Customer Awareness and Customer Care

A recent post by Bernadette Jiwa made me think about the difference between Customer Support, Customer Satisfaction and customer awareness/care.

The post articulates the importance and difference between both categories, which I completely agree and wanted to bring in my perspectives on the same.

Both customer satisfaction and customer support are targeted towards customers who are vocal about what they think and feel about the product or the company. A small subset of this are customer who are vocal because they care and want the business or the product to get better. All others in this set of customers are people who are not happy or are vocal only to resolve an issue and dont particularly care about the product or the business.

It is critical for a business to know who among these vocal customers are being vocal because they care. The business needs to listen to them, build a relationship with these customers.

However, it is even more critical for a business to understand what the other set of customers who are not being vocal think and feel about the product or the business. Most often, if i am happy about a product or a business, I just continue to buy or use the product and not bother about filling out a customer satisfaction survey or reach out to the support team. If i am not happy, i just dont bother buying or using the product again and dont bother giving a feedback.

One way that businesses can continue to grow their fans and customer base is by figuring out a way to care for customers who are not vocal about the product or business but do care about it by giving repeat businesses.

The difference between customer satisfaction and customer care is that one is post interaction and the other is how you interact. You cant change the customer satisfaction post facto but you can influence the customer satisfaction by caring for the customer. In order to do so, you need to be aware of the customers needs and wants and not just that of the vocal customers but also the non-vocal customers.

So, the question that i want to ask is the following:

Are we aware of our customers and do we really care about them and their needs? If yes, how can we continue to improve and if not, what can we do to become aware and care for them.