Customer Care Official - As a career option

“The customer is always right.”

Introduction

We are the age of a rampant consumerism where everything is just a click away. Living in a time where retailers and shopkeepers are sidelined by the cash on delivery messiahs, every one of us is a customer to some of the other technically wired company/corporation.

As buying options increase and online and offline success demand the bubble’s reputation, companies and corporations work hard to ensure that this arrangement runs smoothly.

Hence, customer care executives perform the crucial job of catering to a company’s customers to ensure that their association with the company has been fruitful.

Customer care executives are professionals who are experts in client and customer management. As we know, the good clientele is a prerequisite for any business to expand and grow. Hence, the work of customer care is to ensure that there is a growing and prosperous clientele in a company.

A natural problem, particularly prevalent in large companies, is that when you sell ten thousand units of a certain product, there is bound to be a few defects that slipped through the quality control unit’s fingers.

Customer care executive offers a node of interaction between customers and the company to ensure that mishaps can be alleviated as soon as possible.

What are the job responsibilities of Customer Care officials?

Customer care has become a widely popular workforce in all private sectors and even some government departments. For those of us who are not very well-versed with their working, here’s an analogy: Suppose you have a business that caters to clients.

So everything that you do in your business to ensure that the client comes back to avail your service again is customer care. This may include or touch along the lines of a few other business related branches.

Customer care officials work for better relations between the business and the customer. This could be done through many ways, some of them being:

• Premier client servicing

• Minimal response time

• Added benefits

• Publicity

As the client is of primary importance for every business it is essential to note that the client stays satisfied and connected with the business, thus generating long-term income to the company.

But ensuring this requires that the client is attended properly and is aided by solutions in case of problems related to the product or with the company in general. So, Customer care is that separate branch of a business that is assigned to perform this very function.

They are the same people you go to when your cell phone service provider acts funny. They are also the same people you call up when the Wi-fi won’t work right. Basically, they are the faces and voices of the company that you contact in case of any problems.

Customer care has several other sub-branches that are connected directly with it but are given special place due to their value.

For example, customer experience, customer satisfaction, customer interface and customer ratings are all incorporated as a part of customer care. All the aforementioned are plain extensions of the relation between a company and a customer.

How to become a Customer Care official?

To become a customer care official, one needs at least a bachelors degree in Business Management or Business Studies. This could be further followed up with a Masters degree in the sea respective disciplines.

India has some very good colleges that are catering to aspirants with a knack for business management programmes. But more importantly, one needs to be a keen and patient manager innately to fit the shoe of a customer care official.

As management anyway requires a lot of placing and timing and calculative thinking, it becomes all the more vital and strict when it deals with humans.

It’s not quite about how many customers does a company have in fact it is about how many customers does a company retain from its previous clientele. This is based solely on two things: the quality of services and sales, and the after-sales.

For example, you may be convinced into buying an electric appliance by a brand’s advertising, but its true test is when you have a complaint regarding the product. It matters more that in how much time is your issue addressed, rectified and delivered.

Customer care is all about how diligently and courteously you can manage your clientele, while the technical team is busy fixing their issues. It is a booming profession in today’s time due to the excessive consumerism that we’re living with.

Below is a list of business schools in India that are proven to give you just the right kind of base you need to excel in Customer Care:

• Xavier School of Management

• Indian Institute of Management

• Indian School of Business

• Birla Institute of Management

• Symbiosis Institute of Business Management

 A day in the life of a Customer Care official

Greeting! I’m a Customer Care executive and I work for a private phone carrier company. My job is to cater to clients day in and day out, to listen to the grievances and complaints of customers who aren’t satisfied with our service, and to offer plausible remedies.

The job of a customer care official is versatile in nature and require some basic but very effective principles to work on. We are taught in this line that the customer is of prime importance and that their satisfaction is our utmost priority. Here’s how a day in my life goes:

9:00 AM: Just got to work. We typically have a quick briefing session with the boss, where we’re informed of the current situation of the company’s services.

E.g. if a large fault in the line has affected a large number of customers in a specific area that we cover, we’re informed that a large number of calls are going to be regarding it, and are told the quickest and most effective way to handle the situation, which can involve call center automation to help things run smoothly.

11:00 AM: Luckily, I have been assigned to work on online complaints this week. I cater to customer complaints about email, chat, and sometimes, VOIP.

I’m now checking over the online complaint section.  I’m in charge of a team of six junior executives who cater to more than a hundred online complaints daily. Usually, our job is to look up suitable solutions and forward their case to the competent authority.

2:00 PM: The morning session was uneventful, for the most part. We handled a case of connectivity issues with the carrier - nothing can be done to help the poor lady in the short term, the location she lives in simply doesn’t have enough towers.

However, protocol demands us to apologize to her for the inconvenience and forward her complaint to the technical staff. This is, of course, one out of about thirty customer complaints we handled!

3:00 PM: My junior just informed me about a frustrated client who has been made to wait too long for his number portability request.

Usually, I allow my team to handle phone calls that go on the nod but instruct them to forward tricky calls to me so that I can handle them personally. This customer is tricky because he’s angry and needs to be spoken to tactfully and calmly.

4:00 PM: This was a long talk. I apologize profusely to Mr Sharma for the inconvenience and personally forwarded his application to the relevant department, emphasizing on urgency. I then follow-up with a phone call to the department to further stress the fact that the customer has waited too long for this.

The useful technical staff gets the job done while I wait for the call. I call back Mr Sharma and inform him that his number has been transferred from his existing carrier to ours. His tone changes completely and he personally thanks me before hanging up. Little perks of the job!

4:30 PM: We typically have 12-hour working days, so it’s still more than four hours before I get to go home. However, I have dropped out of the office for a little while for a cup of coffee and a snack.

Once I go back, I’ll mostly be catering to the customers who contact us by chat. This is less straining work and the rest of the evening will go smoothly.

Do you think you have enough abilities to handle people from the various background? Do you want to pursue a career as a customer care official? We hope this article has answered all your queries related to this profession. Have your say in the comment box below. Enjoy Reading!