10 Signs of a Company That Really Cares About Customers

Did you know that there’s such a thing as International Clients’ Day? Although I’ve been in customer service for more than a decade, I first learned of it last week through a special offer email that I got in my inbox. Did you happen to hear about it too?

Whether or not, the fact is that this informal holiday has not been around for that long. Actually, it was proposed (and celebrated for the first time) by Lithuanian and Russian businessmen on March 19, 2010 as an opportunity to show gratitude to their customers. Since then, the occasion has been supported by many organizations and businesses in Western Europe, and it’s constantly expanding, with more companies joining the initiative year by year. Would you join the club too?

Isn’t It Nice?

I was surprised and amused to discover this interesting fact, and as I pondered over it, I began to realize that I definitely like the idea. Along with the discount offer on the special occasion, I got the acknowledgment of how much the company appreciates me as a loyal customer and that it cares about the relationship. For me, it’s certainly a good sign, important and valuable for further business relationship. Later on it served as an inspiration for my article, as I decided to extend on it a little bit.

In this post, I would like to speak about the signs that show a company cares about its customers in deed and not in name. I managed to come up with my own version of 10 things that are truly important for me as a customer. Take a read and let me know if you can find out a bit more!

What Do Companies That Really Care Have in Common?

1. Providing Easy-to-Access Customer Support Options

Today’s consumers expect that the process of contacting customer service is seamless and straightforward. Statistically, 83% of online customers require some degree of support to complete a purchase and 71% expect to be able to access help online within 5 minutes.

Top performing companies realize that their customer service channels should include many, if not all, of the options available today. Be it email, phone, Live Chat, social media channels, FAQs or self-service, companies that care about customers ensure their contact details and other relevant information can be easily found, all of the options are working properly, and agents are swiftly responding when their help is needed.

2. Being Obsessed with Customer Service Excellence

According to another research, 89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service, and 40% are sure they will cease doing business with a company if they happen to experience it. That sounds too disturbing to ignore.

These days we witness high product availability, increasing choice options, and more competitive prices. Business competition has evolved into the challenge of building and maintaining exceptional customer experiences. Companies that stand apart recognize the importance of excellent customer service for keeping customers feeling positive and happy about their experiences with the brand.

3. Constantly Striving to Know Customers Better

Today’s consumers are much more demanding if compared to what they used to be a while ago. 72% of them now expect a customer service representative to know their contact details, product information and service history as soon as they get in touch with support.

Knowing your customer is an essential key to business success. Without this knowledge, you just won’t have the information needed to make the right decisions about pricing, marketing and almost any other aspect of running your business. As market landscape is evolving, and social media and many other resources allow companies to connect with their customers on a personal level, true customer care implies going all out to know customer expectations and tend to their needs.

4. Living In Customers’ Shoes

Stepping into customers’ shoes is all about being able to see a situation from another’s perspective, understand how a customer feels at each particular stage of their journey and provide tailored solutions based on the situation. Closely related to the notion of empathy, this skill enables employees to communicate better with customers and address the emotional side of customer interactions.

There is a brilliant quote by Marsha Collier that reads: Customer service can’t always deliver solutions, but it can always deliver empathy. Companies that lead the pack recognize the importance of emotional connection and train their staff to listen to customers’ verbal and non-verbal communication to come up with tailored solutions right on the spot.

5. Willing to Go an Extra Mile

Majority of companies offer staff training to make sure everyone knows basic procedures to follow in standard situations. While having clear policies and procedures is important to make sure everyone is one the same page about applying them, it’s also critical to encourage and empower employees to take decisions on their own.

This might include breaking the rules and flexibly using employee creativity for rewarding customer experiences. Companies that empower their staff to go above and beyond for great customer satisfaction know its worth. They do not tie their employees with scripted scenarios and encourage staff to use their unique personality to serve their customers the best way possible.

