Richard Branson famously said, “A complaint is a chance to turn a customer into a lifelong friend.” This quote from the billionaire entrepreneur highlights how customer care can build your connection with customers—even if you start out on the wrong foot.
To develop a base of loyal customers, treat shoppers fairly, listen to them, and go above and beyond to ensure an excellent customer experience.
Learn more about the importance of customer care and some best practices to set your company up for success.
What is customer care?
Customer care is the effort all members of a company take to make customers feel heard and valued. This method involves building an emotional connection with clients through kindness, empathy, and active listening.
Some examples of good customer care include staying late to help a customer with an issue and offering free products or discounts after a shopper receives an incorrect order. In both of these customer interactions, an employee has taken time to assess how to go above and beyond for the client.
Building relationships with customers increases the likelihood of shoppers returning to the brand or sharing their positive customer experience with friends and family.
Why is customer care important?
Exceptional customer care creates the opportunity for a mutually beneficial relationship with your customers; they feel valued and you gain a loyal customer base. By addressing your customers’ emotional needs, you can also boost brand loyalty, improve customer retention, and increase customer satisfaction.
Incorporating a customer care strategy has the added benefit of creating a company culture that focuses on connecting with customers on a human level, which can lead to higher employee retention.
How is customer care different from customer service?
Customer service also focuses on assisting customers, but it differs from customer care in a few ways:
Customer care
Customer care is all about establishing an emotional connection with customers, listening carefully to what they want, and offering a solution that surpasses their expectations. Customer care focuses on creating a strong bond with clients through personalized customer interactions.
Customer service
Customer service is provided by a customer service team and helps a customer through standard solutions like processing a return. Think of customer service as a subset of customer care that deals with basic issues without leaning into an emotional connection.
Companies need both great ecommerce customer service and customer care to create a positive experience for their buyers.
Challenges of customer care
Customer expectations
In recent years, customers have come to expect: seamless service across multiple channels, like phone, chat bots, and social media; personalized attention; quick resolutions; high-tech solutions; and the attention of a human representative.
This paradoxical set of expectations can make customer care much harder to deliver. The consulting firm McKinsey spotted an interesting trend in its 2024 survey of 3,500 consumers: even young, tech-savvy customers often prefer live phone conversations for support. This flies in the face of the “digital-only” approach many companies have been pushing. Add AI into the mix and customers are expecting lightning-fast response time, regardless of how complex their issues are.
For many businesses, living up to these expectations is a huge task. They must integrate new technologies, upskill staff, and reimagine their approach to customer care, all while maintaining operations and controlling costs.
Volume of inquiries
Customer care departments face an overwhelming number of inquiries across various channels. According to McKinsey, 57% of customer care leaders expect call volumes to increase by up to 20% in the next one to two years. This creates several issues, including longer wait times, staff burnout, a decline in quality, and a strain on company resources.
Interestingly, reducing contact volume is no longer a top priority for many leaders. Instead, they are focusing on improving customer engagement. To manage high volumes, many are turning to technology, with more than half expecting digital channels to handle more than 40% of inbound contracts in the next three years.
However, human interaction is still important. All age groups still prefer live phone conversations—including Gen Z. Now, companies will have to balance personalized service with technology to manage high volumes effectively.
Difficult customers
Managing difficult customers is forever a challenge in customer care. Between the rise in customer expectations and call volumes, support staff face significant pressure to satisfy angry, demanding, and confused customers.
To address this, companies are turning to AI-powered tools to help customer service agents quickly access information and resolve complex issues. Two-thirds of leaders are also investing in upskill programs to better equip staff for challenging interactions that require a personalized approach.
Consistent service quality
Challenging customers, large volumes of service requests, and unique inquiries can make it particularly difficult to maintain superior service quality.
While new technologies like AI can improve service efficiency, integration can be a challenge. The McKinsey report notes that only 8% of North American companies report better-than-expected satisfaction with their customer performance operations, often due to partial or low levels of digital integration.
However, 21% of leaders in the survey lean on AI tools for training and support. The goal is to equip staff with the service skills and resources needed to provide high-quality service across all customer interactions.
