Customer Care: Beyond Customer Service

The onset of the pandemic has led the world to embrace the digital age at an accelerated rate. Online shopping, communication, entertainment, gaming, wellness, and learning services have seen a surge that will likely continue well after the pandemic is over. As online customer behavior, wants, and needs continue to evolve, so does the need for optimized customer engagement with a strong emotional connection at the core. 

This is where deep and robust customer care comes in. It is the process of looking after customers by ensuring their satisfaction and delightful interaction with a business and its brand, goods, and services. While related, it might be more accurate to see customer care as the next-level evolution from customer service, which primarily focuses on responding to and the subsequent solutioning of customers’ needs. The key difference is that customer care goes beyond traditional customer service metrics and focuses on anticipating and delivering on customers’ needs while establishing a positive emotional connection, preemptively or proactively.

Customer care engages with customers across any and all communication channels in a consistent, seamless, personalized, and easeful way. Customer care is a vital foundation for building trust and improving the overall customer experience (CX) and satisfaction.

Being customer experience-centric can deliver significant benefits. Dimension Data reports that 84% of customer experience-centric brands have seen an upward trend in their revenue – a 92% increase in customer loyalty and a 79% reduction in costs. On the other hand, when companies are slow to improve customer experience and adopt digital transformation, they fall behind. Additionally, in one Salesforce Research study, 80% of customers said that brand experience is just as important as products and services, and a total of 66% expect companies to understand their needs and expectations. This truly shows that we are now living in an “experience economy”.

As companies scale and engage with more and more customers, it could be beneficial to outsource customer care and support to meet the evolving demands. Customer care outsourcing companies, with their expertise and accumulated knowledge in elevating the customer experience, can be your brand ambassador. Collaborating with them can help maintain a favorable customer experience (especially for subscription business models), support accelerated growth, and focus on other ways to expand your business.

In short, customer care in CX is more than simply providing solutions or adequately handling a customer call. It results in a positive and loyal customer-brand relationship. Now, how do you build a customer care team of highly engaged brand ambassadors?

1. Understand customers’ sentiments in the interaction and/or engagement with your brand. 

There are always insights to be gained from every customer interaction, both positive and negative. One has to examine closely what makes users click, browse, and add your products to their carts. This includes even canceled orders and bad reviews. The data and insights that can be acquired from good and even bad interactions will allow you to determine your next strategy for marketing, product development, sales, and customer service, among others. Always keep in mind that data is key in keeping your business moving forward.

Related: Implementing VoC Customer Experience Programs

2. Look for the best agents to be your brand ambassadors.

Humans are at the core of CX. After all, happy employees tend to lead to happy customers. In fact, according to Glassdoor research, every one-star increase in a company's Glassdoor rating equates to a remarkable 1.3-point improvement in customer satisfaction. This shows that customer care outsourcing companies with high employee satisfaction scores and employee retention rates, and CX excellence are the best partners to provide outstanding customer care.

Ensuring genuine customer care requires recruiting the right people into your customer care team, fully equipping them with the proper tools; fueling a curious, innovative, and digital savvy mindset; and training to maximize their mastery of your brand. Aside from possessing the core skills required, the best brand ambassadors are those who also receive the best employee care, who are fully engaged, and who gets to be authentically themselves.

3. Implement a Multi-tier Operating Model across digital channels, services, and solutions.

Successful customer experience is driven by a range of business capabilities. Consider the following factors in improving your overall customer care as a key enabler of CX excellence.

• Multi-tier Operating Model 

To keep up with the evolution of digital channels, companies offer a varied mix of capabilities and services through digital, hybrid, and optimized platforms. Services and solutions are flexible to better serve customers' evolving needs, wants, and buying (usage) behaviors.

• Market-Leading Agent and Innovation Culture

Agents need full integrated support. This entails not only equipping them with the knowledge for customer care, but also the skills to address the three levels of customer needs: functional, social, and emotional. Solutions are tailored as platforms proliferate and customer care becomes more complex. 

• Super Teammates as True Brand Ambassadors and Innovators

Super teammates are passion-driven, customer care-savvy, and digital product experts who are highly skilled and multifaceted in creating deep engagements. That deep engagement enables them to drive the four key dimensions of customer experience: creating relevance and connection, understanding moments that matter, simplifying the journey, and personalizing the experience. 

• Global Footprint and Colorful, Refreshing Work Environments

Empowering people, creating fun work environments, and embracing a diverse and inclusive work culture are just some of the key factors in delivering exceptional customer engagement, experiences, and care.

• Innovative Recruiting, Training, and Onboarding

Through innovative recruiting, onboarding, and training, companies can attract multifaceted and multi-skilled teammates. This also includes leveraging next-gen technologies such as on-purpose user experience (UX) - designed knowledge bases and browser-based support bots to accelerate training and ramp speed.

4. Collaborate with a strategic innovation partner.

Digital innovation can be thought of as the collaborative partnership between humans and technology to continuously improve business processes, workforce operations, and customer experience. One way to innovate is to remove mundane and repetitive tasks from frontline agents so that they can focus on developing valuable, positive, and trusting relationships with customers. Consider a strategic innovative partner who can help you innovate to do things better, more efficiently, or ridiculously different.

5. Choose an outsourcing partner with a proven track record.

Lastly, look for a customer care outsourcing partner that has an outstanding reputation. Collaborate with one that not only provides world-class customer care but also keeps your customers’ data safe. A widely recognized customer care outsourcing company will ensure that your brand is in good hands.

Your Excellent CX Partner

As a global leader in innovation and people-first culture, TaskUs offers industry-leading CX solutions to some of the most disruptive brands. At least five apps on your phone are powered by TaskUs’ CX Support. Together with our clients, we continue to innovate and push the boundaries to achieve groundbreaking results. 

TaskUs believes in making a tangible impact through technology. We have developed tools and incorporated them into our process to increase our daily work efficiency, accuracy, and communication. By leveraging technology, we help our Teammates provide world-class customer care and customer experience excellence. 

With our deep employee engagement cultivated through our people-first culture, digital fluency and global mastery at scale, we are uniquely positioned as your best partner in customer care.