6. Rewarding Customer Loyalty

Companies focused merely on attracting new customers could be in trouble. Regular customers admit they feel frustrated and left out as they observe businesses shouting out heavy discounts and juicy offers only to attract new customers. Buying growth through discounts and promotions while not caring much about longtime relationship and rewarding customer loyalty can do more harm, actually. According to a research carried out by The Grass Roots Group, about 49% of consumers even consider switching loyalties if a provider’s special offers are only available to new customers. Those businesses that survive and prosper, build their strategy based on fostering customer loyalty and do so with great reward.

7. Taking Care of Internal Customers

It goes without saying that customers are your most important assets, and deserve to have the best service and experience you are able to provide. However, what sometimes goes unnoticed is that the same applies to the people inside your organization, often referred to as its ‘internal’ customers. And that stands for a reason. In fact, company’s employees are an equally important resource. The way they approach customers clearly reflects the way they themselves are treated. Companies that treat their staff like gold, make them feel valuable and important, enjoy better employee performance and higher customer satisfaction rates.

8. Acknowledging the Importance of Customer Service Roles

We often hear that these days customer service is no longer just a department within an organization, but rather an attitude behind the entire company culture and strategy. Companies that realize how important customer service is for their business, adopt the “everyone does customer service” approach. They reinforce excellent performance by stressing the significance of jobs that involve interaction with customers.

9. Treating Leaving Customers Right

When a customer decides to stop doing business with you, whatever the reasons behind the decision, it’s better to leave the door open. There’s still a huge probability (20% to 40%) of successfully selling to those who left at some point if you manage to cope with it professionally and positively. Companies that truly care about their customers find ways to softly ask for feedback, express regret and stay in touch.

10. Keeping Customers Informed

Whether it’s good news or bad, your customers deserve timely, open and honest communication. It is critical to keep them informed about your company innovations and events to justify their trust and gain more credibility.

Truth be known, there are too many follow-up communications like auto-replies, post-sale surveys and special offers, largely left unopened and unread. Yet it’s absolutely imperative to proactively inform your customers about product recalls involving safety issues or product defects, as well as changes in pricing and other significant terms. Those businesses who really care do their best to reach out to their customers with relevant information and pass it via all the communication channels available – to make sure the important message got through.

•  by Julia Lewis

'It was a ghost town': Shoppers reveal why they've abandoned Sears and Kmart

A Kmart store in Richmond, Virginia. Business Insider/Hayley Peterson

Hayley Peterson

Sears and Kmart, once America's leading retailers, are bleeding cash and shutting down stores, as once loyal shoppers abandon them in droves. 

Sears' sales have dropped from $41 billion in 2000 to $15 billion in 2015.

Kmart, which merged with Sears in 2005, has seen its sales plunge from $37 billion to $10 billion in the same period. 

In interviews with more than a dozen long-time customers of the two stores, people repeatedly cited the same reasons for taking their business elsewhere: lack of customer service, poor-quality products, a lengthy checkout process, and messy, "depressing" stores.

Here's what they told us.

'I have to beg them' to take my money

Several people claimed that they were unable to find any cashiers when trying to check out. 

Robert Hoke, 69, of Baltimore, Maryland, said he has been a loyal Sears customer for life. 

"Sears was my go-to store for just about everything," he said. "Now I do my best to avoid going into the local store."

He said he's visited the store about six times in the last two years and only once made a purchase. 

"It is really bad when you have to go through a frustrating ordeal just to get them to take your money," he said. "It's like I have to beg them to take it!" 

Hoke said he went to Sears a couple months ago to buy a new lawn mower, but left and went to Home Depot when he couldn't find anyone to help him. 

A Sears store in Richmond, Virginia. Sears

"It's not a mystery as to why Sears is bleeding cash," he said. "Actually the 'cash' is walking out the door unspent, or even worse, it has just stopped entering altogether. No bogus rewards program or selling cheap stuff for cheap pricing will stop that from happening."

Hoke isn't the only customer who has complained about understaffing. 

"I have been in the store several times and there is no presence of sales associates, only a cashier," said Gary Herndon, who said he was a Sears employee of 40 years and a long-time shopper. "If someone needed help with a tractor or mower, they would mostly likely walk out and go to Lowe's because the store was so inadequately staffed." 

Steve Hall of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, recently tried to buy a weed eater at Sears and said, "What I thought would take 15 minutes max turned into a 30-plus-minute ordeal."

