What is the difference between Customer care and Customer service?

In this competitive era, your relationship with your customer is of paramount importance for your business. And customers will lean towards those offerings they perceive will offer a better value than the competitors. There are many ways to build, retain and strengthen this interaction and relationship. Here in this blog, let’s emphasize on customer care and customer service – the two important practices followed to enhance customers’ experience. 

The two terms are on the same spectrum and are often used interchangeably in many instances. However, there is a difference between customer care and customer service. Both the terms are different when anticipating customers’ needs and thus comprise different principles and strategies. Let’s dive deep, one definition at a time!

Customer service: Focus on needs, and provide value beyond the initial purchase

Customer service is an important part of your customer experience strategy. It is designed to solve common customer problems – help them get familiar with the brand & its offerings, make smart purchase choices, and after-purchase support.

It is an important part of customer retention, as customers form an opinion about the company while speaking to those who should represent its value the most! Often the entire customer experience can be heavily influenced by a customer service interaction.

If a blip in customer experience, say receiving a faulty package — means that a customer will contact customer service. This can be a make-or-break moment for keeping that customer.

Data suggests that 90% of customers pick their brand based on customer service. (highlight in sticker)  

Measuring Customer service

You can measure if you’re serving your customers using metrics like 

Customer Effort Score (CES) –  a service metric that measures how much effort customers put in to interact with your business.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) – A customer experience metric that measures happiness with a product, service, or customer support interaction through a customer satisfaction survey. 

Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) – Designed to measure a customer’s satisfaction after a specific event/stage of engagement.

Customer Care: The relationship you have with your customers

Customer care is an aspect of your overall customer experience cycle and one step beyond customer service. It defines how you treat your customers when they interact with your company and brand. It includes every experience customers have – from the pre-purchases to after they become a customer and beyond. A highly personal approach to building customer relationships that deepens over the long term. 

Measuring customer care 

By incorporating customer care practices into their operations, businesses can foster positive and unique relationships with their clientele. Since customer care is more about personalized customer interactions, not everyone wants the same cookie-cutter experience. Where some may want a high-touch interaction, some others may just want one or two hints and they are good to go. 

Loyalty and success are two such byproducts that symbolize care for your customers. You need to create experiences that delight and satisfy customers and thus can build those, as mentioned earlier. 

When you make customer care a business priority, you are likely to build trust, reduce churn, and boost your bottom line. It will improve the brand reputation and sets you apart from the competition.

Do customer service and customer care share commonalities?

Yes, that’s right! Though there is a difference between customer care and customer service, they still share certain commonalities. Take a look. 

Mutually contribute to customer experience.

Both customer service and customer care affect the company’s overall customer experience. Customers value the usefulness of customer services. They also appreciate the empathetic treatment and having quality one-on-one interactions with brand representatives. 

Improved customer satisfaction

Happy and satisfied clients boost the company’s growth. For example, satisfied customers may be more willing to provide testimonials or positive reviews about your products or services.  It is a boon if your customer service and customer care efforts can help your clients feel satisfied with your business. 

Presence throughout the buyer’s journey

Both customer care practices and customer services significantly contribute either fully or at certain stages of the buyer’s journey. For example, customer service representatives assist clients in understanding which goods/services fulfill their needs or help customers solve challenges that might arise after purchases.

Likewise, your staff can use customer care practices during the buyer’s journey in entirety to ensure that clients receive personalized attention.

Boost customer retention

Quality customer care and service may help you keep a higher number of your customers. In this competitive market, if your customer service and customer care policies and practices are a notch higher, you will retain your customers and prevent them from switching to competitors.  

Proactive & Reactive response

Both customer service and customer care have two approaches when reaching out to customers. 

• Proactive response, where the customer first decides to reach out to the brand for help, and the team provides assistance in return. 
• Reactive response, where the customer service and care team themselves reach out to the customer to check in with their progress.  

