Call Care: How Showing You Care is the Best Customer Service Policy

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In today’s era of customer service automation, digitization, and AI applications, the focus across so many industries is placed on efficiency and productivity.

And it’s not hard to see why; advancements in automation and technology have made the lives of customer service reps so much easier, and they’ve helped to improve the overall customer service experience in a lot of ways.

However, focusing solely on efficiency and productivity can’t take complete precedent over the fundamentals of customer service: showing care and empathy.

How customer service reps interact with and speak to their customers can either make a life-long customer relationship or lose a customer immediately, regardless of how efficient they are.

So let’s talk about call care – what it means, what it looks like, and how slowing down might be the best way to speed up.

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Call Care – What it means and What it looks like

Taking care of your customers is more than just solving problems.

Call care is a holistic approach to customer service that utilizes tone of voice, proper responses, and empathy/understanding, as opposed to just speeding customers through the process for the sake of hitting key metrics. Yes, we want to hit those metrics, we want to be efficient, but never at the cost of the human aspect of the customer relationship.

The key to call
care is simply emphasizing the human aspect of customer support and embracing a customer-centered approach!

• Tone of voice  – When you’re speaking over the phone to the customer, tone of voice is all you really have to show care and understanding. Be sure to be upbeat, positive, understanding, an active listener, and to smile! Smiling while talking has been shown to translate into the tone of the speaker.
• Canned Responses – Using canned responses has gotten a bad rap for being bland, robotic, and simply boring. But designing canned responses that are warm, comprehensive, and human is a great way to find that happy medium between efficiency and care.
• Empathy/understanding is key – Customer support reps are customers elsewhere – they understand how issues go on both sides. Leveraging your personal experience as a customer is a great way to build empathy, cross that line to the customer’s point of view, and establish the kind of rapport that leads to a sincere, human exchange. [Read More: Empathy Exercises]
• Call care applies to all forms of communication with customers – Sometimes call center workers will be required to email or chat with their customers. In the event that you move from phone to text, it’s important to note that all of these points about empathy, care, and understanding still apply.
• Call care doesn’t just end when the call ends – Showing care for your customer means that the interaction doesn’t end when the phone call ends. Providing follow-up surveys, questionnaires, thank you emails and chat messages, and providing reminders for your customers are all great ways to show you care after the call has ended.

These points will ensure that customer service reps are having healthy exchanges with customers that prioritize both care and efficiency, rather than just efficiency and speed. Happy customers come from happy representatives, and slowing things down to establish a more human dynamic will do more for your company in the long run.

Why Call Care works

• Speed is important for customers, but most customers want resolution just as much as they want it done quickly. A study of 9,000 participants showed that the most important aspect to customer service was the human experience, which means that both speed and care need to be a part of the service experience.
• Customer support and customer satisfaction are inherently tied together. Almost 90% of customers in a Gladly study said that they were more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience.
• Slowing down the process a little bit could mean speeding up overall time spent per customer. Making sure language and information is correct on the first contact is key. Less mistakes, less misunderstandings, and less rushed interactions will lead to more concise, clear, and effective caller experiences.

How Gladly can help

While Gladly’s cutting edge technology does utilize the power of AI and automation to make things easier and more seamless for your customer heroes, it never takes the human aspect out of the equation. Our solutions provide agents with the tools to understand and connect with their customers in the most personal and human manner.

Utilize intelligent, perfectly curated canned responses that sound and feel human, and never waste time asking a customer why they’re calling with our comprehensive communication history log.

See how Gladly can work for you, and schedule a demo here.