Customer Care: Producing Tangible Benefits for Intangible Services

Think about your favorite product. What immediately springs to mind?

For clothing, maybe it’s the color, shape or way it fits.

For soap or lotion, maybe it’s the smell or the way it feels on your skin.

For food or drink, maybe it’s the taste, smell or texture.

For other things, maybe it’s attractive packaging, or a brand name that you’ve come to love and trust.

Now think about some of the important services you or your business may need. Insurance. Your phone or Internet provider. Health care. Digital music downloads. What immediately springs to mind now?

For many services, there is nothing to be actually seen, smelled, touched, heard or tasted. That makes it harder to come up with a clear image in your mind about that particular thing. If you’re in a company selling those services, this should make you stop and think. Without any tangible characteristics to appeal to the physical senses, it is much more difficult for your customers to differentiate between you and your competitors. So people turn instead to things like price, reliability and performance, and start balancing those factors against each other.

Price often does indeed come first. However, many people are willing to pay a little — or even a lot! — more to get higher quality and better service. While tangible products are often judged mainly on the basis of physical characteristics, services are judged mainly on, well, service!

That’s where customer care comes in. If someone is shelling out good money for a premium service, they want to know that the service delivers what they want, it is reliable, and if something does go wrong, there is a process to quickly and easily get things back on track.

If someone is paying a premium price, you’d better believe they have high expectations. Customer care agents who are knowledgeable, professional and focused on solving callers’ problems quickly reflect well on a company, making customers feel like they are getting good value for their money.

And when your customers feel valued, your customer care agents are giving you and your company good value too!