Customer care, customer experience, and customer service. They all have to do with making sure your customer is happy, and they all intertwine with each other at certain points. But they do have their own focuses and differences from each other.
A successful business needs a positive relationship with its audience, so having high-quality care, service, and experiences for them is essential.
What is Customer Service?
While it relates to customer experience and customer care, customer service is more focused on taking in, understanding, and providing solutions for customer issues.
If there's something wrong or confusing about your product or content, customer service, are your employees figuring out what's wrong and how to fix it.
Your company might have several different forms of customer service, or multiple, each having different strengths. A combination of these provides a strong quality of customer service to your users, which in turn can improve the customer experience with a positive amount of customer care.
Human Representatives
A team of well-trained and empathetic human customer service representatives can provide a good customer experience to your users. They're able to understand more complex customer interactions and escalate tickets to specialized teams when need be.
Some customers prefer human interaction, while others might rather solve their issues by themselves. Having a team of qualified customer support agents using a well-designed system available to delight customers is an essential element of a great customer experience.
AI Chatbots
AI Chatbots have advanced to the point where they nearly feel like interacting with another human. Although they start off a bit rigid and irritating to people, the latest technologies can be a major benefit to your customer service department.
Using Natural Language Processing, chatbots today can analyze and identify user queries with high levels of accuracy, responding with helpful articles and answers.
AI Chatbots are an excellent first line of service for your users- By taking on and potentially answering the more simple questions, they free up your human representatives to handle more complicated problems.
Self-Service
While some users prefer to speak with a human, others might rather find solutions on their own. They might even prefer to live chat with other customers on social media platforms.
Self-service options like a Frequently Asked Questions page (FAQ) or a community forum can really help in providing answers to those looking for clarification.
An FAQ page is exactly what it sounds like: A simple page on your site dedicated to providing straightforward answers to recurrent problems your customers face.
A community forum is a great place for your customers to chat with one another in a blog-type space. Posting their own questions and answers to each other can be more enticing to some customers.
Both of these service options also have the benefit of being available at all times. Chatbots also have this strength, but for users that don't feel comfortable chatting with a robot, they can always turn to a list of answers on your site to hopefully find the right solution.
Why It's Important
Customer service, particularly high quality and swift customer service, is essential to any size business' customer loyalty. While we all hope our users understand what we provide them all the time and nothing goes wrong, this is rarely the case in reality.
Customers rely on the company to answer their questions, whether it's how to use something properly or related to the information provided by the website.
With how advanced online content and use has become over the years, customers expect a high standard of customer service in quality and speed.
Loyal customers are likely to tell their friends about a business that provides excellent customer service, which is great for business, but unfortunately, the inverse is true as well.
Potential customers who have to deal with slow, unavailable, or generally unhelpful service will share that with their friends and family, giving your business a bad reputation with new customers.
What is Customer Care?
Customer care is generally considered the relationship between your business and your satisfied customers. The perception of a business can make a huge impact on its success. Through the channels of customer service and customer experience, customer care is developed and maintained.
Whatever your company is supplying to your users, whether it's information, a product, or a service, is related to but not immediately a part of customer care.
Consider customer care being a part of the entire customer journey. The trust and reliability that your users have and expect from your business affect customers' perceptions, customer retention, and customer churn.
Good customer service can build customer happiness, and high-quality products create an emotional connection. But at its core, customer care is what your audience thinks of you and your business. How much do they like your business as a whole?
Examples of Customer Care
Customer care is the act of going above and beyond to show that your users are important to you, and even small gestures can go a long way.
Appreciation Letters: Consider sending appreciation messages to your customers. If applicable, a letter can also be a pleasant surprise to your customers after making a purchase. Thank them for their patronage and reassure them that your business is there if they need anything else.
Step it Up: Identify the standard level of service provided by other, similar companies, and go further. Take, for instance, a particular car company that offers auto-servicing wherever the customer is. It doesn't have to be that big, but try incorporating something beyond what your users expect.
Anticipate Issues: Unfortunately, service failure happens. Maybe there's an issue with the system or a fault with the product- But whatever it may be, alert your customers before they start reaching out to you. Doing this shows that your business is responsible and cares about them.
Personalize Your Service: Use traffic data and cookies to pull information on your users and find a way to personalize your content to them specifically. It doesn't have to be too complex- Even including their name somewhere will make them feel more connected.
Why It's Important
Customer care is an essential quality as building a relationship with your users will have them trusting and returning to your business.
Going above and beyond for your customers makes them feel like your business actually listens to them, and users will tend to return to and support a company that they feel connected to.
What is Customer Experience?
Customer experience is a broad term that encompasses every aspect of how your users interact with your company and their opinions about them.
These aspects can include your website layout, whether it's easy to use or not, the quality of your product and content, and the usefulness of your service.
While customer care is more focused on the positive interaction with a user, generally human to the human, customer experience is the big picture of their time with the company.
Care certainly builds to experience, and they are similar in nature. But while they are related and connected, experience is a wider term.
Customer experience can also include the personalization of your service to unique customers. Use traffic data and cookies to collect information and customize what you provide to your users.
This will make their experience feel like it was custom-tailored to them, strengthening the bond between your business and the user.
Why It's Important
Creating a personal and positive customer experience will have your users walking away happy, which is always a good thing.
Customer experience includes how they interact with your business before, during, and after your conversion, and it can dictate whether they return or share your business with their close ones.
In Conclusion
Taking care of your customers needs to be a constant focus for your business. While a high customer satisfaction score certainly does a lot of work when it comes to customers' perceptions, how your business interacts with users strongly shapes their opinions.
Strong customer service includes customer journey mapping for your customers, depending on their preferences. Always make sure to have solutions available whenever needed and keep your human representatives highly trained and prepared to handle complicated tickets.
Go above and beyond for your customers. Setting best practices to provide top-tier service to every single person that visits your page will have positive repercussions.
Make sure that your product and website are all well-thought-out and organized. Users will turn away from any service that's difficult to use, so ensure that they have a positive experience by watching your site's ease of use, monitoring your customer feedback, and watching your customer effort score metrics.
Customers want companies that care, provide high-quality products, and support when the time comes. It's important to take advantage of every opportunity your business has to show that it has all of those qualities.
Sources:
Consumers Prefer to Interact With a Human Agent | Forbes
