What is Customer Care, Why It Matters, and 6 Best Practices

Although exceptional customer care may not be top of mind for every business, getting it right can be a significant driver of success. Care that not only meets but exceeds customer needs helps reduce churn and builds stronger relationships with your customers, transforming one-time buyers into loyal, happy customers.

What is customer care?

Customer care goes well beyond having good customer service. It involves making meaningful connections and understanding your customers’ points of view through the customer support process. That often means using active listening to determine your customers’ problems and empathy to aid the solution you offer them. You’re not just solving a problem; you’re emotionally supporting their needs to help ensure happy customers.

Customer care isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, as some customers may need more or less support than others. For some, excellent customer service means self service options or chatbots. While other types of customers may prefer communicating with a live agent. It’s your team’s responsibility to determine the appropriate level of care and number of touchpoints for each situation, as well as how your team can go above and beyond to promote stronger relationships, address customer needs, and boost customer satisfaction throughout the customer journey.

Customer care also isn’t limited to your customer service reps. Every member of your customer-facing team needs to handle customer interactions with respect, show concern, and do their best to make a positive impression and build connections.

Why Should You Care About Customer Care

Customer service interactions can make or break customer relationships—and your business. If your customer has a bad experience with your company, they won’t hesitate to post the details about it to their social media account. Publicly calling your business out this way can hurt your brand’s reputation and make others more hesitant to buy from you.

But, the opposite is also true—your customers may also post about a customer service experience that goes above and beyond their expectations, helping build your trustworthiness and promote your brand to new customers. Excellent customer care helps differentiate your business from competitors and goes a long way in improving customer loyalty and boosting your revenue.

Customer Care vs. Customer Experience vs. Customer Service

Customer care, customer experience, and customer service all focus on improving customers’ satisfaction with your business. However, they accomplish this in different ways and through various service channels. For instance, a customer who needs assistance with a product or service may contact customer service or use a chatbot. Your customer service team will offer initial support, helping customers determine the exact issue, sharing useful information, or troubleshooting a problem.

Customer care takes great customer service a step further, with agents offering more tailored support and ensuring a resolution that meets their emotional needs as well. Customer care also tends to be more proactive than reactive in its solutions, solving current customer problems while also taking action to prevent future problems from occurring.

Customer experience (CX) differs slightly from customer care and service. CX deals with the entire customer journey, from their first interaction with your brand to the steps your company takes after they make a purchase. Depending on a customer’s particular needs, they may or may not need to interact with your customer service reps or care team during their customer experience. However, any interaction during this journey does ultimately impact their overall CX.

How To Successfully Show Customers You Care

To understand how customer care goes beyond a good customer service experience, review these five real-world examples of customer care below. Seeing customer care in action can help your business learn how to apply it in your support actions and achieve customer success.

Spotify: Personalized Customer Interactions

Spotify strengthened its customer relationships by offering increased personalized customer support through more service channels like social media. The brand uses dedicated support accounts across social media platforms, including X (formerly Twitter), where customer service reps can more easily connect with customers to identify their concerns and work quickly to resolve matters.

Instead of replying to customer messages with generic customer service responses, such as “Thank you for your feedback, we’re working to solve this problem,” Spotify takes time to develop a more meaningful and customized resolution for each customer. For example, when a new user messaged Spotify on X and shared that they were still learning how to use the app, the brand responded and offered support in a personalized, creative way: by sharing a playlist they created just for them.

Spotify could have simply welcomed the new customer with a general message, but instead it went above and beyond to make its customer feel seen and appreciated.

Hertz: Staying Late for the Customer

Customer care helps build customer loyalty, as seen in this example with Hertz. An agent of the car rental company continued working at an airport kiosk well after their official hours of operation to help a customer who arrived late due to a delayed flight.

The customer was so impressed by the employee’s dedication that they took a photo with the representative and posted about their positive experience on social media, letting everyone know the agent “rescued our trip.” Hertz’s ability to exceed customer expectations not only increased loyalty with this one customer but also helped promote its brand’s reputation with a wider audience.

Hertz quickly responded to this positive feedback, acknowledging their customer and appreciating their feedback. Doing this illustrated their commitment to customer care.

Trader Joe’s: Above-and-Beyond Customer Service

If you’re a regular grocery store shopper, you’ve probably experienced a young child getting upset or throwing a tantrum while shopping at some point. Even though it’s not an unexpected scenario, that didn’t stop several Trader Joe’s employees from offering the customer an extra dose of support.

