Customer Care: Importance, Examples, and Best Practices

• What is customer care
• Key differences in customer service, support, and experience vs. customer care
• Why is customer care important?
• Ways to measure customer care
• How to improve customer care
• 4 customer care examples
• Customer care best practices
• Future trends in customer care
• How customer service software can improve your customer care

Customer care is when a company goes beyond basic customer service standards to make an emotional connection with a customer. This could mean actively listening to an angry customer with patience and empathy as part of your incident management strategy, or surprising customers with a special loyalty promotion once a year.

Good customer care involves interacting with customers on their preferred customer service channels, responding to their emotional needs, personalizing your interactions, and showing them appreciation for loyalty.

Customer service managers are typically responsible for a company's customer care program. To ensure positive customer care experiences, service managers must:

• Set customer service goals and policies and train your team to uphold them
• Track individual cases and customer service metrics to ensure and evaluate customer care
• Conduct customer satisfaction surveys and implement the learnings in your customer care
• Train reps, AI agents like Agentforce for Service, and mobile workers so they understand care tactics, such as active listening, empathy, and acknowledging concerns
• Manage workloads with agents and automation so that reps can focus on higher-value work like maximizing revenue. Monitor customer service analytics and implement improvements on a continuous basis

While customer care is part of customer service, support, and the overall customer experience, all these terms vary slightly. Here's how they're commonly defined and how they differ.

Customer service teams have a lot on their plates by delivering customer service, support, and care:

• Customer service: This refers to the support you provide to customers before and after they buy and use your products or services. It's meant to ensure a positive, easy experience with your brand. Customer service includes proactive and immediate assistance on the customer's preferred channel. For example, you might provide detailed product information and knowledge base articles on your website but also have reps and AI agents like Agentforce for Service ready to provide help to customers who call or start a chat with questions.
• Customer support: Support helps your customers make the most of your product or service by addressing any issues or questions they have. Let's say a mobile worker installs a home security system at a customer's home. Customer support might mean referring them to your website's knowledge management, where they can easily gain self-service information with answers to FAQs, tutorials on troubleshooting, a list of home security tips, and more.
• Customer care: This is a targeted approach to customer service and support that aims to make customers feel like your company genuinely cares about them. Customer care doesn't always involve a service rep or mobile worker. We'll explore some examples later.

The customer service experience includes every interaction a customer has with your brand, from the first point of contact to ongoing support. It's the overall perception a customer forms with your company by interacting with your marketing efforts, products, services, and customer service team.

Customer care is an essential part of a customer's experience — it's how you show that you value and care about them. Our research finds that 86% of customer service reps say customer expectations are higher than they used to be. To keep up and exceed expectations, customer service teams must provide excellent customer care.

Our research shows that 88% of customers are more likely to purchase again from a company that delivers good customer service. This makes customer care an essential part of your company's success. Showing customers they matter to your company can make them more likely to post positive online reviews and recommend your products or services to others. That can help attract new customers and boost your reputation and revenue. Check out the reviews for Service Cloud on G2 .

Excellent customer care has the power to impact retention, brand perception and awareness, and revenue. Let's dig into the details behind those benefits and others:

• Positively impacts your brand: When you treat customers with care, they're more likely to sing your praises and refer others to you. Our research shows that 79% of service professionals say their company views them as brand ambassadors. Going the extra mile to share customer care success stories in your social media, case studies, ads, press releases, and other public content can increase brand awareness and build a positive perception.
• Increases customer trust, loyalty, and retention: If your customers feel like your company cares about them as individuals, they may trust you and your products more and continue doing business with you.
• Attracts new customers: Many people read reviews before they purchase a product or service. The more positive reviews your company has — especially those that highlight how you exceeded customer expectations — can help attract more customers and contribute to a positive brand reputation. This can also help you stand out among competitors.
• Improves your customer service: By monitoring support cases and service interactions for examples of excellent customer care, you can gain valuable insights into what you're doing well and where improvements are needed.
• Improves your offerings: Surveying customers about your products or services and acting on learnings helps ensure you provide offerings that fit their needs. It can also help you address concerns proactively. For example, if survey feedback for a new product reveals that a feature doesn't work as expected, you can address this issue with potential buyers before they make a purchase — letting them know you're aware of the issue and working to fix it.
• Improves employee retention: Service professionals are more likely to feel proud to work for a company that seems to care about its customers. This is an important consideration as our research finds that 69% of service decision-makers say employee attrition is a major or moderate challenge.
• Boosts revenue: Caring for customers and listening to their needs leads to positive reviews, improved customer service, and better products — which may lead to more satisfied customers and increased sales.

