Pro-active customer care

Anticipating and meeting customer needs at critical points of the customer life-cycle. This includes periodic follow-up, customer rewards, other perks, providing VIP and other membership privileges, and in some cases, personalized service (e.g. sending out birthday/anniversary cards).

Follow-up

The process or act of returning a customer’s call on an issue or executing a task to address a customer’s concern. It is usually a feedback-soliciting process to determine the effectiveness of customer service and delivery.

Feedback

The process of giving and receiving input in the form of comments, opinions, observations, and analysis to either validate or invalidate the customer service system.

Customer touch-points

Specific actions that are carried out at measurable intervals during a customer life-cycle. It’s a tool to ensure that the customer feels cared about, and that the company values his or her business.

Customer loyalty

Condition where a customer, because of favorable experiences with a product, service, or company, voluntarily and gladly chooses to remain a loyal consumer of that product, service, or company. He or she is unwilling to switch brands in spite of marketing and advertising campaigns by competitors.

Value proposition

The characteristic of enhancing the desirability of a product, service, or brand identity by adding further intrinsic value to the existing package. It is usually made in the form of an offer to the customer which incorporates a call to action to which the customer responds favorably to.

Tracking & learning

Process of measuring the entire customer-care life-cycle and system including all its’critical waypoints, to modify, improve, or remove any touch points necessary to improve the process even further. The lessons learned from this assessment are used to validate or invalidate components of the system. The ones which are useful are kept, the ones which aren’t are discarded or modified.

Best practices / World-class practices

These are practices or ways of meeting or exceeding customers’ expectations, which have evolved to such a high standard that no immediate changes need to be made to the process or system. They are the yardstick or
+ role model which other systems, companies, etc. try to match.