Cashiers noticed a young boy who was crying while waiting in the checkout line and stopped what they were doing to dance and cheer him up. Instead of just offering the parent and child a smile or some kind words, they went above and beyond their job responsibilities to care for the customers and improve their shopping experience.

Not only did this work to stop the child’s tantrum, but it also put a smile on the faces of everyone around them, improving the customer experience for all shoppers. This type of customer care shows that your brand is invested in your customers’ emotional well-being and that you’re willing to go beyond basic customer support to improve a person’s day and experience with your company.

Virgin Atlantic Airlines: Service Accountability

This example shows how you need to tailor your customer care because every person has different needs—and accountability is an important element of this care. It begins when a customer writes to the airline about their terrible experience with the meal they received during a flight. The customer goes into great detail describing their meal and how unappealing it was.

While the average airline customer may not expect much in terms of in-flight meals, this particular customer did and was more dissatisfied as a result. The airline could have responded with a simple apology, offered discounts for future flights, or even provided meal vouchers to use in the airport, but the company went much further.

Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Atlantic, took accountability for the bad meal by inviting the customer to join the company’s culinary council and help develop a new and improved menu for all flights. Branson realized the value of this customer’s experience and insight and took steps to ensure his company met this customer’s personal needs.

Zappos: Thank Loyal Customers with Extra Benefits

You’ll see how customer care involves much more than just resolving customer issues in this example with Zappos. The shoe and apparel retailer understands that decreasing churn and improving customer retention depends on a great customer experience and building customer loyalty. All of this can be accomplished through customer care efforts like showing appreciation to your current customers through rewards programs and other benefits.

Zappos frequently sends personalized discounts or rewards vouchers in the form of gift cards as thank-you gifts to existing customers to boost customer retention. Taking this step shows that your brand appreciates and cares about your customers beyond just benefiting your bottom line.

How To Improve Your Customer Care: 6 Best Practices

Now that you know what customer care involves and what it looks like in action, here are some improvement strategies your business can follow to improve your own customer care practices:

Get To Know Your Customers

To provide top-notch customer care and support, you first have to understand who your customers are, their biggest pain points, and whether they’ve had a positive or negative experience with your company. Your customer care team needs to listen closely to their concerns, ask questions to help clarify the situation, and customize a solution that not only solves the underlying problem but also meets or exceeds the customer’s personal needs.

Be Open to Customer Feedback

Great customer care starts with being open to customer feedback and accepting criticism gracefully. Not everyone will have a wonderful experience with your brand every time, and that’s okay. Instead of taking negative feedback personally and feeling hurt, use it to your company’s advantage. Gather insights from your customers’ first-hand accounts to help your business see what’s working well and identify areas that need improvement.

Use Positive Language

The words you use in customer communications matter and can make the difference between building trust and customer loyalty or losing a customer for life. Staying calm and using empathy-driven, positive phrases that show you acknowledge their situation and want to find the best option for them goes a long way. Consider language like, “I understand where you’re coming from,” or “The best option for this situation is…” to improve your customer care.

Know Your Products and Services

It’s critical that your customer care team knows your products and services in detail. An extensive knowledge base about how each of your products or services operates is necessary to provide the proper customer support and quickly troubleshoot any issues. Their knowledge should go well beyond the basics to offer tailored tips or tricks to customers based on their needs.

Be Solutions-Focused

Focusing on finding a resolution and the steps needed to achieve it can help your team stay on track when dealing with upset customers. Train your customer care team with problem-solving and customer service skills to help them find positive solutions to difficult problems.

Admit Mistakes

Miscommunication and mistakes happen; it’s part of human nature. The best step your support team can take when this occurs is to quickly admit the error and be clear about how they will resolve the matter. Being accountable goes a long way to building trust with customers.

How To Measure Customer Care

Taking steps to improve your company’s customer care is essential, but you also need a way to measure your efforts to ensure your strategy is effective. Here are a few metrics to consider:

• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): This score measures how happy your customers are with your products, services, or customer support through customer feedback and satisfaction surveys.
• Net promoter score (NPS): This metric measures customer loyalty and the likelihood that customers will recommend your brand to others. You can measure NPS by sending post-purchase or post-customer service customer surveys.
• Customer effort score (CES): This score measures your effort. Sending surveys to customers after a support interaction helps your business measure its effectiveness at resolving issues and the amount of effort customers have to contribute. A more effortless interaction on your customer’s end means greater satisfaction.

Measuring customer care is easier with the right tool, like Podium. Podium’s all-in-one platform includes customer feedback surveys, making it convenient for customers to use and easy for your business to measure and gain valuable insight into your customer care. Watch a demo to learn how Podium can help your business improve customer care.