One of the best ways to ensure you're consistently providing excellent customer care is to make it part of your customer service operation's measurable KPIs (key performance indicators). Here are a couple more tips for measuring customer care:

• Survey customers: Learn about a customer's last interaction with your company by regularly sending out customer satisfaction surveys. Use the results to create a customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and pair that with other metrics like customer effort score (CES) to get an overall picture of customer sentiment and loyalty. To learn even more from your customers, give them a way to tell you what they liked, disliked, or would improve.
• Customer service analytics: Analyzing data helps teams uncover areas of customer care to either replicate or workshop. Collect and analyze data from all customer interactions — phone conversations, emails, chats, social media, and surveys — for a complete picture.

Including customer care in your KPIs is one important way to improve customer service. Let's take a closer look at some other ways to improve your approach to delivering excellent customer care:

Our research finds that 92% of service professionals say nurturing customer relationships is increasingly important. Reps need to develop specific communication skills, such as remaining calm, listening carefully to customers, and treating them with kindness. Resources like Salesforce's free online learning platform, Trailhead and the Serviceblazer Community on Slack offer training courses and valuable peer best practices.

Reps aren't the only ones on your customer service team who can provide excellent customer care. Agentforce can significantly enhance customer care by providing quick and accurate responses to both routine and complex inquiries, offering personalized recommendations, and resolving issues efficiently. They can operate 24/7, ensuring that customers receive timely assistance at any hour and in any time zone. AI agents can also analyze customer data to anticipate needs and preferences, leading to more tailored and proactive support. Like your reps, Agentforce can continuously improve customer care through self-learning, keeping up with changing customer needs. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also builds trust and loyalty over time.

Customer service management software like Service Cloud can really step up your customer care. It streamlines communication, keeps track of all customer interactions, and gives you valuable insights. Both reps and Agentforce can quickly access customer history and preferences, which helps them provide more personalized and efficient service. Plus, the software handles routine tasks automatically, so your team can focus on more complex issues. It also offers real-time customer service analytics and performance metrics, which helps managers spot areas for improvement and tweak workflows. All of this adds up to faster response times, better resolution rates, and a much better overall customer experience.

Our research shows that 69% of reps find balancing speed and quality is difficult when helping customers. This pressure can lead to consequences like burnout and attrition. Use internal surveys to learn about employees' pain points and what support they need to be successful. Then, put the learnings into practice as much as possible. Consider creating a mentoring program to support reps in their daily jobs and career paths.

Customer surveys are a useful way to gauge and improve customer care, but there are more ways of gathering data. With the right customer service operations software, you can measure which products, issues, and service processes are leading to a positive or negative customer experience — and either hold them up as examples or create an action plan to address them.

When you picture an emotional connection with a customer, you might envision a two-person interaction. But customer care doesn't always involve a customer interacting with a customer service rep or agent. Let's look at a few examples of excellent customer care:

When a customer needed to cancel their cat food order from an online pet supply company, they entered "Unfortunately, Mr. Pibbles passed away this week" in the "Reason for canceling" text box. A few days later, the customer was moved after receiving flowers and a handwritten condolence card from the pet supply company.

By giving customers a way to communicate why they need to cancel an order and showing them empathy during difficult times, the pet supply company provided personalized customer care even without a spoken interaction.

A customer complained about the difficult-to-open packaging of a fresh dill pickle company. The AI agent that handled the complaint escalated it to a rep because the customer care required critical thinking. The service rep assured the customer that the company would look into the situation and offered a refund. In response, the company decided to survey other customers to gather more feedback. The survey results confirmed that many other customers were also struggling with the packaging. This prompted the company to recognize that making design changes was crucial for improving the customer experience.

Sales and positive reviews increased when they implemented an easy-open tub, and the customer who complained initially now frequently recommends their pickles. By taking a single customer's complaint seriously, the company improved customer care for all its current and future customers.

Good customer care also applies in B2B customer service. There doesn’t always need to be a problem either.

For example, a financial software company continuously provides automated, accurate, and compliant solutions that streamline financial management, enhance reporting, and ensure secure data handling to its business clients. They also offer dedicated support, training, and regular check-ins to help their clients efficiently use and maximize the value of their software solutions, thereby building trust and strengthening the relationship.

