7 Ways to Prove Customer Care Sets Your Business Apart

To say customer care sets your business apart is cliché if you can’t say why. After all, don’t your competitors say the same thing? Here are seven ways to make sure customer service truly differentiates your business.

Customer care can differentiate your business, but that means it has to be different than the service customers receive anywhere else.

When asked what sets their business apart, many business owners say, “customer service” before they’ve even fully considered the question. The problem with this claim is that everyone makes it; if there’s no true differentiation from one business to another, it’s not true. Here are seven new ways to think about customer care and its true impact on the success of your organization.

7 Ways to Prove Customer Care Sets Your Business Apart

1. “Customer success is in, customer satisfaction is out.” (Adam Segal)

Wanting customers to be satisfied with your business and wanting your customers to receive the results they desire is not always the same thing. At the point of sale, many cashiers ask “Did you find what you were looking for?” Customers might find what they are looking for at your business, but may not get the result they want.

How can you follow up with your customers to find out whether they truly achieved success as a result of doing business with you?

2. “What if how you sold was as important as what you sold.” (John Jantsch)

Over on the pages of Duct Tape Marketing, John Jantsch asks a critical question: What if how you sold was as important as what you sold. Given a competitive marketplace, where your customers can purchase the same or equivalent products or services from competitors, it is the buying experience that will tip the scale.

How can you infuse more of the values, creativity and brand identity of your organization into the buying experience, from the touch points where the customer experience begins to where it ends (or is renewed)?

3. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” (Henry David Thoreau)

If asked to describe your organization’s brand, it’s likely that the words you use will differ from those that your customers – or even your employees – would use if asked the same question. Like it or not, the customer perception outranks yours when it comes to the reality of what your brand is.

When it comes down to it, your brand is the sum total of any given individual’s experiences with (or exposure to) your business, or any representative of your business. What can you do to move people’s perceptions toward the ideals of what you most want your brand to represent?

4. Why you might not truly love your customers.

Many business owners claim to love their customers or that their customers are their top priority. Uncontested marketing guru Seth Godin noted that there are really two ways to think about it:

“We love our customers because they pay us money. (Inherent here is customers = money = love.)”
“We love our customers, and sometimes there’s a transaction.”

“In the first case, customers are the means to an end, profit. In the second, the organization exists to serve customers, and profit is both an enabler and a possible side effect.”

This goes to the heart of your vision of your organization – the greater good that you want to be true, someday, because your business has fulfilled its mission.

How can you measure organizational success in terms of the benefits your customers experience (as a result of doing business with you) vs. sales you make to them?

5. Are you minding the gaps?

Sometimes it’s not the buying process or point of sale that diminishes the customer experience; but rather, how much time or how many steps it takes to get there. In an article titled “5 Tips for Decreasing Customer Wait Time,” Salesforce.com notes that “Whether we’re staring at our watches in a checkout line or tapping our fingers on hold, the time we spend waiting for service diminishes our customer experience.”

How can you make it easier, faster or more convenient for customers to buy from you?

6. “How you make others feel about themselves says a lot about you.” (Unknown)

Doing business with you should make people feel better about themselves. Some of these feelings might be expressed in benefits such as:

Receiving a good deal or a good value
Believing their opinion matters to you
Believing they contribute feedback that is truly valuable to you
A desire to tell friends and family about your business
Being proud to feel personally connected to the brand of your business, or to you

Customer satisfaction rarely leads to emotional connection. Customers expect to leave a business satisfied. To establish the kind of connection that makes people feel better about themselves – as a result of doing business with you – requires more. How can you facilitate emotional connection with customers in making them feel more positive about their choice to do business with you as a result of the customer care they receive at your business?

7. Money can’t buy you love.

Business owners often believe that organizational shortcomings are a result of a lack of money – money needed to attract and retain better staff, money needed to digitize and bedazzle the brand identity, money needed to woo and win big clients, and so on.

But ultimately, whether speaking of customers or employees, money won’t buy you love. To nurture relationships with clients and employees, there must exist a win-win mindset. In The secret to my success, by Zappos, we read, “The happiness we notice is a by-product of a corporate culture that engages people around the success of the enterprise and their own development at the same time.”

How can you help people understand how their success and your organization’s success are (or can become) one and the same? To create engagement, people feel personally invested in your brand and its success. For you to accomplish this, you must have a true understanding of what their collective and individual goals are, and make a sincere investment toward helping them achieve their goals.

It’s cliché to say that customer care sets your business apart—especially if you can’t pin-point an aspect of the customer experience that is truly unique and meaningful to your customers.