By Dhruv Mehta, Digital Marketing Professional, Acquire

To win business in your local market today, your dealership must cultivate customer care as a brand differentiator.

According to Gartner, customer experience is usually approached by brands in two ways:

• The first approach is an ad hoc method of fixing customer issues. While a very effective and successful approach, it is about reacting to problems and coping with the ramifications of substandard service after acknowledging them in retrospection.
• The second method uses a proactive approach where the goal is to reduce customer efforts at every touchpoint by making customer experience improvements for predictable customer issues. It is about proactively identifying customer problems and keeping them from happening in the first place.

While the ad hoc method is traditionally tried-and-tested and is known to improve customer experience, today’s customers want companies to be organizations when it comes to gaining their business, with 62% of customers saying they expect companies to anticipate their needs.

In such cases, reactive customer experience just won’t cut it anymore. If brands want to reap the rich dividends of customer loyalty, retention, and sales, customer experience has to be replaced with the second method, also known as customer care.

What Is Customer Care, and Why Is It Important?

Keeping up with similar-sounding phrases that mean entirely different things may seem difficult. That’s why predicting customer intent is such a topical matter today, with a fair share of AI musings thrown into the mix.

Often thoughtlessly lumped together with customer relations or customer service, customer care is an entirely different function, which means how well you care for your customers when they engage with your brand. This constitutes the total of all experiences at every touchpoint with the organization, its product, and its resources before, during, and after a sale has been made.

In this light, customer care can be seen as an aspect of customer service that builds an emotional connection between the customer and the organization. It furthers brand continuity by treating every customer as an independent entity to minimize customer issues and efforts at every touchpoint instead of tackling the collective issues of the entire customer base.

The difficulty in understanding customer care lies in the fact that it isn’t quantifiable and is thus easier to demonstrate with the help of live examples. Here, we will take a look at memorable customer care instances and the technologies that can help facilitate it.

Customer Care Examples

It can be refreshing for both customers and brands to see customer care done right. Here are a few customer care case studies that will show you how and why it is tipped to be the crown prince of customer engagement.

1. Dilawri. An example of turning crisis into opportunity, Dilawri, Canada’s largest car dealership group, showed how brands can not only turn things around in the prevailing situation but also make it better.

In the weeks following the COVID-19 outbreak, Dilawri sought to leverage AI to improve its overall customer experience. Since car sales heavily rely on face-to-face interactions, Dilawri had to find a way to keep the customer experience buoyant. With social distancing keeping customers away, the dealer group recreated the live experience digitally.

To create a stand-out interactive experience, they knew they had to do more than just provide a simple virtual overview of their vehicles, so they employed a chatbot to engage users across various touchpoints to boost customer interest, experience, and satisfaction.

With the help of the chatbot, proactively engaging with consumers across various sales funnel stages, Dilawri was able to isolate individual customer needs effectively. From there, they switched to using co-browsing to explain car options to prospective customers and conducting virtual vehicle walkarounds with the help of video chat. Dilawri rounded off the process by using the chatbot to keep customers engaged after hours and catch discrepancies in the service while proactively offering to iron them out.

2. Spotify. Dilawri already proved what personalizing the service experience can do. When you treat customers independently, instead of looking at them through a scope, they feel more valued. It fosters the emotional connection that a consumer has with your brand and leads to more engagement with every interaction. This is because customers feel good about your brand when you are not rushing them as just another service case to close soon. Taking time to come up with a thoughtful and caring response is the best and simplest way to show customer care.

This is exactly what Spotify did when it asked its social media team to respond to consumer queries, issues, and complaints with personalized and creative solutions. For example, when a new customer tweeted that they liked the app even though they didn’t know how to use it, Spotify was quick to the mark and replied with curating a personalized playlist that inducted and introduced the new user to the app.

While Spotify could have simply replied to the tweet with a link to their FAQs page, they showed how treating a user independently can lead to a satisfied customer. With just one tweet, they not only exemplified customer care but also turned the customer into a brand advocate.

3. Amtrak. One of the largest passenger railroad service providers in the U.S., Amtrak, is also a visionary in providing customer care. They recognized how they could not only ease their staffing woes but also turn customer service on its head with the help of chatbots.

Already one of the biggest railroad services, Amtrak had a huge volume of visitors, at times aggregating almost 375,000 each day. With this increase came the problem of efficiently managing customer interactions.

Amtrak then used a sophisticated AI chat platform to create ‘Ask Julie,’ a chatbot that helped provide stellar customer service by aiding visitors in finding answers without having to talk to a live representative. However, it didn’t stop there. Julie took customer service several notches when it helped travelers book rail travel in advance and assisted them in filling in forms for them. The results were evident and spoke volumes about Amtrak’s customer care as Julie saw its usage grew by 50%, helping Amtrak save $1 million in customer service costs and realize an estimated 800% ROI.

The Long Run: Customer Care in Addition to Customer Experience

While a difficult term to define, you can view customer care simply as an approach to customer service that just doesn’t stop when the sale is made. Contrary to the customer experience that deals with the customer lifecycle, customer care goes beyond it to provide holistic customer support whenever the customer might need it.

While it is tough to make every customer satisfied during the sale, you can always account for and acknowledge your shortcomings to find a proactive way to deal with it. That is the essence of customer care, and all it takes is to look out for them even after a sale is made.