What is customer care?
Customer care is based on principles and strategies that help companies optimize the quality of interactions with their customers. It is about taking comprehensive care of customer needs and wishes. With customer service, companies provide professional, helpful and high-quality support beyond the expected level.
The aim is to make every single customer feel that they are valued by the company. Here, every interaction with the brand and every experience that customers have with the company counts — from the steps before making a purchase to the purchase of products, concerns after they have become customers and beyond. As a result, good customer service promotes an emotional bond between customers and companies and strengthens their relationship in the long term.
Customer care is one facet of the entire customer experience, but goes beyond other functions in customer relationship management. You can tell whether companies are investing specifically in customer service. When they interact with brands like this, customers feel that their needs are being addressed, their problems are really being heard, and that they're getting a solution that really works for them. They know that they count as a person for the company.
Companies that provide excellent customer support ensure that their customers are satisfied and loyal for years to come.
Customer care vs. customer service — what's the difference?
Hardly any company today can do without approaches and teams that explicitly care about buyers or users and aim to improve their experiences. Terms such as customer service, customer support and customer support are on everyone's lips.
But although they're often used interchangeably, customer care and customer service involve different principles and strategies. That is the small but subtle difference:
This includes customer service
- Customer service is the advice or assistance that a company provides to its customers in case of questions or other concerns.
- Customer Service (German: customer service) helps to decide on a suitable product, make optimal use of the purchased product, fixes problems and ensures that the purchase was a positive experience for the customer.
- Customer service focuses on practical measures, such as technical support, answering questions, complaint management, product complaints or self-service offerings, which customers can use independently.
In comparison, this is what makes customer service stand out
- Customer service is not as easy to quantify as customer service, as it is often much more individual.
- What matters here is how well customers are cared for when they interact with the brand: that you care about the customers, listen to what their actual needs are, and find the right solution.
- In many cases, customer care goes a step further than customer service by building an emotional bond.
The common denominator of customer care and customer service
Does that still sound pretty similar to you? This is due to the common goal of the two concepts: Both help companies keep their promises and win loyal, satisfied customers. Customer service and customer care are therefore both important puzzle pieces in the overall customer experience.
Another reason why the terms are so often used synonymously: The boundaries between disciplines are becoming more and more blurred. This is due to the fact that companies are increasingly focusing holistically on their customers and their needs and, for example, are no longer just reactively acting in service.
Examples of what good customer service can look like
There are plenty of customer support options out there, but they're all aimed at making customers feel that the company cares about them and has their back.
Example 1: Provide comfort
Most car owners dread having to make appointments again for tire changes, repairs or maintenance. On often stressful days, you have to drive the car to the dealer or workshop, wait on site or drive back home with a rental car to pick it up again later. However, some car dealerships have found a way to make these appointments more convenient and to offer special support: They pick up the car for customers and bring it back after the service. A relatively simple tool, but one that makes for happier customers. By taking on this small task, they save them a trip there and back and the waiting time at the car dealership. Thanks to this convenience, customers will feel particularly cared for — and will not want to miss them in the future and remain loyal to the provider.
Example 2: Personalize customer interactions
One of the basic principles of customer service is that people don't want to be treated like interchangeable parts in the customer management machine — they expect personal, individualized service. While this is already common practice for many retailers, things are still different for medical practices, for example. But doctors can also individualize their patient communication and send them messages, for example, to congratulate them on their birthday or public holidays. This step is easy to do with email automation software, but it can have a big impact on patient satisfaction. Patients feel that their doctor and his team care about them as a person and not just as a “paying” customer. This helps to strengthen the relationship with patients.
Example 3: Being there for the customer
While on vacation abroad, it can happen that a customer leaves their credit card in when withdrawing money and the machine collects it. Usually, a bank would send a new card to the home address. However, this situation offers potential to show that companies really care about their customers. So that the customer is not lost on vacation without a card, the bank could arrange for express delivery to the customer's hotel, call the customer to make sure that they have received the card and that everything has worked. That's real, authentic support for customers in a situation where they need help — even though it may not be convenient or profitable for the company.
Five tips for top customer service
We have five tips for you on how to establish excellent customer service:
- Customers expect quick answers on the channels of their choice — speed is one of the absolute must in customer service. Messengers or chatbots are ideal for quickly accepting inquiries, pre-qualifying them, or processing and resolving them directly.
- In order for your customers to reach you where it suits them best, you also need an omnichannel approach — anyone who can only be reached via email or hotline no longer wins praise when it comes to customer satisfaction.
- Employees are decisive: If you want to impress in customer service, you need employees who not only have professional competence, but also score points humanly. To make customers feel valued, you need to train your employees in key customer care skills. This includes active listening, empathy, independent judgment, and creative problem solving. It's not about giving them a list of steps, but about giving them the skills they need to deal with individual customer experiences.
- First-class customer service goes the extra mile and doesn't work according to Scheme F. As individual as the individual customers are, their problems and concerns are just as diverse. As a result, customer service as a whole is difficult to standardize. In order to be convincing, you should find individual and perhaps “out-of-the-box” solutions for your customers in complex cases.
- Management also plays an important role in customer service. Employees can't offer tailored solutions to problems if they're forced to stick 100 percent to a series of steps or a specific script. Management must enable customer service teams to offer the “out-of-the-box” solutions that are sometimes required so that they can take care of customers in every situation.
conclusion
Genuine, authentic customer service does not follow standard procedures. This is exactly what makes it an effective way to increase customer satisfaction and build an emotional bond with customers. This is how companies strengthen their customer relationships in the long term. Customer service is therefore an important piece of the puzzle which, together with other functions such as customer service, ultimately leads to a positive overall customer experience.