"I could not find an available cashier," he said. "When someone showed up after 10 minutes, he had problems scanning the UPC code. He also had problems entering my gift cards ... They didn't care whether or not I bought it. I will not go again."

A Kmart store entrance in Tinley Park, Illinois. Gary Hayslett

Rick Arnold of Salt Lake City Utah also complained about the lack of available cashiers, as well as "outdated technology" and empty shelves. 

"Sears was an icon. It was the place to go to buy just about anything," Arnold said. Now if you're "lucky enough to find what you are looking for and then want a speedy checkout process you are faced with long checkout lines."

Arnold thinks Sears won't last much longer.

"The end is near," he said. "The store I grew up with will be just a memory. So sad." 

'They are committing suicide'

Some customers claimed that the quality of Sears' products has declined over the years.

"When I walked into a Sears store 10 to 15 years ago I knew automatically that I would pay more for whatever I bought, but I was confident that it would be top quality," said Tilmon Strickland of Ada, Oklahoma. "But today, I don't buy anything from Sears. The appliances are very cheaply made and won't last." 

A Sears store in Richmond, Virginia. Sears

Charles Tucker of Exeter, New Hampshire, said he and his father were lifetime Sears customers. He said he still has some of his Sears Craftsman tools from the 1960s, but newer tools don't last.

When Sears sent him a new credit card in the mail recently, he said, "I just cut it up. Sears put a lot of small retailers out of business 100-plus years ago. Now they are committing suicide."

In response to the customer complaints described in this story, Sears spokesman Brian Hanover said the company is constantly getting feedback from customers and that most of it is positive.

"We constantly solicit feedback from our tens of millions of members and customers, as well as provide a variety of ways for them to provide it unsolicited and authentically back to us," he said. "The feedback you described is not reflective of the vast majority of comments and scores we receive and does not depict a typical member experience."

He said customer satisfaction scores have improved for both Sears and Kmart year-over-year.

"Regardless, we appreciate this additional feedback and know there are instances when we can do better," he said. "We will continue to enhance our operations and provide our members with superior service while they shop their way."

'Heaven help you if somebody needs a price check'

Employee incentives to get customers signed up for the company's Shop Your Way rewards program and credit cards have also been a headache for customers.

"They have so many questions that the checkout person needs to ask each and every customer to try and sway them into some sort of loyalty program," shopper Samuel J. Ely said. "They want my phone number, address, email, etc. Even the card swiper wants all kinds of things."

He compared checking out at Sears to a crossing point for the Berlin Wall.

"The annoyance really starts the moment you get in the long line and have to wait for the other customers in front of you to go through Checkpoint Charlie," he said. "Heaven help you if somebody needs a price check."

The loyalty program also makes things confusing when trying to get a price on something, Ely claimed. 

After purchasing a house, Ely said he went to Sears to buy all new appliances. He ended up leaving without buying anything, however, because he said it was too confusing to get a bottom-line price on the appliances with all the possible combinations of discounts and loyalty rewards that a salesperson was pitching to him. Ely left the Sears store and went to Lowe's instead, and said he spent $8,000 on his appliances there. 

"Ever since then, I avoid Kmart like the plague and I don't shop at Sears at all," he said. 

Herndon, the 40-year Sears employee, agreed that the Shop Your Way program is "a misery for both employees and customers."

"When a customer came to get checked out they were presented with: Sign up for Shop Your Way rewards, get their email address, sell a maintenance agreement ... or a repair agreement on smaller items, try to get them to open a charge account, ask them to call in a customer-service survey — and by the time all of this was presented, many customers were angry and just wanted to pay for their purchase and get out."

'It was a ghost town'

Customers also complained that the stores are in total disarray. 

"The Tinley Park, Illinois, Kmart is sad and depressing," said Gary Hayslett, of Tinley Park, Illinois.

During a recent trip, he said he saw two cashiers in the store and only one other shopper. He said Kmart stores have been using sheets and shower curtains for years to hide empty shelves and closed departments, and that many of the registers are broken and covered with cardboard.

