Customer care is a crucial element of business success. Every contact your customers have with your business is an opportunity for you to improve your reputation with them and increase the likelihood of further sales.
From your telephone manner to the efficiency of your order-fulfilment systems, almost every aspect of your business affects the way your customers view your business. But there are also specific programmes you can put in place to increase your levels of customer care.
This guide outlines what customer care involves. It explains how you can use customer contact, feedback and loyalty schemes to retain existing customers, increase your sales to them and even win new customers. It also covers how to prepare for receiving a customer complaint.

Customer care involves putting systems in place to maximise your customers' satisfaction with your business. It should be a prime consideration for every business - your sales and profitability depends on keeping your customers happy.
Customer care is more directly important in some roles than others. For receptionists, sales staff and other employees in customer-facing roles, customer care should be a core element of their job description and a core criterion when you’re recruiting.
But don't neglect the importance of customer care in other areas of your business. For instance, your warehousing and dispatch departments may have minimal contact with your customers - but their performance when fulfilling orders has a major impact on customers' satisfaction with your business.
A huge range of factors can contribute to customer satisfaction, but your customers - both consumers and other businesses - are likely to take the following into account:

• How well your product or service matches customer needs.
• The value for money you offer.
• Your efficiency and reliability in fulfilling orders.
• The professionalism, friendliness and expertise of your employees.
• How well you keep your customers informed.
• The after-sales service you provide.

For customer-facing employees such as receptionists and salespeople, customer care is a core part of the job. Customer service levels should be a key criterion when recruiting to these roles.
Training courses may also be useful for ensuring the highest possible levels of customer care.

In business-to-business trading, providing a high level of customer care often requires you to find out what your customers want and to identify your most valuable customers or best potential customers so you can target your highest levels of customer care towards them. Another approach - particularly in the consumer market - is the obligation to treat all consumers to the highest standard.

Information about your customers and what they want is available from many sources, including:

• their order history
• records of their contacts with your business - phone calls, meetings and so on
• direct feedback - if you ask them, customers will usually tell you what they want
• changes in individual customers' order patterns
• changes in the overall success of specific products or services
• feedback about your existing range - it's a pity it doesn't do …
• enquiries about possible new products or services
• feedback from your customers about things they buy from other businesses
• changes in the goods and services your competitors are selling
• feedback and referrals from other, non-competitive suppliers

It's important that you draw up a plan about how customer information is to be gathered and used in your business. Establish a customer-care policy. Assign a senior manager as the policy's champion but make sure that all your staff are involved - often the lower down the scale you go, the more contact with customers there may be.
You can manage your customer records using a database system or with customer relationship management (CRM) software.

Where possible, put systems in place to assess your performance in business areas which significantly affect your customers' satisfaction levels. Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) which reflect how well you're responding to your customers' expectations.
For instance, you might track:

• sales renewal rates
• the number of queries or complaints about your products or services
• the number of complaints about your employees
• the number of damaged or faulty goods returned
• average order-fulfilment times
• the number of contacts with a customer each month
• the volume of marketing material sent out and responses generated

Your customers and employees will be useful sources of information about the KPIs which best reflect key customer service areas in your business. Make sure the things you measure are driven not by how your business currently runs, but by how your customers would like to see it run.
There are important areas of customer service which are more difficult to measure. Many of these are human factors such as a receptionist's telephone manner or a salesperson's conduct while visiting clients. In these areas it's crucial that you get feedback from your customers about their perceptions of your customer service.
Customer surveys, feedback programmes and occasional phone calls to key customers can be useful ways of gauging how customer service levels in your business are perceived.

Customer feedback and contact programmes are two ways of increasing communication with your customers. They can represent great opportunities to listen to your customers and to let them know more about what you can offer.
Customer feedback provides you with more or less detailed information about how your business is perceived. It's a chance for customers to voice objections, suggest changes or endorse your existing processes, and for you to listen to what they say and act upon it. Feedback is most often gathered using questionnaires, in person, over the telephone or by post.
The purpose of customer contact programmes is to help you deliver tailored information to your customers. One example is news of a special offer that is relevant to a past purchase - another is a reminder sent at the time of year when a customer traditionally places an order. Contact programmes are particularly useful for reactivating relationships with lapsed customers.
Do your best to make sure that your customers feel the extra contact is relevant and beneficial to them - bombarding customers with unwanted calls or marketing material can be counter-productive. Newsletters and email bulletins allow you to keep in touch with useful information.

