What is Customer Care?

What is Customer Care?

Wikipedia defines “customer care” as the provision of service to customers before, during and after a purchase.

In broader terms it refers to systems in the business place that will maximise your customers’ satisfaction with your business. Customer care is vital to any business, because if your customers are satisfied and happy so will profits and sales figures.

Customer care is of more direct importance in some positions. For example employees such as the receptionist, sales people, and other employees interacting with customers directly on a daily basis; customer care is core to their job description and should also be when recruiting for such staff members.

However, don’t neglect the importance of customer care on an indirect level throughout any business. On any level, customer care is present. For example, if you are in the supply chain industry; the Warehouse, Dispatch, Transport and Call Center Divisions are all part of the Customer Care function. These departments are ultimately responsible for delivering the right product, at the right place, at the right time and in the right quantities, resulting in either a satisfied or unsatisfied customer.

There are several factors that contribute to customer satisfaction for both the consumer and other businesses. But some factors are considered essential to customer care:

Ø The compatibility of your product or service to your customers’ needs.

Ø The reliability and efficiency in fulfilling orders.

Ø The level and quality of your after-sales service.

Ø The value for money in your product or service.

Ø The professionalism, efficiency and friendliness of your employees.

Ø How well you keep your customers informed.

Other essential elements that form of the customer care umbrella are:

Ø Understanding your customers.

Ø The manner and efficiency of dealing with customer complaints.

Ø The level of customer feedback.

Ø The implementation of customer loyalty schemes.

There are several training programmes available to improve your business’ level of customer care. Trevor Ketler specialises in business/corporate training, motivational talks and corporate seminars. To find out more on how you can improve your level of customer care, contact us.

Even though we live in a business world and society that is driven by online technologies such as e-mail, a phone call can be just as powerful tool. Sadly, due to some poorly run telemarketing services, this marketing tool has received a bad knock due to some “dinnertime phone calls”. However, if done under the right conditions, business-to-business (B2B) cold calling still generates a solid profit.

By outsourcing lead follow-ups to a telemarketing call centre you could benefit:

§ In-house calling can get quite expensive. Telemarketing requires a lot of phone calls and telephones, hiring call center staff, training teams, computers, and dialers amongst many other things. Opposed to an outside telemarketing service leveraging existing resources.

§ A telemarketing service: an efficient marketing tool to quietly test new offerings. Call centers can randomise scripts to inexpensively evaluate a market.

§ A well-trained agent within a telemarketing service can pre-qualify leads.

Instead of hiring additional staff a call center agent can pre-screen a sales lead and give a “warm transfer” to a highly trained company representative.

Although a lot of companies calculate the per-call cost before adding a telemarketing service to their marketing strategy. There are several other factors to consider when hiring a successful telemarketing service.

Service Compliant. An in-house call center agent should comply with federal, state and local trade regulations. An in-house audit team will assist in ensuring that agents act ethically and effectively.
Conversion rates. Modern telemarketing services enables one to rate top-level closing calls, monitor minute data to determining the average length of a successful phone call.
Do not call compliance. Potential telemarketing services should provide a detailed list of its processes scrubbing a lead against the National Do Not Call Registry and customer privacy lists.
Clarity of audio communication. Some of the best telemarketing services only hire agents that speak clear, and present an enthusiastic attitude over the telephone. A person with a heavy accent or slow manner of speaking could call a potential sales call within a few seconds.
Low abandonment rates. When a person answers the phone before an agent is ready for the phone call it will lead to that person abandoning the phone call entirely. Low abandonment rates lead to customer satisfaction and increased rate of a successful sales call.

Here is how you can find the right telemarketing service for your company:

Review the service’s metrics. A successful telemarketing service should be able to indicate its success rate of similar campaigns.
Test some role-play sessions. The account executives of a successful telemarketing service can make agents available for sample calls during real-time or recorded.
Support lines. A successful telemarketing service staff their feedback lines with top agents.

Need a professional and successful telemarketing service. Contact us now!

Heritage Day, one of South Africa’s newly created public holidays signifies the recognition of South African culture that are both tangible and difficult to pin down such as creative expression, historical inheritance, language, the type of food we eat as well as the land in which we live, according to the government of South Africa. Essentially it is about celebrating the unique land in which we live in, South Africa.

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Customer Care