How to Master the Art of Customer Care with These 10 Real-Life Examples

1. Empower your customers

Even if your team consists of the best professionals on the planet, you should never neglect your customers’ opinions. As they say, every day is a school day, which ties well into the philosophy of success.

If you gather and analyze feedback on a regular basis, you’ll always be on top. This is a great way to get inspired with new ideas and significantly improve your product.

The team behind the HelpCrunch live chat tool always strives to deliver their customers’ demands . They carefully collect every customer request and store them in a unified database.

For instance, they released their pop-up banner functionality upon receiving a handful of similar requests, even though other live chat solutions don’t usually offer this feature.

Takeaway: be flexible enough to adjust your roadmap a bit if that’s what your customers want. This strategy will always pay off with their loyalty.

2. Adapt to your customer’s tone

In 2020, more companies are implementing chatbots to reduce the workload and provide help on the fly. In some cases, it’s a smart decision. But having to chat with a bot instead of a real person can also be very frustrating at times.

From my experience as a support representative, one of the first things I learned about customer care is that you need to understand the person on the other side. This feeling of comprehension can mean the world to customers, especially if they’re desperate.

Here’s an interesting case shared by Marvin Amber from Caseable.

His customer support operator received a message from a client. It said that her ‘naked Kobo [tablet] is so cold.’ Which means that she got the tablet without its custom case.

Caseable investigated her purchase order and made sure that the case was delivered promptly to her.

Takeaway: always aim to match the tone of your customers’ and adapt accordingly.

3. Be proactive

We all know that great customer care needs to be proactive. It makes perfect sense since providing customer support requires a genuine desire to help people out.

When questions arise, leaving your website or store is way easier than approaching customer support. You need to remember that customers can be hesitant, and it’s your job to encourage them proactively.

But being proactive can take guts, too. Here’s an example of how Adobe notifies its customers via tweets about current technical difficulties the company is experiencing.

What’s so amazing about this case is that Adobe puts the customer experience above everything else. Even if it means risking their reputation, the fact that they’ve let people know about the issue that many wouldn’t even notice is a real example of exceptional customer care.

Takeaway: ensure your customer care team answers questions that haven’t been asked. In doing so, you uplevel your communication and make things easier for your customers.

4. Offer options

Some people always ask for a callback or may prefer to chat, and others are just fine with a simple email follow-up. When you work with customers closely, flexibility is what really counts at times.

This is probably the reason why Maids in Black give you 5 different options to get in touch with them.

Source

Note that Twitter is also there, which feels like they don’t have anything to hide. Every complaint will appear there - and the company is okay with that. What else do you need to trust their services?

By the way, they also contributed to creating this article and mentioned that the speedy email option was the most common one, which is a bit surprising given that you can always use live chat.

But this proves once again that patterns don’t always apply.

Takeaway: adjust your communication sources to your clients’ needs. The more options you can offer, the more eagerly they’ll contact you for business.

5. Learn when to cut the red tape

Sometimes, rules can be broken for a just cause. Every company probably has a strict policy on how their products and services can and can’t be used, which helps eliminate misuses and incidents.

However, I’d like to present to you an interesting outlier. You might have heard about Steam, a gaming platform that allows you to download games online. Pretty convenient, but at the same time, it can cause issues with different versions in online shops like Amazon. In the below example, a customer bought the wrong version of a game and subsequently emailed the developers about it.

Although this wasn’t their issue to handle (nor their responsibility), the response they gave is textbook perfect:

Takeaway: don’t be afraid to break the rules if it’ll serve a good cause. It’s all about your customer being happy.

6. Speak your customers’ language

Your customers need to feel at home on your website. Nothing should stop them from browsing your products and web pages freely.

And if they do have any questions, a language barrier can be a real threat. This is why Canyon, a German manufacturer of bicycles, deals with this issue like a boss.

As soon as you enter the LiveAdmins website, you can choose from 5 supported languages. This handy feature saves time and streamlines customer support big time.

Takeaway: try to hire customer success specialists that speak at least two different languages.

7. Take time to reply personally

No one will argue that replying to every email you receive is hard. But at the same time, it can be rewarding. Remember that people tend to share their positive experience with friends and family.

So if you take the time to craft personalized emails to your customers, you’ll increase your chances of getting more word-of-mouth endorsements.

Here’s what happened when a woman sent an email to Zappos’ CEO:

A witty and funny reply that made her day. As a result, she tweeted about it and brought more exposure to the brand.

Takeaway: every email you send out to your customers can be game-changing. Try to make them as personalized as it gets.

8. Be bold

Big companies like Amazon constantly raise the bar for great customer care. They all have these same day deliveries and compensations. And that’s what customers expect from other businesses, too.

This is why the average reply time is reducing, and you get more professional and qualified help.

But there’s always an outlier that stands out. Wendy’s has become a living meme for its hilarious replies and threads on Twitter. They made humor their primary tool of building emotional connections.

Here’s an example:

Takeaway: don’t be afraid to make an unpopular decision and have your own unique voice. Just do it with your heart — and it’ll pay off eventually.

9. Find a personal approach

People want to be treated like individuals. The same goes for customer care. So, the basics of online assistance is to get to know the person that’s contacting you a little bit. Greet them by their name, ask about how they’re doing, etc.

But Bluleadz, an inbound marketing agency, took it even further by sending funny videos to their potential prospects. They introduce the team, show the office, and make funny little remarks about their daily routine. These short, relatable clips make a nice impression on everyone watching them.

Takeaway: if you’re not getting many customers, your best bet to win their heart is to find a personal approach. So, don’t be afraid to go the extra mile for this.

10. Be creative

In pursuit of being efficient and effective, don’t forget to stay creative. This way, you can make the user experience more entertaining and interactive.

So, next time you’ll be thinking about how to minimize your customers' efforts and stress, try to do something out-of-the-box like Warby Parker. They put together a quiz to help their visitors find the right kind of glasses.

Source

Takeaway: dare to be creative to achieve great results. Attract customers not only with your products but also with the solutions you come up with.

Conclusion

Business is never static. It always grows bigger and evolves. Those who can’t deliver great customer care can easily fall behind. Therefore, it’s crucial to learn from the best and implement strategies that already proved to be effective.

Some of the examples listed above are tricky, and some are ridiculously simple. But they’re all united by the simple but powerful desire to stand out and do something extraordinary.

One day, your very own website might be highlighted as an example of great customer care. So, start taking those creative steps now.