Customer care and why it matters to your customer experience

How much are you investing in your current customers? Our research reveals that customer experience (CX) professionals say their number one priority is improving customer retention (43%), followed closely by boosting customer loyalty (41%). 

Because many CX teams focus on improving customer loyalty and retention, you need to stand out. One way is with a solid customer care program, which sounds like a big investment. But it really takes getting all your employees to adopt a customer-focused mindset. 

Here’s how you can make it work for your business.

Customer care is the process of building positive emotional connections with customers through consistently respectful, empathetic interactions. 

Customer care is a facet of your overall customer experience program. It includes how people are treated when they interact with your company and brand. From the pre-purchase steps to buying products to after they become a customer and beyond, everything comes down to customer care. 

A company that invests heavily in customer care makes its customers feel valued, considered, and heard. 

Good customer care, or a customer care program, happens during any part of the customer experience: before, during, and after a purchase.

Customer service is any support that your business offers to its customers. Customer service agents should be able to support your customers both before and after they buy your products or partner with your services.

Customer service is an important part of your customer experience strategy. Just because it’s not the same as customer care doesn’t mean it’s not vital. It’s how your customers get support with their most basic needs and issues, like instructions for setting up their new software or replacing a broken part in a product. 

Great customer service means resolving issues quickly and effectively for the vast majority of your customers.

Related reading: 5 tips for improving customer service and driving retention.

Customer experience represents the full extent of a customer's interactions with your business. It covers every single touchpoint and extends across the entire customer journey.

Your customer experience strategy should account for both customer service and customer care to be maximally effective. They work together to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, but they do so in different and complementary ways.

Customer care and customer service might just seem like different terms to describe the same thing—taking care of customers when they need you. But they’re actually separate concepts, though they do work together to create your overall customer experience. 

In customer care, you build a personal and emotional connection with the people who interact with your business. In customer service, you provide assistance or advice to customers who need help. Customer care isn’t as easy to quantify as customer service, and it’s more personalized. 

Now more than ever, customers have seemingly limitless choices on where to shop. With more options than they can count, the only businesses they’ll stick with are ones that treat them right.

According to SurveyMonkey research, 91% of consumers are likely to recommend a company after a positive experience. When you implement customer care into all of your interactions, you ensure that your customers have a pleasant experience with your business.

Providing excellent customer care is your chance to differentiate your brand and increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

When businesses decide to invest in customer care programs, they begin to actively improve the customer experience they offer. 

Based on SurveyMonkey research, customer experience teams prove ROI in several ways:

Customer care programs allow businesses to give customers the great experiences they deserve. Here are some of the leading benefits of customer care.

According to SurveyMonkey research, 81% of consumers say they’re likely to share a poor customer experience with friends or family. Without good customer care, you could be losing customers and feeling the effects of negative word of mouth. 

Fortunately, our same research revealed that 91% of consumers are likely to recommend a company after a positive experience with them. If you’re committed to great customer interactions, you could be building your customer base and keeping your current customers around.

Related reading: How to improve customer loyalty and retention: A complete guide.

If you want to boost employee engagement, build a customer-centric culture. 

Our research shows that feeling connected to customers is a big factor when it comes to employee happiness and retention: 

Are you unsure how connected your employees feel to customers? Use our Customer Centricity Survey Template to see where you stand and make improvements.

You’ve likely heard that retaining a customer is much less expensive than attracting a new one. Plus, there are many benefits to customer loyalty and retention, from increased customer lifetime value (CLV) to improved profits. 

The more care you show for your customers, the better. As your customers like your business more, they’ll even start recommending your brand to their coworkers and friends. Word-of-mouth marketing can be a considerable factor in your future growth.

While customer care helps to radically improve your customer experience, companies can encounter several problems with monitoring and implementing it.

Here are some of the most challenging aspects of customer care. 

It would be great if there were one number that could tell you how well your customer care program is working. Because customer care is about cultivating relationships with customers and thinking less about your aggregate customer data, you might find it difficult to understand the impact of customer care on your brand image or growth. 

The good news is that you can measure different dimensions of customer satisfaction with some industry-standard metrics:

Related reading: How to use NPS surveys to create the best customer experience. 

It’s one thing to say you’re investing in customer loyalty. It’s another to implement a customer care program that touches all of your employees.

A good customer care program takes time and resources to get right. In addition to leadership buy-in, you’ll need to get all of your employees to take customer care seriously. This could include updated employee training and incentives to truly put the customer first.

Customer care only works when everyone in your organization is involved.

Even if you provide the best customer care, you have other factors to overcome. Consumers may leave your brand for a competitor because of lower prices or better products and features.

It’s a good idea to run regular market research to see how you can complement your customer care with competitive insights.

Now that you understand the importance of customer care initiatives, it’s time to launch and refine them. Once a program is up and running, you can use the following strategies to improve customer care.

Customers like being rewarded for their loyalty with special recognition and benefits. But you don’t necessarily have to offer these perks for free. 

Creating methods that customers can use to get bonuses, discounts, free products, or little additions can help to drive customer loyalty and engagement. Loyalty programs will help increase your customer lifetime value while enhancing satisfaction.

Zappos is well known for its responsive, above-and-beyond customer service. That’s because they have a unique approach to customer service, including how they measure success. For example, Zappos doesn’t penalize call center employees for long service calls. In fact, they celebrated one of their customer service agents for spending eight hours on the phone with a single customer.

A VoC program means regularly collecting customer feedback and sharing key insights with your employees. You should also let customers know you hear them and are making improvements based on their feedback. 

One of the core tenets of customer care is that people don’t like to be treated like interchangeable parts in your customer service machine—they expect personalized, customized service where it’s possible. That’s why many dentist offices have begun sending out individual messages to their patients to wish them a happy birthday or a merry holiday season. 

SurveyMonkey research shows that personalized experiences are constantly one of the leading methods that customer experience pros can use to enhance the customer experience.

If consumers feel that a brand understands them on a personal level, they’re much more likely to actively choose to shop with that company. 

Collecting customer feedback and connecting it to existing customer data in your CRM, such as Salesforce, can help you better understand customer needs.

Related reading: The ultimate guide to running a customer feedback program.

Build meaningful connections with your customers by proactively showing them you care about their experience. 

Here are a few customer care examples:

Remember that customer care is more than customer support or service. It’s about connecting with customers on an emotional level throughout the customer journey. It’s simpler to build those connections when you can truly empathize with the customer experience. 

SurveyMonkey makes it easy to understand the customer experience and gain actionable insights. Automate customer surveys, connect feedback to customer data, and collaborate with your team. Because when your employees and your customers can truly connect, everyone wins.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.