While good overall service is the best way of generating customer loyalty, sometimes new relationships can be strengthened, or old ones refreshed, using customer loyalty schemes.
These are sales programmes that use fixed or percentage discounts, extra goods or prizes to reward customers for behaviour that benefits your business. They can also be used to persuade customers to give you another try if you feel you have successfully tackled past problems in your customer-service regime.
You can decide to offer rewards on the basis of:

• repeat custom
• cumulative spend
• orders for large quantities or with a high value
• prompt payment
• length of relationship

For example, a car wash might offer free cleaning every tenth visit or a free product if a customer opts for the deluxe service. A mail-order company might seek to revive the interest of lapsed customers by offering a voucher redeemable against purchases - response rates with such vouchers can be improved by setting an expiry date.
You can also provide key customers with loyalty cards that entitle them to a discount on all their purchases.
Employees who deal with customers' orders should be fully aware of current offers and keep customers informed. Sometimes brochures and other marketing materials are the best way of getting word out about a new customer incentive.
Don't forget though, that your customers' view of the overall service you provide will influence their loyalty much more than a short-term reward will.

Your existing customers are among the most important assets of your business - they have already chosen you instead of your competitors. Keeping their custom costs far less than attracting new business, so it's worth taking steps to make sure that they're satisfied with the service they receive.
Existing customer relationships are opportunities to increase sales because your customers will already have a degree of trust in your recommendations.
Cross-selling and up-selling are ways of increasing either the range or the value of what you sell by pointing out new purchase possibilities to these customers.
To retain your customers' trust, however, never try to sell them something that clearly doesn't meet their needs. Remember, your aim is to build a solid long-term relationship with your customers rather than to make quick one-off profits.
Satisfied customers will contribute to your business for years, through their purchases and through recommendations and referrals of your business.

Every business has to deal with situations in which things go wrong from a customer's point of view.
However you respond if this happens, don't be dismissive of your customer's problem - even if you're convinced you're not at fault. Although it might seem contradictory, a customer with a complaint represents a genuine opportunity for your business:

• If you handle the complaint successfully, your customer is likely to prove more loyal than if nothing had gone wrong.
• People willing to complain are rare - your complaining customer may be alerting you to a problem experienced by many others who silently took their custom elsewhere.
• Complaints should be handled courteously, sympathetically and - above all - swiftly.

Make sure that your business has an established procedure for dealing with customer complaints and that it is known to all your employees. At the very least it should involve:

• listening sympathetically to establish the details of the complaint
• recording the details together with relevant material, such as a sales receipt or damaged goods
• offering rectification - whether by repair, replacement or refund
• appropriate follow-up action, such as a letter of apology or a phone call to make sure that the problem has been made good

If you're proud of the way you rectify problems - by offering no-questions refunds, for example - make sure your customers know about it. Your method of dealing with customer problems is one more way to stay ahead of your competitors.

Joe Ibrahim is director of the painting and decorating division of Axis Europe plc, a London-based construction company. Joe wanted to find a way of measuring how effectively the business was performing - and devising a customer-feedback programme was one of a number of key performance indicators (KPIs) that the firm uses to measure its efficiency.

What I did Started simply
We were looking for a proven way to measure our business performance and customer satisfaction seemed a good, basic place to start. So we devised a questionnaire for clients and we kept it tightly focused on the areas we wanted to measure.
One question, for example, was, "Did the painters tidy up to your satisfaction?" The possible answers we offered clients were simple - either "yes" or "no" or a satisfaction-rating which ranged from one to ten and used faces going from scowls to smiles.

Home in on specific issues
Any strong negative feedback is now immediately investigated, but otherwise we look at all the feedback from the jobs we've done half-yearly, present the findings on piecharts and search for any trends.
The results haven't always been what we've expected. For example, at first a lot of our clients - around 30 per cent - were saying that the contractors were not tidying up enough after themselves. That figure should be almost zero so we really attacked that problem.
We had a brainstorming session with contract managers and supervisors and discovered that often poor feedback is often driven by a perception of a problem rather than a real one. What we do now is not only be tidy but also highlight the perception of ourselves as tidy by using throwaway protective materials with our logo on. It's a way of exaggerating what we're doing.
Another common complaint discovered was about scaffolders leaving loose clips around. The scaffolders said they didn't do this but now for every clip found £5 is donated to charity.

Share the finding
I report back all the findings from my division to other divisional directors. It's important to help them introduce customer-feedback schemes and it also helps me again measure what we're achieving and therefore improve things further. The whole system works like a big circle, really.
We also have monthly meetings with all the staff where we talk about customer satisfaction, performance, KPIs and where the company is going.

What I'd do differently Not expect 100 per cent of clients to understand the importance of feedback
We're learning as we go along. For the first three months we sent questionnaires out to clients by post with an SAE and the return levels were about 30 per cent. We then tried hand-delivering them for the next three months and we found we had 30 per cent returns again so we've gone back to the post. Hand-delivering takes a lot of time and 30 per cent is not a bad result.