What is the difference between customer care and customer service

Let’s delve into the factors that testify to customer care vs customer service

Help the brand loyalty 

Although both customer service and customer care work towards enhancing customer experience, customer care is more oriented toward improving brand loyalty. If you make your customer feel valued, it creates that trust that the brand will fulfill their needs – they are more likely to stay loyal to the brand and might help bring new leads too. 

Working with multidisciplinary teams 

A team is built dedicated to customer service, including trained and educated representatives to solve customer problems and issues. The motive is to look after customer queries, guide them through the purchase process, and post-purchase product assistance. As for customer care, it acts as a policy incorporated by any department directly or indirectly associated with the customer. 

Measurements of success

Businesses use different key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate customer care and service responsibilities. Customer services use quantitative measures, such as the time each service request takes, how many issues each customer service representative successfully resolves, etc.

However, customer care practices focus on optimizing the quality of each individual client interaction. For instance, customer care teams might ask clients to fill out surveys to understand how customers feel during or after their interactions with the brand.

Personalized interactions

Although both involve treating customers with individualized attention, however, customer care places greater emphasis on personalizing interactions with customers. This personalization helps clients feel valued by your business.

The time span of customer goals

Customer service job is typically short-term. Once the customer contacts the brand with a query or problem, it ends when that problem is resolved. On the contrary, customer care prioritizes strengthening customer interaction on a long-term basis. Treat customers with empathy and care, regardless of the interaction. 

Complete or partial involvement of all departments

In the case of customer service, representatives may handle one or multiple aspects related to customer service – helping prospects choose products/services that match their needs, managing customer correspondence & helping customers troubleshoot or fix issues related to their business.

On the contrary, customer care involves complete involvement across company departments. Marketing, Sales, and other departments that regularly interact with customers can benefit from customer care initiatives.

For example, a marketing team prefers to personalize ads suiting various segments of their entire consumer base. Or an administrative staff follows up with customers to confirm if they have resolved their customer service ticket.

When customer service is powered by technology

Digitalization has transformed the way we buy, pay, and also interact. Thanks to AI intervention – a technological breakthrough that has taken almost every business industry by storm. And customer service is no exception. 

AI transforming customer service game the chatbot way

AI has transformed customer service interactions, including online customer experience, loyalty, brand reputation, preventive assistance, and even the generation of revenue streams. It has become an incredible helper in improving your support without sacrificing too many resources. 

Speaking of AI, one will mostly associate it with chatbots in customer service. Undoubtedly, chatbots make up a large part of automated communications as they offer diverse support. However, there’s always more to discover when it comes to AI in customer service.

Lets the explore the depth of this massive hype about how AI has completely transformed customer service.

• Zero-human intervention: For instance, AI-powered chatbots easily recognize voice triggers & provide necessary information and guidance without needing human interference.
• Insightful analysis: Exploiting vast amounts of data generated through customer communications and analyzing the same for identifying customer behavior, preferences, churn rate, and more.
• Seamless lead generation: AI analyses browsing history on company sites, translates what customers want, and guides them to what they need. It identifies common trends and pain points for users. And this analysis is performed for hundreds of conversations simultaneously. 
• Streamlines workflows: One can rely on AI to monitor customer activity, provide answers to frequently asked questions, offer assistance during the checkout process, and more. At moments, it can also easily transfer a customer to a human agent for more personalized interactions.
• Stellar customer service: An AI Chatbot facilitates 24/7 availability, personalized and targeted support, fast response times, and multilingual support to improve customer experience, bringing new levels of customer loyalty.
• Soft on pocket: Using AI is more budget-friendly than hiring customer service representatives once the business grows. For this, you could look for companies that specialize in assisting with providing automated communications. Your savings will be substantial.  

Summing it up

So, don’t you think it’s high time to consider AI and its powerful tools to improve customer service? 

You must consider it! In fact,  we can help you join the league of early adopters and thrive in the customer service industry with Chat360.

Sign up for free!

Further, read:

Inbound Customer Service Vs Outbound Customer Service