Essential qualities of customer care
A few qualities are at the heart of creating an exceptional customer care experience for your customers:
Empathy
Customer care requires you and your team to practice empathy during all interactions with customers. Take the time to understand and relate to your customers so you can cater to their emotional needs. By placing yourself in your customers’ shoes and seeing their perspectives, you can facilitate an excellent customer care experience.
Active listening
Essential to an empathetic interaction is active listening, or the process of being attentive to customers and communicating accordingly. Practice active listening by paying close attention to your customers' verbal and nonverbal cues, withholding judgments, and asking open-ended or clarifying questions. For example, practice asking if you have correctly assessed the situation before moving toward a solution. Take the time to accurately grasp the situation so you can address your customers’ needs effectively.
Problem-solving
Problem-solving is an essential element of customer success and involves generating creative solutions to your clients’ problems. Familiarize yourself with all aspects of your products and services so you are prepared to answer any customer questions and offer specific solutions for each individual. This kind of tailored problem-solving enhances customer loyalty and increases the chances of positive word of mouth.
For example, if a customer orders a shirt in the wrong color, you might offer them the correct clothing item and let the shopper keep the other to give to a friend. This means the customer doesn’t have to deal with the hassle of figuring out a return, and they can treat someone in their life to a gift. This kind of generous and specific problem-solving creates goodwill with your customers.
Empowerment
Rather than having your customer care team stick to a specific script, you can empower them to interact with customers on an intuitive level. While you need to provide your customer care service representatives with boundaries for what they can offer customers, you also want them to have autonomy. For example, give them a monthly quota of free products or coupons they can offer customers at their discretion.
Patience
Imagine a paying customer calls to express disappointment about a product or service. A good customer service agent will give the customer a chance to vent without rushing or interrupting them. If the customer care representative responds with patience, the client might feel more at ease, which can lead to positive interaction.
Customer care best practices
- Hire a team
- Choose an effective CRM
- Gather and analyze customer care data
- Train your team
- Admit mistakes and fix them quickly
1. Hire a team
To improve customer care within your company, hire a support team of emotionally intelligent representatives who can act as the foundation for customer interactions. A skilled customer service representative has natural communication skills and a penchant for active listening and empathy—especially during tense and difficult situations.
By hiring representatives who focus solely on creating personal connections with your customers and keeping them happy, you increase your chances of developing an effective customer care program.
2. Choose an effective CRM
A customer relationship management (CRM) system is a software program for managing all interactions with customers. Businesses use CRM tools to track customer interactions, manage customer accounts, analyze demographic information, monitor sales transactions, and more.
An effective CRM tool helps customer service representatives keep up-to-date information on customer journeys, so customers don’t have to repeat information to multiple service agents or go through repetitive steps. Having this information handy can streamline communications with your customers whether you are interacting in person or through email, mobile devices, chatbots, or customer surveys.
3. Gather and analyze customer care data
Regularly examine how your customer care program performs based on key performance indicators (KPIs) so you know where you are excelling and where you can improve. Analyze your customer satisfaction score (CSAT) to understand customers’ level of satisfaction with your brand.
Dig into your customer effort score (CES) to learn how easy or difficult it is for a client to get help from your company. Or look at your Net Promoter Score (NPS) to discover how likely customers are to recommend your company, product, or service to another person.
Gathering feedback is another effective way to boost your customer care strategy. Send surveys and ask customers open-ended questions to gain more information on how satisfied customers are with your business.
4. Train your team
Hiring emotionally intelligent and empathetic customer care representatives is only part of the process; your team needs regular customer service training to stay up to date on best customer care practices. Role-play different customer interaction scenarios with your team and provide constructive feedback for ways to personalize customer messages and communicate better.
A personalized response goes a long way with customer care, and empowering your team to adapt to specific customer situations and needs can keep your customer care strategy adaptable.
5. Admit mistakes and fix them quickly
When it comes to customer satisfaction levels, one of the best practices is to admit mistakes, apologize for them, and fix them with quick and creative solutions that surpass what customers expect. Although your customer care program should work to prevent mistakes, certain situations will still slip through the cracks.
