Quality customer service is essential every day, but organizations should move toward making customer care part of their long-range vision. What’s the difference? Customer service involves actions and support to help customers with immediate needs, but customer care is a broader, more holistic approach that focuses on building long-term relationships. The “how” lies in emotional connection, as this trend toward customer care emphasizes tactics such as genuine empathy, personalized interactions and remembering individual preferences to ensure customers feel valued and understood.
The Four Loyalty Behaviors
How you have interacted with customers before often influences whether they’ll return and whether they would recommend you to others – simply stated, it’s the foundation of your marketing strategy. Building emotional connections with clients by making them feel valued, often through personalized responses and going above and beyond to meet their needs, creates a positive relationship that can lead to long-term opportunities.
The Qualtrics XM Institute studied the connection between customer experience and loyalty. Specifically, they examined the effects of three elements of the customer experience – success, effort and emotion – on loyalty behaviors such as purchasing more, recommending, forgiving and trusting. They found that an improvement in emotion provides the biggest benefit, and that consumers with a high rating in emotion are more likely to exhibit all four loyalty behaviors than consumers with a high rating in either success or effort. For example, 62% of survey respondents said they would be “extremely likely” to forgive a company based on “success” and 64% based on “effort,” but “emotion” raised that metric all the way to 74%.
Emotion in Action
How can businesses build more emotion into the customer experience? Strategies can include dialing up empathy and active listening; storytelling; maintaining regular, meaningful communication; and actively seeking and acting on feedback.
Exceed expectations by surprising customers with small gestures, such as handwritten thank-you notes or unexpected discounts. And ensure there’s a human touch in digital interactions, including conversational language in chatbots.
Fostering personalized, meaningful interactions through customer care should be the priority. Tailor interactions to individual customers by using their names, remembering their preferences, and offering personalized recommendations. Using audience insight tools like HubSpot and analyzing digital data from platforms like Google Analytics to better understand your audiences will help you build stronger relationships and create a lasting, positive brand image.
“Don’t overlook the ways you can make customers feel special. To deliver the kind of customer care that creates loyalty, look for opportunities to surprise and delight, incorporate empathy and active listening, and make sure digital interactions are delivered with a human touch.”
Fern Senra-James, APR
Partner and Executive Managing Director