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Customer Care: Importance, Examples, and Best Practices
Here’s how to use customer service management and other strategies to build emotional connections, foster loyalty, and set your business apart.
Here’s how to use customer service management and other strategies to build emotional connections, foster loyalty, and set your business apart.
Customer care refers to the actions a company takes to build a positive relationship with its customers. Beyond just meeting basic expectations, customer care focuses on creating an emotional connection with customers — one that prioritizes satisfaction and loyalty by addressing key customer needs and concerns.
Treating customers with care is more important than ever. Our research shows that 81% of customer service reps and 73% of mobile workers say that customers expect a personal touch more than in the past.
We'll explore the importance of customer care, with examples and best practices for implementing and improving it at your organization with the right customer service management software with AI.
Customer care is when a company goes beyond basic customer service standards to make an emotional connection with a customer. This could mean actively listening to an angry customer with patience and empathy as part of your incident management strategy, or surprising customers with a special loyalty promotion once a year.
Good customer care involves interacting with customers on their preferred customer service channels, responding to their emotional needs, personalizing your interactions, and showing them appreciation for loyalty.
Customer service managers are typically responsible for a company's customer care program. To ensure positive customer care experiences, service managers must:
High-performing organizations are using data, AI, and automation to deliver faster, more personalized service. Find out how in the 6th State of Service report.
While customer care is part of customer service, support, and the overall customer experience, all these terms vary slightly. Here's how they're commonly defined and how they differ.
The customer service experience includes every interaction a customer has with your brand, from the first point of contact to ongoing support. It's the overall perception a customer forms with your company by interacting with your marketing efforts, products, services, and customer service team.
Customer care is an essential part of a customer's experience — it's how you show that you value and care about them. Our research finds that 86% of customer service reps say customer expectations are higher than they used to be. To keep up and exceed expectations, customer service teams must provide excellent customer care.
Our research shows that 88% of customers are more likely to purchase again from a company that delivers good customer service. This makes customer care an essential part of your company's success. Showing customers they matter to your company can make them more likely to post positive online reviews and recommend your products or services to others. That can help attract new customers and boost your reputation and revenue. Check out the reviews for Service Cloud on G2.
Excellent customer care has the power to impact retention, brand perception and awareness, and revenue. Let's dig into the details behind those benefits and others:
One of the best ways to ensure you're consistently providing excellent customer care is to make it part of your customer service operation's measurable KPIs (key performance indicators). Here are a couple more tips for measuring customer care:
Watch Agentforce for Service resolve cases on its own, deliver trusted answers, engage with customers across channels and seamlessly hand off to human service reps.
Including customer care in your KPIs is one important way to improve customer service. Let's take a closer look at some other ways to improve your approach to delivering excellent customer care:
Our research finds that 92% of service professionals say nurturing customer relationships is increasingly important. Reps need to develop specific communication skills, such as remaining calm, listening carefully to customers, and treating them with kindness. Resources like Salesforce's free online learning platform, Trailhead and the Serviceblazer Community on Slack offer training courses and valuable peer best practices.
Reps aren't the only ones on your customer service team who can provide excellent customer care. Agentforce can significantly enhance customer care by providing quick and accurate responses to both routine and complex inquiries, offering personalized recommendations, and resolving issues efficiently. They can operate 24/7, ensuring that customers receive timely assistance at any hour and in any time zone. AI agents can also analyze customer data to anticipate needs and preferences, leading to more tailored and proactive support. Like your reps, Agentforce can continuously improve customer care through self-learning, keeping up with changing customer needs. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also builds trust and loyalty over time.
Customer service management software like Service Cloud can really step up your customer care. It streamlines communication, keeps track of all customer interactions, and gives you valuable insights. Both reps and Agentforce can quickly access customer history and preferences, which helps them provide more personalized and efficient service. Plus, the software handles routine tasks automatically, so your team can focus on more complex issues. It also offers real-time customer service analytics and performance metrics, which helps managers spot areas for improvement and tweak workflows. All of this adds up to faster response times, better resolution rates, and a much better overall customer experience.