Remember to stay open, patient, and kind in the face of negative feedback. Avoid falling into a defensive style of communication by graciously accepting responsibility for any negative customer experience. This way, you set yourself up for a better dynamic as you work toward a solution.
Examples of customer care
- Customer care programs
- Responsive interactions
- Customer feedback forms
- Long-term relationship building
Here are some ways to incorporate customer care into your customer service operation:
Customer care programs
Customer care programs are any initiatives to improve customer relationships and satisfaction. They go beyond basic customer service and meet a variety of customer needs.
A typical customer care program might include:
- Loyalty rewards. Points or perks for frequent customers.
- Personalized communication. Tailored emails or messages based on customer preferences.
- Proactive support. Reaching out to customers before issues arise.
- Feedback systems. Regular surveys or channels for customers to share their opinions.
- Special events. Exclusive access to sales or product launches for program members.
LIVELY, for example, offers a tiered rewards system with increasing perks based on annual spend, including exclusive events, early access to sales, and priority customer support. The thoughtfully designed program meets customers’ needs at various levels. It offers practical benefits like free returns and expedited shipping, showing LIVELY’s commitment to improving the overall customer experience.
Responsive interactions
Speed is everything to customers today, and their patience wears out in minutes. Companies must reply to messages, emails, or social media posts promptly or risk losing the sale. Recent Shopify data shows that 70% of Shopify Inbox conversations are with customers making a purchasing decision.
Smart businesses use tools like Shopify Inbox to manage conversations efficiently, provide instant answers, and even offer personalized discount codes to close sales.
Wood Wood Toys, a Canadian retailer, responds to shoppers with quick replies on its website using Shopify Inbox. When you ask the online chatbot a question, an AI-generated answer appears within seconds.
Customer feedback forms
Listening to customers is the heart of customer care. Businesses that seek out customer opinions through surveys, reviews, and conversations can learn about pain points and opportunities for growth. The true magic happens when companies take action and use insights to refine their offerings and introduce new features.
Say you run an online clothing store. You notice a trend in your post-purchase surveys about how customers cannot find the right size. In response, you add a virtual sizing tool to your product pages where customers can input their measurements and receive personalized size recommendations for each item. That’s customer care in action.
If you’re looking to capture customer feedback, tools like Grapevine make it easy.
Long-term relationship building
Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report states that 88% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. These connections you build with customers matter, and they contribute to building loyalty and trust that lasts for years to come.
Companies these days can collect and use data to cater to customer needs and preferences. They can reach out regularly, not just to sell, but to connect and care.
Once you get to know customers over time, you can offer value-added services that go beyond your core product and give customers more reasons to stay loyal to your brand.
Some examples include:
- Complementary products and services
- Personalized consultations
- Extended warranties
- Special events or experiences
Remember that building these relationships isn’t a one-time thing. It takes regular, meaningful interactions over time, not just during sales or service issues. Invest in customer retention strategies that build trust and make customers feel valued.
Customer care FAQ
What are customer care skills?
Customer care skills include empathy, active listening, and the flexibility to offer customers incentives based on their specific needs and experiences.
What is the role of customer care?
The role of customer care is to build an emotional connection with individual customers. Enhance customer loyalty by providing genuine communication and problem-solving strategies that cut to the core of what your customers want.
Can technology help a brand’s customer care efforts?
Yes, technology can help your brand’s customer care efforts through tools like CRM software that track customer interactions, manage customer accounts, analyze demographic information, monitor sales transactions, and more.
What role does empathy play in customer care?
Empathy is central to great customer care because it requires you to place yourself in your customers’ shoes and make decisions based on their specific needs. Taking the time to understand and relate to your customers’ experiences is an essential quality for an effective customer care strategy.
How can I measure the success of my customer care efforts?
You can measure the success of your customer care efforts by looking at metrics like your customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), and Net Promoter Score (NPS). All of these give you an idea of whether customers have had positive or negative experiences with your company.
