How does your company rank the importance of customer care? Customer care is critical to your organization. It’s the fulcrum leveraging customer retention.
What is quality of experience your customers receive when dealing with your customer care people?
Customer care involves mastering the art of being proactive and anticipatory of the trends, personas and requirements influencing the choices your customers make. Is that the focus of your customer care folks when creating a positive and enduring customer experience for your clients?
Most companies regard customer care as post-sale conflict resolution. That means your company does business anticipating there will be problems.
What if you did business that eliminated problems before the sale rather than dealing with them afterwards?
This conscious decision makes your customer care folks into true customer service professionals.
What if you did business from a model that made everyone in your organization responsible for creating a positive customer experience? That means customer care is part of everyone’s job function.
- How might these small pivots in customer care impact the types of departmental throughput in your organization?
- How might these changes in your team’s mindset influence the quality of output throughout your organization?
- How might a focus on Customer Experience impact the types of customers you acquire?
When Customer Experience becomes central to your corporate culture, you focus less on low-hanging fruit types, who tend to be demanding and unprofitable divas who are always looking for reasons to be dissatisfied. You target customers whose own corporate cultures underscore the importance of creating a positive and enduring customer experience.
If customer care is part of everyone’s job function, how might that epiphany influence whom you hire for your dedicated customer care person/department? What types of skills are involved? How might this individual become the customer experience evangelist throughout your organization?
Many people equate customer experience with Apple® and Disney®, B2C rather than B2B experiences. Since when is business development anything less than an interpersonal experience, even if conducted virtually?
This week, have everyone in your organization quantify how many customer care experiences surface each day. You’ll be amazed. Those experiences create customer retention opportunities. You will identify those customers who are well-worth your time in developing collaborative relationships.
This conversation places customer care in a completely different place, doesn’t it? Have I moved you beyond your status quo, conflict resolution perception of your customer care function? I hope so.
Concentrating on customer experience as the total outcome of everyone’s relationship with customers creates enduring and profitable relationships and a loyal and retained customer base.
Babette N. Ten Haken, is President of Sales Aerobics for Engineers®, LLC and author of its award-winning blog. She catalyzes business transition, startup growth, and professional development for non-traditional sellers, engineers, manufacturers, and technical startups. Her book on collaboration strategies, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com.
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