When it comes to customer care vs. customer service, there’s a big difference between the two, even though they might sound similar. While customer care revolves around customer relationships and how happy you keep your clients, customer service focuses on solving customers’ problems.
In this post, we take a closer look at the principal differences between these two customer-related services.
Understanding Customer Service
You’re effectively delivering basic customer service when you handle customer inquiries, complaints, and requests. This business function includes troubleshooting customer problems through to providing them with detailed product information. At the front line of the customer support service department are the customer service representatives (CSRs). The customer service team resolves customer issues and works hard to increase customer satisfaction.
What is the goal of customer service? Resolving customer issues as effectively and efficiently as possible!
To ensure your CSRs can perform their task, they need to deeply understand your offerings and the procedures and policies your organization operates by. Furthermore, they must be excellent communicators who can empathize with a customer’s issues to find innovative ways to solve them.
Customer service can directly impact your brand’s public image when done right since it drives brand loyalty and promotes customer retention.
Understanding Customer Care
Going above and beyond providing great service to your customers, customer care revolves around ensuring your customers have the best possible experience with your brand and are satisfied with the interactions they have with your organization.
In essence, client care is an act of customer service. Instead of waiting for customers to present their problems to you, you’re proactive and reach out to them first to prevent any issues from arising in the future. This function generally includes check-ins with customers, follow-ups, and extra support services that all contribute toward your customer satisfaction score.
Weighing Up Customer Care vs. Customer Service
Even though customer care and customer services are equally important, they do not serve the same purpose. Good customer service lays the foundations for solving any customer problems. Brilliant client care helps prevent those problems from occurring at all. This is why many businesses provide both services, to ensure they have a comprehensive strategy to keep their clients as satisfied as possible.
Customer retention is one of the most vital aspects of brand growth, and that is what customer care sets out to do. By providing your clients with these services, you’re committing to providing quality service to your customers. Through customer care, you get to build rapport with your clients, which leads to improved brand loyalty and higher satisfaction ratings.
The short and sweet here is this: customer care is a super-charged version of customer service since it exceeds expectations to keep customers satisfied and enhance the customer experience.
Tracking and Improving Client Care Services
Customer care revolves around building relationships with your clients, which means that it is a long-term investment that extends throughout the entire customer lifecycle. It’s all about ensuring that you offer the best possible customer experience, and this calls for your customer service teams to build an emotional connection with your clients.
One of the best ways to track and improve your customer care strategy is by using a partner to roll out customer surveys and get customer feedback. With the insights you’ll gain through these surveys, you’ll be able to measure the efficacy of your strategy and implement new tactics to help improve this function.