TABLE OF CONTENTS Customer care is often misunderstood. People tend to assume that:
it is all about being courteous and friendly to customers;
only customer-contact staff need to bother about it.
This is quite wrong: customer contact is an important area (which we will look at in Session C), but seeing polite smiles is not the customer's top priority.
Customer care is in effect part of marketing, and it plays a crucial part in ensuring the success of any organization. Unless it covers every aspect of the service provided to customers, ensuring that their needs and wants are met, it will not work.
Customer care can be defined as:
'serving the customer in a way that meets their needs and wants'
This is not the same as winning new customers, though many commercial firms devote a great deal of time and energy to doing this, through their sales and marketing activities.
McGibbons is a pharmaceutical company which makes and sells drugs used for treating severe asthma. Its primary customers are family doctors and hospital specialists, because these have the authority to prescribe drugs, and can opt for McGibbons' drugs rather than those of a competitor.
Out of McGibbons' 520 staff, 100 are employed in some aspect of sales or marketing.
The Marketing Department itself consists of 20 people. They are responsible for working out strategy and controlling the annual advertising and promotion spend of 6,000,000.
The Sales Department includes 40 sales representatives who spend most of...