Our research shows that 69% of reps find balancing speed and quality is difficult when helping customers. This pressure can lead to consequences like burnout and attrition. Use internal surveys to learn about employees' pain points and what support they need to be successful. Then, put the learnings into practice as much as possible. Consider creating a mentoring program to support reps in their daily jobs and career paths.
Customer surveys are a useful way to gauge and improve customer care, but there are more ways of gathering data. With the right customer service operations software, you can measure which products, issues, and service processes are leading to a positive or negative customer experience — and either hold them up as examples or create an action plan to address them.
When you picture an emotional connection with a customer, you might envision a two-person interaction. But customer care doesn't always involve a customer interacting with a customer service rep or agent. Let's look at a few examples of excellent customer care:
When a customer needed to cancel their cat food order from an online pet supply company, they entered "Unfortunately, Mr. Pibbles passed away this week" in the "Reason for canceling" text box. A few days later, the customer was moved after receiving flowers and a handwritten condolence card from the pet supply company.
By giving customers a way to communicate why they need to cancel an order and showing them empathy during difficult times, the pet supply company provided personalized customer care even without a spoken interaction.
A customer complained about the difficult-to-open packaging of a fresh dill pickle company. The AI agent that handled the complaint escalated it to a rep because the customer care required critical thinking. The service rep assured the customer that the company would look into the situation and offered a refund. In response, the company decided to survey other customers to gather more feedback. The survey results confirmed that many other customers were also struggling with the packaging. This prompted the company to recognize that making design changes was crucial for improving the customer experience.
Sales and positive reviews increased when they implemented an easy-open tub, and the customer who complained initially now frequently recommends their pickles. By taking a single customer's complaint seriously, the company improved customer care for all its current and future customers.
Good customer care also applies in B2B customer service. There doesn’t always need to be a problem either.
For example, a financial software company continuously provides automated, accurate, and compliant solutions that streamline financial management, enhance reporting, and ensure secure data handling to its business clients. They also offer dedicated support, training, and regular check-ins to help their clients efficiently use and maximize the value of their software solutions, thereby building trust and strengthening the relationship.
After a major storm knocked out power to thousands of people, a utility company used an incident management strategy to handle customer requests. Standard service protocol requires customers to either call or report an outage on the company's website. But during major power outages, the company also monitors its social media channels for urgent customer needs.
By allowing reps or agents to immediately respond to and help customers who reach out on social media during emergencies, the utility company showed top-notch customer care. No need to call or report it online!
It's an exclusive meeting place, just for service professionals. From customer service to field service, the Serviceblazer Community is where peers grow, learn, and celebrate everything service.
Our research finds 65% of customers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences. This applies to the level of customer care they expect.
If your team is struggling to meet customer expectations, here are some best practices:
AI will play an essential role in the future of customer service and care. But our research finds that only 42% of customers trust businesses to use AI ethically — down from 58% in 2023. As companies invest more in customer service AI, they'll need to maintain transparency and use AI ethically or risk losing their customers' trust. One way they can do this is by adopting AI tools with built-in security and privacy guardrails, like the Einstein Trust Layer.
AI and humans will have more opportunities to work together more efficiently and effectively. For example, AI customer service agents can rapidly generate insights and responses based on customer data. This enables reps to focus on providing more personalized customer care and building stronger relationships, especially on issues that require critical thinking. Agentforce will become increasingly prevalent, helping businesses scale customer service more quickly and cost-effectively while meeting the demand for excellent customer care.
Investing in AI-powered customer service software like Service Cloud lets service organizations take advantage of strong AI, automation, and other tools that can greatly improve customer care, such as:
Customer care is essential to service operations. When customers feel a company has taken measures to show they care about them, they may be encouraged to become repeat customers and recommend your business to others.
With the right strategy, tools, and training in place, service teams can improve customer care, leading to new customers and customer loyalty, positive brand recognition, increased revenue, and other benefits. Investing in the right technology is more important than ever, especially when it comes to AI and automation.
Your AI is only as strong as the data it's built on. Agentforce for Service's are built on trusted, secured data to safely maximize the power of AI.