In any industry, any corporate culture or any company philosophy, better customer care should forever be striven for. Customer care is the most vital function a company can provide, far and above the quality of products and services, or public image. In fact, 90% of your public image as a company will be determined solely by your customer care, rather than your services or products.
There are many, many reasons why you need better customer care, regardless of how exemplary your current care may be, but today, we’re going to look at six reasons for this. The goal of this is to point out to anyone reading that no matter what, improving customer care should be a permanent, high priority goal that is never considered achieved but forever sought. This philosophy, while regarded by some as expensive or blatantly liberal has proven time and again to be the key to keeping customers happy and loyal, and preserving the public image and equitability of a company for the long term.
Without further ado, let’s look at the reasons everyone should tirelessly strive for this.
#1 – Cost Effectiveness
We’ll get the more selfish ones out of the way first, starting with the obvious long term cost effectiveness of improving customer care. When customers need assistance or have questions, resolving them and improving circumstances in response to these issues will reduce the amount of money spent on repeated refunds or repairs of services or products in the future.
It will also reduce the amount of lost customers, which reduces the expenses to a company, and reduces overhead in the long run as well. While it may seem expensive to strive for endlessly improving customer care, in the long run, it pays for itself and then some.
#2 – Product and Service Improvement
Going along with the first point, this also helps to improve a service or product, and give it an edge in the competitive marketplace. When better customer care is implemented, this improves ways to diagnose where problems or room for improvement with the product or service may exist as well.
This reduces the workload on and improves the efficiency of the R&D department, so that a product or service may also strive for constant improvement as well. This improves the previously mentioned cost effectiveness as well, and leads to our next point rather fluidly …
#3 – Empowering Customers
When the ability to note problems customers site, and implement solutions to them is possible, from the previous point, customers will notice that they were heard, and this will make them feel empowered. Everyone likes to feel that their opinions matter, and that they bear weight, and this is especially true for a customer/company relationship.
Customers who feel empowered in this way will also grow to respect your company more, and this will breed loyalty and maintain continued patronage from them as well.
It’ll also stimulate better word of mouth PR via customers, which speaking of …
#4 – Reputation Among Customers
Ever-improving customer care breeds a sense of being valued as customers, alongside making them feel empowered. Customers who feel valued with feel the urge to promote your company to others, citing that they feel treated well, touting your company like a good friend.
This has an exponential effect, as customers spread the word to others, who as eventual customers do the same. This makes the customer base a PR engine of unparalleled power and efficiency.
#5 – Reduction of Legal Issues
With improved customer comer care, there is less risk of miscommunication resulting in litigation. Many class action lawsuits filed against companies have been the result of legal issues over inability to resolve severe financial problems with a product or other customer problems.
When communications and customer relations are improved, this reduces the risks of these greatly, due to better communication and immediate resolution.
#6 – Accuracy in All Things
When customer care and communications are improved, it’s easier to tell, as said before, where frequent problems are occurring in a service, product or policy. Combine with this the fact that communicating with customers on a fundamental level lets you truly know how the average consumer feels about something, and you have a far more accurate metric of success and user experience for your product or service as well.
This level of accuracy is impossible by sales figures and questionnaires which most customers won’t take the time to fill out. Remember, people are far more talkative when they have something to complain about.
These are six of the many reasons you should strive for better customer care at all times, but if you think for a moment, there are boundless others that become obvious as well.
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