8 Customer Care Methods to Improve Client Satisfaction

Operations

In the contracting world, it’s not just the quality of your work that matters—it’s how you communicate, handle issues, and treat your clients every step of the way. So, if you want more repeat business, positive reviews, and word-of-mouth referrals, focusing on customer care is key.

Read on and learn the meaning of customer care, the various customer care methods for contractors, strategies for measuring customer care, tips to improve client communication, and more.

What Is Customer Care?

Carpenter in workshop speaks with two clients

Customer care means ensuring customers are happy and satisfied when interacting with your business or services. It’s about treating them with kindness, respect, and empathy.

Customer care aims to build a deep and meaningful emotional connection with clients. That means it goes beyond customer service/support.

Although customer service and customer care are often used interchangeably, the two are quite different.

Customer service or support deals with helping clients navigate a particular offering. As a contractor, customer service may include providing clear estimates, communicating project timelines, or following up after a project is completed. Generally, customer service revolves around the services or products being offered.

On the other hand, customer care is far more proactive and less tangible than customer service.

Customer care involves assisting customers with their emotional needs. It shapes how a customer feels about your contracting brand or services. Do customers feel content, appreciation, joy, worry, or regret after interacting with your business?

Think of customer care as part of the larger customer experience. Customer experience encompasses the entire customer journey from brand discovery and purchase to post-purchase. Incorporating moments of customer care in the customer journey drastically improves the overall customer experience.

Why Customer Care Matters

In business, and particularly the home services industry, doing a good job is not enough.

You may be the best home remodeler or trade contractor in your area, but that won’t matter if your customer care is poor. It’s important to give customers more than what they pay for. Besides, you can’t put a price on kindness.

Here’s why you must make customer care a business priority:

Build your contracting reputation

Good customer care portrays your contracting business as, well, caring. It shows that you genuinely understand your customers’ needs and are willing to go out of your way to meet them.

That’s the sort of reputation you want for your brand. It can set you apart from other contractors. And research shows that 86% of consumers will pay more for a great customer experience.

Manage customer expectations

At times, it can be difficult to understand, let alone meet, customer expectations. As a home improvement contractor, you probably know this all too well.

Some customers find it difficult to express their needs and expectations. Others don’t know exactly what they want. Such scenarios are where customer care comes in handy.

Prioritizing customer care means being honest, candid, and transparent with customers. Commit to meeting your client’s needs. But also make sure they understand what you can and can’t offer. That way, no one gets disappointed.

Increase customer loyalty

Providing excellent customer care encourages customers to stick around. Customer care fosters trust and long-term customer relationships. That leads to repeat business and more loyal customers.

According to one survey, 81% of customers want to form lasting relationships with brands. Demonstrating care invites customers looking to connect more deeply with your business. And such connections breed loyalty, increasing your customers’ lifetime value.

Customer care could easily be the difference between a one-time contract and a long-term client.

Grow your client base

A majority of customers (72%) share good experiences with others. That’s free word-of-mouth marketing—the most effective form of marketing.

It makes sense. Customers who are happy with your service are more likely to recommend your business to colleagues, family, and friends.

Excellent customer care turns your customers into valuable brand advocates. This is a cost-free, organic, and sustainable way to land more contracting clients.

8 Customer Care Methods

Home pro on phone with client in carpentry workshop

Customer satisfaction is a strategic asset in any business. Protect that asset by providing care services for customers.

Here are eight customer care techniques you should try in your home contracting business:

Exceed Customer Expectations

Go above and beyond with service delivery. Surpass your customer’s expectations with every home improvement project.

Don’t go too wild, though. We’re not recommending remodeling an entire house when only contracted to do the kitchen. Exceeding customer expectations does not mean overdoing a job at your own expense.

It starts with understanding what the customer wants. And rather than deliver the bare minimum, just go a bit over in terms of quality of work, professionalism, speed, service discounts, etc.

Listen to Your Customers

Be a good listener. Practice active listening to ensure that your customers feel heard. Besides, how else will you know the customer’s needs, pain points, and concerns for a particular project?

Here are some pro tips for active listening:

Give the customer your undivided attention.
Use nonverbal cues like leaning in, nodding, gesturing, and maintaining eye contact to show you’re listening.
Avoid interrupting the customer as they speak.
Ask questions to seek clarification.
Pick up on the customer’s body language and tone of voice.
Respond to any questions appropriately.
Paraphrase and summarize what you’ve heard to confirm you fully understand.

Active listening demonstrates a great deal of care. It shows you’re interested in everything the customer has to say. That makes the customer feel valued and paves the way for even deeper connections.

Invite Customer Feedback

Encourage customers to share their feedback. This could be through face-to-face conversations, phone calls, emails, online reviews, testimonials, etc. You want to find out what customers think of your contracting services.

However, collecting customer feedback is only half the effort. Respond appropriately to the feedback and act on it. Besides being a mode of engagement, customer feedback is often rich with actionable insights. Use those insights to improve customer satisfaction and your overall business.

Keep In Touch

Communication is the key to keeping any relationship alive. So, keep in close contact with clients throughout the customer journey.

Check in on your customers; learn what they’re up to, how they feel about an ongoing project, and any changes in their expectations. Also, follow up on clients after completing a project. Find out if the finished renovation turned out as they’d hoped.

