Customer Care Checklist

Customer care is a combination of services and methods to maximize satisfaction of customers and keep a
business competitive. If you are a business owner or manager, you are interested in using effective customer
care techniques that can help your organization to satisfy its customers and treat them with the best care. The
given below customer care checklist includes customer care solutions that will help your business increase
sales and profitability.

The customer care action plan consists of the following categories:

 Understanding your customers
 Managing your customer care
 Retaining your customers

1. Understanding your customers.

 Accumulate information about your customers. Use the following sources of customer information:
o History of orders
o Records of customer contacts (phone calls, email addresses, etc.)
o Direct feedback from your customers
o Feedback from your customers about your existing product range
o Feedback from your customers about goods and services that your competitors sell to your
customers
o Feedback and referrals from non-competitive suppliers
 Manage information about your customers. The following customer care worksheets will be
helpful:
o Create and follow customer care professional plan to collect and use customer information.
o Set customer care policy and assign customer care manager who will control
implementation of the policy.
o Use customer management software to create a centralized database in which you will store
customer records. Such software is useful to design and apply customer care metrics.
o Employees of your customer care department will have access to the database to review
customer information and get new tasks and assignments.

2. Managing your customer care.

 Measure the level of your customer service considering the following customer care tips:
o Use customer management software to assess performance of your employees. Employee
performance significantly affects your customers' satisfaction levels, so you can use key
performance indicators (KPIs) to see how well your employees carry out their customer
care duties and meet your customers' expectations.
o Track the following customer care metrics:
 sales renewal rates
 the number of customer complaints
 average time of order fulfillment
 the number of contacts with a customer
 the time taken from order to delivery
 the volume of marketing material sent out and responses received by each employee
 Consider the influence of the following factors to improve customer care effectiveness:
o A telephone talk manner that your employees use to communicate with customers
o A behavior of salesmen (when a salesman personally talks to a customer)
o Existing dress code in your company
o How your employees use marketing material and symbols of your company to promote
products
o Availability of the full product range in sales outlets
o How well your employees carry out their duties and whether all their tasks are completed
according to customer care week schedules.
3. Retaining your customers.
 Strengthen existing and new relationships with customers considering the following customer care
means and loyalty schemes:
o fixed or percentage discounts
o special offers and volume discounts
o extra goods
o prizes
 Decide on providing your customers with rewards on the basis of:
o repeat purchase
o cumulative spending
o high-value orders, or large-quantity orders
o immediate payment
o long-term relationship
 Use customer feedback to conduct customer surveys to uncover the following important
information:
o Which your products or/and services are in great demand, and which are not
o Whether existing level of customer care is sufficient and satisfactory
o Your customers do not think about the difference “customer care vs customer service” –
they are just satisfied with your products or/and services.
o Whether existing loyalty schemes and customer care means are sufficient and satisfactory.
 Use customer surveys to earn the following advantages:
o Direct feedback (voice objections, written suggestions) from your customers
o Contact information about your customers
o The latest information about existing situation on the market
o Attempts to reactivate relationships with lapsed customers