The three Cs of customer care

Every good customer care organisation has the three Cs of customer care at the heart of its business. The three Cs are context, continuity and convenience. So how do they apply to your organisation and to your role as a customer service professional?

The first C, context, provides the foundation for communication and understanding. A message that is provided without context is a message that is either without meaning or is a message that is difficult to extrapolate. Providing context to customer messaging means knowing just about every relevant detail of the communicating parties’ messaging. It also means having access to all the data necessary and relevant to the customer experience.

This includes everything that has been collected during previous interactions with the customer. It also means mining things such as social media for data that is not immediately connected to the customer but is relevant to the interaction. Finally, customer preferences for the way communications should occur needs to be taken into consideration.

Customer service communications that lack context lead to messages that are virtually meaningless and have low informational value for the customer. If you’re not applying context to your communications with your customers, you’re basically treating them as a number, not an individual.

The second C is continuity and it’s a core requirement for effortless, seamless communications. Communications are virtually always a two-way chain of messaging, and a good customer service organisation uses context to provide continuity in its customer communications. Communications that are without continuity and context get bogged down, and key details need repeating, leading to frustration on the part of the customer and a lack of efficiency and understanding on the part of the customer service organisation.

Overall, the ease with which a customer service organisation uses context and continuity acts as the benchmark that customers use when forming an opinion about the company. Using those two Cs paired together is an absolutely vital part of the customer service experience.

Finally, the third C is convenience. Humans crave convenience in everything they do, and it’s an everyday goal.

In customer service, knowing the context of a particular customer’s circumstances and then applying that knowledge to achieve continuity will naturally result in an ease of doing business — and those three things should be the ultimate goal of every organisation today.

Kristen Pimpini is Managing Director of Aspect Software ANZ, which specialises in customer contact management and workforce optimisation.

Pictured: Kristen Pimpini