A Kmart store in Hillsboro, Ohio. Mark Schmidt

A Kmart store in Tinley Park, Illinois. Gary Hayslett

He also noted that the Tinley Park store appears to be renting out part of its parking lot to a local car dealer for car storage. 

"Kmart made a huge impression on me as a child. At one point I had hoped to work there," Hayslett said. "I watched as Kmart overtook Sears as the nation’s No. 1 retailer in sales. And I’ve watched with dismay as Kmart has fallen from grace to irrelevancy."

Shopper Jeff Magnet of Newton, Massachusetts, said he visited the Kmart store in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a couple weeks ago and found a similarly depressing scene.

"It was like a haunted house," he said. "A real mess."

Another customer, Paul Martin, compared his local Sears — where he said he and his wife worked in the 1990s — to a "ghost town." 

"Last time I was in the store where we once proudly worked, it was a ghost town," Martin said. "Very sad to see a once great retail giant at its end."

Customer Loyalty Boomerang Effect

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Customer loyalty is important to business success. Profitability of customer retention is pretty much common knowledge. So companies do a lot to encourage customer behavior that favors their brand, to increase:

• Purchase frequency and volume
• Involvement and structural ties
• Recommendations of the brand.

Yet, like most things in life, loyalty is a two-way street. Who are you loyal to? "Loyalty by its very nature demands that we commit ourselves to a person, group, or cause," explain Timothy Keiningham and Lerzan Aksoy in their book Why Loyalty Matters. "We suppress our short-term self-interests to maintain our bond. In its most noble form, we serve a cause greater than ourselves, designed to unite with another."

What and who do you consider to be greater than yourself? The answer to this question reveals the shallowness or depth of loyalty in your environment.

Customer Loyalty
Are you personally loyal to your customers? Is your whole department loyal to customers — both internal and external, with an emphasis on the external ones who ultimately make your payroll possible?1 If not, we may be subconsciously expecting customers to "serve a cause greater” than themselves – us! If we really think about it, the company exists because of customers, not the other way around, so this line of thinking makes the customer “a cause greater than ourselves".

Reciprocal customer loyalty is not limited to customer-facing employees. A company is a team. Everyone's attitude, decisions, and behaviors have a ripple effect on customers.

How do you (individually and collectively) demonstrate your loyalty to customers? What happens when you're stuck between a rock and a hard spot, so to speak? Do you "suppress short-term self-interests" to maintain your bond with customers?

Companies' reports to stockholders and industry analysts frequently tout satisfaction and net promoter rankings. In some cases, stellar customer-centric performance is indeed a hallmark for the business. In other cases, the benchmark may be the prevailing mentality among competitors, which may not at all reflect what customers actually perceive as being focused on their best interests. It's worthwhile to conduct occasional reality checks!

Personal Loyalty
"Our loyalties demonstrate what we value, what we believe, and what we want our world to be", explain Keiningham & Aksoy. "Loyalty requires deliberate effort, constant practice, and conscious employment. … Being loyal is the manifestation of the choices we make in life. … And for the world at large, it is the small yet numerous acts of loyalty or disloyalty that help determine the kind of communities in which we live."

Laws of congruence imply that it may not be possible for reciprocal loyalty on a professional level without actively practicing loyalty on a personal level. Consider loyalty among your friends, family, community, faith, and fellow citizens. In this age of instant gratification, it's easy to become self-centered and discount the value of relationships and time-proven principles. It's worthwhile to conduct occasional reality checks with all your relationships, and strive to continually improve relationship skills. You may enjoy richer ties in all facets of life, with spill-over benefits of customer retention in your business.

Boomerang Effect
Huge budgets and efforts are dedicated to enticing customers to be loyal to businesses. And according to the two-way street theorem, reciprocal loyalty by companies to their customers is key to sustainable return on investment.

¹Note: a careful analysis of this is essential, as it's not just about who deposits money in accounts, but rather, those who are at the end of the line as recipients in the chain of your services and products — even for non-profit and government entities.

²The book includes a code for complimentary access to the LoyaltyAdvisor online assessment, which provides an evaluation of how you view your loyalties, and how your friends and family view them, to help improve your bonds with others.