Personalize Customer Communications

Research by McKinsey & Company shows that 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. What’s more, 76% of consumers get frustrated when this doesn’t happen. The researchers also point out that most customers are likely to purchase, repurchase, and recommend brands that personalize.

This is what personalizing customer communications entails:

Addressing customers by name
Sending out tailored messages
Providing personalized recommendations and advice
Referring to previous interactions
Soliciting feedback/reviews
Using a conversational tone
Being friendly and approachable
Avoiding purely transactional language

FROM ONE OF OUR PARTNERS: How Personalized Customer Communication Helps Reduce Customer Churn

Offer Proactive Multichannel Support

Ensure customers can reach you whenever they need to. Provide multiple modes of contact, including email, phone, SMS, online chat, and even social media. Availability is crucial in customer care.

The most important thing when offering customer support is to act quickly. Respond promptly to customer requests, questions, and concerns.

Show Empathy and Care

Bring out the human side of your business. Humanize your brand in order to connect with customers on an emotional level.

Show that you actually care about your customers’ needs, pain points, and worries. Let them know that behind the contracting business is a human who sympathizes with others.

Leverage Modern Technologies

It can be overwhelming to manage customer relationships. Tracking customer expectations, responding to feedback, and staying in touch can be a lot. And remember, you have a business to run on top of all that.

Luckily, modern tech solutions can offload most of that burden. With today’s sophisticated customer relationship management (CRM) and AI systems, you can easily automate the mundane parts of customer care.

4 Examples of Successful Customer Care Strategies

Contractor and homeowner reviewing tablet at construction site

Wondering how to implement customer care?

Let’s look at four examples of customer care methods in action.

Persuading Potential Contracting Leads

The customer journey starts long before a purchase. And so does customer care. So, make customer care part of your lead nurturing efforts.

Address potential clients with respect. Speak to them in a conversational tone without sounding too promotional. Make a subtle pitch that speaks more about the client’s needs and less about your company.

Explaining Things to Confused Customers

Home improvement projects have lots of moving parts. It can be challenging for some clients to wrap their heads around a contract.

Firstly, it’s your job to identify when clients get confused. Secondly, you must jump in and clear things up for them. Don’t be the sort of contractor who shrugs off confused clients, saying, “You’ll see. It will all make sense in the end.”

Take your time to explain what’s going on from start to finish. Clarify everything about the project, including the approach, materials, paperwork, schedules, etc.

Remember to use simple language the client will understand—none of that construction jargon.

Handling Complaints

You can’t please everyone. That’s a fact of life you have to accept as an entrepreneur and as a contractor.

Every so often, you’ll come across a disgruntled customer. Some of them will lodge their complaints directly to you. Others will air their frustrations via negative reviews and comments.

It’s essential to respond to negative feedback. People are more likely to buy from a business that responds to all its good and bad reviews.

Approach disgruntled customers with a positive attitude. Be honest about what went wrong and take the blame. Then, offer a solution or some sort of reparation for damages done.

Rekindling Past Client

Leverage customer care to drive repeat business. Do this by rekindling old customer relationships.

Let’s say a homeowner hired you for a kitchen remodel. They were so pleased with how it turned out that they promised to hire you for a bathroom makeover. It’s been several months since.

Don’t let such a hot lead go cold. Contact the homeowner with a subtle pitch. Personalize your message; start by asking them how they’re enjoying their new kitchen. And don’t forget to thank them for hiring your company.

Use that as a segue to remind them that their bathroom could benefit from a similar renovation.

How to Know if Your Customer Care Strategies Are Working

It helps to know whether your customer care strategies are working or not. Luckily, that’s something you can gauge using the following metrics:

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score: Directly measures individual customers’ satisfaction with your brand, services, or interactions.
Customer effort score (CES): Measures how easy it is for your customers to get what they need or resolve an issue.
Net promoter score (NPS): Gauges customer loyalty and the likelihood of past customers recommending your contracting services to others.
Customer retention rate: Shows the ratio of homeowners who continue to contract your business for various home improvement projects.
Customer churn rate: Gives the percentage of customers who stop doing business with your company, including those who abandon or cancel renovation contracts.

You can get most of this information by conducting customer satisfaction surveys and analyzing customer feedback. To complement survey data, you can leverage customer service software and monitoring tools.

FROM ONE OF OUR PARTNERS: Measuring Customer Satisfaction: How NPS Drives Enhanced Customer Engagement

5 Extra Tips to Improve Your Communication with Customers

Plumbing contractor explains repair work to client in front of kitchen sink

Customer care is a multifaceted and ongoing initiative. It’s built around honesty, respect, kindness, empathy, and most of all, communication.

Here are some more tips on how to be the best at customer service:

Be a proactive communicator. Speak clearly to customers before they even come to you with complaints or requests.
Choose the right communication channels. Ensure customers can reach you via the means available to them, be it phone, email, or chat.
Use simple, direct language. Write and speak to your customers in a language they’ll understand. Avoid technical terms and unnecessary details, but don’t talk down to them either.
Take your time. Listen patiently to your customers and take your time explaining things or responding to feedback.
Don’t shy away from difficult conversations. Strong and lasting relationships often arise from difficult conversations. Whether sharing bad news, owning up to a blunder, or calming down an angry client, never dread talking to your customers.

Great customer care starts with the basics. Stay organized and keep track of important client info, no matter where the day takes you.

Manage clients on the go