The Retention Factor with Rosanne D'Ausilio, Ph.D.C.A.R.E. for Your Customers
- Poor Customer Service
- What is Communication?
- The 3 R’s vs C.A.R.E.
Does that sound familiar? If I asked you to raise your hand if you never had a bad customer service experience, would any one of you have your hand up? I doubt it. I’d even bet money on it. All of us have had an incident where we either were enraged, frustrated, incredulous, or downright amazed at the inefficiency, inadequacy, ineptness, etc. of whomever we were interacting with.
Truth be told, customer service is not good regardless of channel, and services tops the list in terms of customer dissatisfaction. In today’s world, your competition is merely a click away and customers are more fickle than ever before.
It’s reported that it takes 12 positive customer service experiences to make up for one negative experience (“Understanding Customers” by Roby Newell-Legner). Yet 91% of unhappy customers will not willingly do business with your organization again (Lee Resources Inc).
When I was in school (I’m probably giving my age away here), we were taught the 3 R’s, Reading, Writing, and Rithmatic, and were also told that was all we needed to survive in the world.
That’s no longer true or appropriate. Today’s world needs more C.A.R.E. in my opinion. What is C.A.R.E.?
C stands for Communication. According to the American Management Association (AMA)’s Critical Skills Survey over 2000 managers responded that more than half (51.4%) of their employees were only average in effective communications skills.
What is communication? Communication means that a message was sent, it was received, and it was understood. Words, after all are only 7% of communication, tone of voice is 38% and physiology is 55%. In other words, how we say what we say is significantly more important than what we say.
A stands for Acknowledgment. All we want is to be heard, and to be treated with dignity and respect. So before you can help me, I need to know that you heard what I said. This could be a simple, “If I understand what you are asking, you want…” or “Wow, you’re really upset. Thanks so much for calling. I’m going to do my best to assist you.” Or simply paraphrase what you heard.
You can either acknowledge the feelings behind what is being presented, or the issue itself for a customer to feel heard.
R stands for Responsiveness. Simply this means to focus on and address the issue presented, not to bring in any ancillary matters. A synonym for Responsiveness is Sensitivity—be sensitive to what is being said and how it is being presented.
E stands for Empathize. I must admit this is my favorite, and is what separates us ‘humans’ from the rest of the species. To empathize is to put yourself in another person’s shoes, not wear the shoes, not make the other person right and you or your company wrong, but to see if from the customer’s point of view. They may even be wrong, but it’s their perception that needs to be honored.
Bottom line: C.A.R.E. for your customers—internal and external, current or potential, face to face or on the phone or in chat, etc.
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