After a major storm knocked out power to thousands of people, a utility company used an incident management strategy to handle customer requests. Standard service protocol requires customers to either call or report an outage on the company's website. But during major power outages, the company also monitors its social media channels for urgent customer needs.

By allowing reps or agents to immediately respond to and help customers who reach out on social media during emergencies, the utility company showed top-notch customer care. No need to call or report it online!

Our research finds 65% of customers expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences. This applies to the level of customer care they expect.

If your team is struggling to meet customer expectations, here are some best practices:

• Prioritize customer care: Set specific customer care goals, like balancing service quality with speed and providing proactive customer service. Also consider creating policies for situations that call for special care. For example, an airline might have a policy for bereavement fares where anyone traveling to a funeral is upgraded to first class when possible.
• Properly train your team: Reps should be able to communicate effectively, listen carefully, and show empathy — and this may require additional customer service training. Other soft customer service skills, like time management and adaptability, can give reps more time to effectively handle difficult or sensitive customer interactions.
• Adopt automation and AI: Support your service team with technology and resources that can assist customers with common and complex issues. Tools like chatbots, AI agents, and self-service options can help lighten your reps' load while still delivering a good customer care experience. Automating workflows can also speed up routine processes for greater efficiency.
• Unify your data: Integrating your customer relationship management (CRM) platform with your contact center software gives reps and agents a full picture of customer histories. This can help them provide customers with faster, more personalized care.
• Provide an omnichannel experience: Engaging with customers where they already are and where they prefer to communicate is a good way to show them you care about their convenience. Use omnichannel contact center software to streamline workflows.
• Support customers proactively: Our research finds that only 33% of customers feel the typical company provides proactive support. Communicate with customers before something becomes a problem — such as a delayed delivery or recalled part. When possible, resolve their issue before reaching out to them so you're bringing a solution instead of a pain point.
• Monitor data and solicit feedback: Survey customers and use analytics software to identify customer preferences, problem areas, and other insights. Use this information to continually coach your team and improve your customer care.

AI will play an essential role in the future of customer service and care. But our research finds that only 42% of customers trust businesses to use AI ethically — down from 58% in 2023. As companies invest more in customer service AI, they'll need to maintain transparency and use AI ethically or risk losing their customers' trust. One way they can do this is by adopting AI tools with built-in security and privacy guardrails, like the Einstein Trust Layer.

AI and humans will have more opportunities to work together more efficiently and effectively. For example, AI customer service agents can rapidly generate insights and responses based on customer data. This enables reps to focus on providing more personalized customer care and building stronger relationships, especially on issues that require critical thinking. Agentforce will become increasingly prevalent, helping businesses scale customer service more quickly and cost-effectively while meeting the demand for excellent customer care.

Investing in AI-powered customer service software like Service Cloud lets service organizations take advantage of strong AI, automation, and other tools that can greatly improve customer care, such as:

• Omnichannel support: Our research found that 79% of service organizations connect with customers through various messaging apps, including Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Without an omnichannel contact center, this can be a difficult and disjointed process — and a poor experience for customers. But having omnichannel support means reps can engage seamlessly with customers across multiple, integrated channels for a consistent, convenient experience.
• CRM integration: Merging your contact center software with your CRM gives reps a complete view of all customer data, including current and past interactions across all channels, previous purchases, account information, and more. This allows teams to quickly respond to issues with all the information they need in front of them.
• Knowledge management AI: A strong knowledge management process is a key aspect of any successful service organization. Enhance this process with AI for knowledge management to help everyone on your team retrieve, store, and share collective knowledge. This can help reps and AI agents alike quickly access accurate information to improve customer care speed and quality.
• AI agents: AI agents can help ensure service teams always have enough support to handle increases in service channels and evolving customer needs. They can take simple, routine tasks off human reps' plates, and provide them with extra support to increase efficiency and build customer trust and satisfaction.

Customer care is essential to service operations. When customers feel a company has taken measures to show they care about them, they may be encouraged to become repeat customers and recommend your business to others.

With the right strategy, tools, and training in place, service teams can improve customer care, leading to new customers and customer loyalty, positive brand recognition, increased revenue, and other benefits. Investing in the right technology is more important than ever, especially when it comes to AI and automation.