What is Customer Care? Meaning, Benefits, and Examples

This article will guide you toward understanding customer care, how it differs from customer service, and best practices to keep in mind.

What is customer care?

Customer care encompasses how your business interacts with customers at every stage of the customer life cycle—before, during, and after a sale. It’s your brand’s commitment to offering service that’s above and beyond what’s necessary at every opportunity.

Customer service vs. customer care: What’s the difference?

Customer service is support you offer customers in helping them discover, use, and troubleshoot your products and services. These principles are optimized to guide the customer service team toward helping customers discover and use a business’s products or services.

In general, customer service involves troubleshooting and handling customer questions and complaints. It can also be quantified and measured through metrics, such as the customer satisfaction (CSAT) score. The CSAT score measures how satisfied a customer is with a specific product, transaction, or business interaction.

In contrast, customer care can be described as a feature of customer service. It involves building relationships and nurturing connections. To provide customer care, your business needs to listen and understand customers’ needs.

Providing excellent customer care means:

• You provide fast solutions to customer’s problems or questions.
• You can answer customer questions as they come up in real time through multiple channels (e.g., chat, phone, social media, email).
• You have humans on the other end of the chatbox or phone line.
• You can meet customers through a channel that’s most convenient for them.
  

Here’s a great example of how one restaurant embraced customer care. On a cold day in March 2021, Steve Chu and Ephrem Abebe, founders of the Baltimore-based Ekiben restaurant, drove to Vermontto surprise a long-time customer who was dying of cancer with her favorite meal: tempura broccoli.

The customer’s son was originally going to pick up the food in Baltimore and drive it to Vermont. But Ekiben’s owners knew the dish would turn soggy during the six-hour trip and wouldn’t be the meal their customer craved.

Most restaurants would have solved the issue by providing instructions for reheating the broccoli. Instead, the owners of Ekiben drove to Vermont, created a makeshift kitchen in the back of their truck, and made a personalized meal for one.

That’s customer care.

What are the benefits of providing customer care?

The goal of customer care is to create emotional connections with customers and develop lifelong relationships. This, in turn, can lead to a number of benefits for your business.

Customer loyalty

When you have customer satisfaction as a company goal and engage your customers emotionally, you increase their likelihood of a person committing to buy your products or services. Here are reasons that’s good for your company’s bottom line:

• Repeat customers and improved customer experience can increase your business’s profits.
• A better customer experience can also improve customer loyalty.
• You’ll likely convince an existing customer to continue buying from you.

Passionate customers

Customer care should not be a function of one department in your organization. It should be the responsibility of all of your team members to make sure the customer service experience is satisfactory at all times. Why? Because customers who are unhappy will most likely complain or contact customer service. The rest will just leave.

However, if customers are happy with your service, they are more likely to share their positive experience with other people. Not only does this lead to word-of-mouth advertising, but also increases brand loyalty.

Brand elevation

Providing an excellent customer experience is how you can set your brand apart from the competition.

Customer care and great customer service are crucial aspects of customer experience. No customer will put up with being treated badly. In fact, customers are willing to pay more for the experience qualities that matter most to them:

• 43% of consumers would pay more for greater convenience.
• 42% would pay more for a friendly, welcoming experience.
• 65% of U.S. customers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising.

The opportunity to re-engage customers

Customer care creates opportunities to re-engage customers through personalized follow-ups, self-service options, and more.

5 best practices when it comes to customer care‍

The best practices you need to remember when implementing customer care include:

• Empower team members so that they can represent your brand positively.
• Collect feedback and use it to personalize interactions with customers.
• Be consistent with customer experience whether you’re online or offline.
• Offer options.
• Be proactive.
  

Customer care may not be easily quantifiable and measurable, like customer experience and customer service. If you can make all three aspects of customer satisfaction work together, you’ll exceed expectations, delight customers, and be on your way to building a satisfied, loyal customer base.

6 customer care examples you can learn from

There’s no right way to provide customer care. However, a great start is listening to your customers and understanding what they need—and taking the opportunity to fill in the gap between what they need and what’s available. You must look at customer care as a holistic approach applied to every interaction your brand has with your customers.

Here are some ways you can integrate customer care in your business practices:‍

Personalized content based on customer interactions

Starbucks’ mobile app is an example of successful customer experience personalization. In the last quarter of 2020, 24% of all transactions were done through the app. For 2018 and 2019, it was also the most commonly used platform for mobile payments, overtaking Apple Pay and Google Pay.

