all these are brief examples of what needs to be done to establish good and long lasting emotional relations with our customers.
Rule No. 2: An Extra Mile is not Enough
It is tough to make every customer happy but this is the goal. All employees should have in mind that making the customer feel appreciated, understood and respected at all times makes the difference to them and these positive interactions can make a big difference on their day and in their lives.
Rule No. 3: It’s All About Emotions
Customer Care cannot be measured, it’s about creating an emotional connection when a customer engages and interacts with any of your employees. It is about making them feel they can trust the brand and brighten their day with a friendly greeting. Make them feel like friends. Hopefully the customers will keep coming back, be sure to notice when they do!
And so, always remember Customer Care is the process of looking after your customers to best ensure their satisfaction and delightful interaction with our business, brand, goods and services.
Every single customer interaction with our employees provides an opportunity to improve your reputation with customers and increase your brand value and further sales and it also helps in increasing the loyalty towards the company.
Follow these 3 rules at all times and try to constantly emphasize the importance of Customer Care to establish a strategy and process to transmit to all agents and employees, so that every time they interact with a customer or a potential one they are ready with a mindset of being polite and helpful to them no matter the situation.
