Some say that working as a customer care agent means you don’t like yourself very much. You choose to spend eight hours a day, five days a week, getting yelled at by frustrated customers and fixing somebody else’s mistakes. Even though this job description isn’t that far from the truth, we beg to differ about the label that follows this occupation. Having steel-strong patience and god-like nerves doesn’t mean you don’t like yourself. It means that God himself sent you among humans to spread kindness and tranquility. If you don’t have time to train and hire these agents for yourself, then customer care outsourcing through some of the verified and trusted BPO outsourcing companies is the only way to get these godly creatures in your company and build a solid customer base.
What Is the Meaning of Customer Care?
Why should any company care about anything but its profit? Well, if you want to make any profit, you need customer care. This means that the person who’s using the services you provide is at the center of your every action.
It also means helping them if they can’t find what they’re looking for. And to solve any problem that they encountered while working with you. While building trust, answering questions, and assisting people, the business attracts returning customers and grows its base of regular customers.
What Is Customer Care?
A proactive approach to customer service is called customer care. Instead of waiting for clients to come to you with complaints, you actively engage with them to solve problems. This can be achieved by implementing strategies such as routine check-ins, follow-ups and providing extra assistance or resources.
Customer care isn’t focused on boosting your metrics or loyalty; it’s about developing an emotional bond with your consumers and doing things for them just because you want to. Going above and beyond to help a customer when they genuinely need it is important, even if it has nothing to do with your company’s objectives and goals.
When you provide excellent customer service, your business develops a bond with your clients that benefits both sides. You stop being just another retailer and start being seen as a trusted authority. Customer service can foster extremely strong loyalty among the clients your team interacts with. After all, excellent customer service is a competitive advantage among companies.
What Is Good Customer Care?
Imagine the following situation – after some of the common sales mistakes, such as missing out on some information, it comes to customer dissatisfaction. Instead of waiting for the frustrated customer to call back, a company can prevent all of this by doing the following:
- Instead of learning how to handle customer complaints, sales agents should first know their product. Every customer should get all the information firsthand, all the features of the product, and should feel like they’ve gotten actual value for the money spent.
- Bad customer experiences can be prevented if sales representatives keep a positive attitude during the whole process. It’s much easier to communicate with someone who’s friendly toward you than with someone who sounds like they’re only waiting for their shift to finish. A positive attitude in dealing with clients is half of the customer care skill.
- Being quick in solving problems is a skill that is learned, so every company representative should practice being as attentive as they can. People usually appreciate it greatly when their concerns and questions are solved in a flash.
- Listening actively means paying close attention to what the customer is saying, whether it’s in real-time or over written communication. This increases efficiency and shows that the agent is mindful of the customer’s requirements and concerns.
With all of these techniques implemented, a customer will feel understood and valued as they get the service/product that the company provides. This kind of treatment goes a long way, and it ultimately means that you’ve got yourself a returning customer.
After implementing the right approach, every company realizes that customer service is as important as good sales, marketing, and every other aspect of doing business.
When you compare customer service to other parts of doing business, you’ll see that they’re equally important.
What Is the Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Care?
Now, here’s an interesting question. According to some, these two mean the same thing – assisting customers when they reach out. However, some say that these are different concepts, but both require excellent customer service skills and increase customer satisfaction.
So, what would be the differences? Customer care means that the agent is establishing a close and personal relationship with clients who deal with the company. This agent supports emotional needs and actively listens to customers’ problems.
On the other hand, customer service involves answering questions, solving problems, and offering support or guidance to consumers in need when you work in customer service.
Even though both ways of interacting with customers serve to maximize customer satisfaction and increase customer lifetime value, they do it differently. Customer care is more individualized and harder to measure than customer service.
What Is Customer Care Outsourcing?
Not being able to focus on developing a team to be more attentive toward customers leads to learning ways to improve customer service. Or it can lead to outsourcing this service to someone external who has the know-how.
When debating between in-house vs. outsourcing teams, the dilemma isn’t just about whether the conversion rate will increase or decrease. It’s also about cutting costs, but most importantly, it’s about having pros work for you. Not every company has the luck to recruit a whole team of highly skilled employees that outperform themselves and the competition each month.
If a company is lucky, it has a strong and stable team that provides its clients with top-notch customer service every day. If not, then it’s time to consider one of the three following options:
- Hiring new professionals,
- Training existing employees,
- Or outsourcing this service.
Since the first two options take a lot of time and money that companies usually don’t have, then you might’ve just got yourself an answer to the question of why do companies outsource.
Outsourcing customer care services means that a company will (fortunately) have dedicated agents working exclusively for them and pay less than they would if hired in-house.
How Does Customer Care Outsourcing Benefits a Business?
If a company realizes that customer care, which, as we learned, is crucial, isn’t at its very peak, that can only mean two things – either the company will focus on training existing or new employees to perform better, or they will declare themselves out as one of the companies that use outsourcing.
Every business that has employees who know how to perform their customer care skills with every interaction they have with clients literally has a gold pot. Those people are the ones who will keep the business running and thriving and who will, with time, build a rock-solid customer base.
Customer care agent is one of the best roles for outsourcing because you immediately get a whole team of people that can quickly address any concerns or issues they may have. It’s critical to not keep a dissatisfied customer waiting because bad news travels quickly, and just one negative Yelp review can cause your income to collapse.
Once you’ve found yourself the perfect e-commerce customer service, you can sleep tight without letting any bad reviews bite.
How Can You Measure Customer Care?
Whether you use customer service automation or have a person answering customer inquiries, you should measure your customer care satisfaction rate. Even a single bad client experience can make that person turn their back on you, and that’s something every company wants to avoid.
If you want to be known for impeccable customer service, you should monitor your metrics. Here are some of the performance indicators you can track:
- CSAT score – rates that show customer satisfaction with surveys where they rank their recent experience.
- First response time that you can calculate as the average time between when a client contacts customer care and when a representative responds.
- Customer service abandonment rate that is calculated by dividing the total number of inquiries by the number of abandoned customer support requests.
- Resolution rate – deduct the number of pending issues from the volume of client inquiries and then divide that number by the total amount of inquiries. Your service quality has been successful if there are not many unanswered challenges.
- CES – Customer Effort Score: Asking your clients, “How simple was something to do?” will help you determine how much effort they believe they have put in to resolve a problem with you.
Asking a simple question such as this can help you measure your customer service metrics.
Do You Know How to Find a Reputable Outsourcing Partner?
We should talk about one more crucial step toward your customer satisfaction – finding a reputable partner. Once you’re done debating which one is more cost-effective, outsourcing vs. hiring, and you finally see how much time and money you’ll save by outsourcing, it’s time to partner up with someone trustworthy.
- You’ll need a company that can provide the kind of service that suits your business at the times that your customers are awake (in case you cover more than one-time zone).
- You’ll also need someone who has a good reputation and a team that can cover the workload of your business.
- Another crucial factor is knowing that the third party you’ll be working with is a company that will take care of all the work that you don’t want or have time to do.
Consider all possible partners, narrow down your options to five to seven companies, and then ask for quotes. Once you compare the offers, you’ll see more clearly which one is best for you.
We Recruit Customer Care Agents From Heaven Directly
There’s a hotline for heaven where you can get highly-skilled customer support agents that work only for one client – just contact us. We surely have the perfect deal for any business that wishes to have a strong and growing customer base that’s made with impeccable inbound sales and customer care. Get in touch and let us know what kind of customers you have and how angry they are. We’ll take care of the rest.