The Starbucks app’s popularity is both due to the easy way to pay and the personalized experience it delivers. The app lets customers place orders that can be picked up in the store and offers points as rewards for every purchase.‍

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Offering targeted and personalized services may take a lot of planning and design but it’s a must for companies that want to survive and thrive. Consumers are likely to expect it from the brands they interact with.

The first steps to designing personalized services include:

• Create customer profiles.
• Train and support your customer-facing team members.
• Ensure your frontline members, sales team, and customer service representatives are connected and have one source of information.
• Provide choices that allow customers to manage how they spend their time and money according to their preferences, which includes a self-service option.
• Develop a process on how to collect and use customer feedback in your personalized offerings.

Multiple forms of customer support

To engage potential customers, you must meet them where they are and across multiple channels, whether through live chat on your website, an app, phone, email, or social media platforms. Although customers may accept the different service levels available across channels, they may not be forgiving when communication is inconsistent.

Consumers are likely to be driven away if:

• They get passed from one service representative to another and have to repeat the issue to different people.
• There’s only one way to get customer service support and no one answers from that end.
  

Hence, customer care must be consistent across channels. In this regard, Ritz-Carlton’s commitment to excellent customer experience shows. The company allows any employee to fix any guest problem. The Ritz-Carlton offers this responsibility and autonomy to employees along with permission to spend up to $2,000 per day.‍

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Customer loyalty rewards programs

Customer loyalty breeds trust and familiarity between your company and your customers. Shoppers generally spend more time and money with brands they trust.

The PetSmart Treats loyalty program by PetSmart is a great example. It allows pet owners to treat their fur babies with new toys, hair cuts, and spa days while saving money. The program lets owners earn eight points for every $1 they spend, get free shipping, and have members-only sales and in-store discounts. The points can be used for grooming, puppy training, or can be donated to an animal charity where PetSmart is affiliated. ‍

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Social media engagement

Consumers will engage more with your brand if they’re following you on social media. This includes visiting your website or app, buying from you, and recommending you to family or friends.

This is your formal invitation to start engaging with customers on various social media platforms. However, you need to do it right. Customers will also be quick to hit the unfollow button for the following reasons:

• Poor product quality
• Poor customer service
• Irrelevant content
• Too many ads

A brand that exemplifies excellent social media engagement is Spotify. Their team often responds to customer questions and complaints with well-designed, personalized solutions. For instance, a customer tweeted that they liked the app but were confused about using it. Spotify’s team replied with a special playlist that welcomed the new user.

Another company with a dedicated social media account is Upwork. If you’re on Twitter and have questions or need support regarding your Upwork account, @UpworkHelp is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. ‍

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Speed and convenience

Businesses rise and fall, but the most innovative companies evolve by observing and reacting to changes in consumer preferences. More often than not, there’s a gap between what customers need and what’s on the market.

Speed and convenience are at the top of the list of positive customer experiences for most customers. They want their questions and issues resolved quickly and completely. However, a chatbox, email address, phone number, or social media account aren’t enough if you don’t have humans on the other end to engage in real time.

Consider a customer’s experience at one Real Canadian Superstore. The grocery store offers a service where customers can order online and pick up their purchases at the store. The service team called the customer to suggest alternatives when they realized some of the items weren’t in stock—a simple gesture, but the result was a happy customer who raved about their service on social media.

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Surprise and delight

To surprise and delight customers, you only need to look for opportunities where you can display exceptional customer care. The story of how a boy got his Buzz Lightyear toy back after it was left behind on a flight is an excellent example.

Jason William Hamm represented what customer care means to Southwest Airlines with his actions. Not only was it a happy reunion for 2-year-old Hagen and his action figure, but the family also got the toy back with a handwritten note and printed photos of Buzz Lightyear on a “mission” in a box decorated with hand drawings.

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Customer care creates loyal customers

The goal of customer care is to build relationships and nurture connections. It starts with listening to customers and understanding what they need. It involves delivering solutions and meeting customer needs and expectations consistently before, during, and after the sale.

You can compete in your industry through price, technology, agility, and innovation. But it may not be sustainable for your company to keep lowering prices or funding research for new designs or development. That’s why the best way to differentiate your brand is to invest in customer care.

When you put your money in improving customer experience, you’re investing in creating loyal customers.