Customer care vs customer experience: why the best brands blend both
Good customer care
I don’t see customer care and customer experience as separate things. Customer care is what kicks in when someone gets in touch – often frustrated, annoyed, or already halfway to typing in all caps 🫤. That’s where the calm, kind, templated responses come in. But those moments aren’t the only ones that matter.
The customer experience is the layer that sits over the top. It’s the difference between replying just to resolve the issue, and replying because you genuinely want to help. It’s choosing to go a bit further than necessary, to mean it, to make the customer feel understood rather than just managed.
You can send an email about a delayed delivery and still leave someone cold, or you can send the same news with genuine care and turn the whole situation around. Same news, two very different outcomes.
Awesome customer care only really works for me when it’s always delivered with a healthy dose of customer experience blended all the way through 🤗
The moments that matter most
As we know customer care doesn’t just show up when something goes wrong. It runs through the whole experience – the before, during, and after a purchase.
It starts before someone presses “Add to Cart”. Clear product descriptions, honest delivery times, and answering questions customers are already worrying about. That early reassurance is customer care too.
It continues during the purchase. Order confirmations that reassure. Updates that arrive before a customer starts wondering where their order is. Clear communication reduces uncertainty – and uncertainty is usually what causes problems later.
And if things do go wrong, customer care and customer experience blend. Most customers aren’t angry about the issue itself; they’re anxious about how it will be handled. Calm, human, non defensive responses matter more.
Finally, there’s what happens afterwards. Making sure the customer feels looked after. That last impression often decides whether they come back.
Confession:
I’m a big introvert. A proper one. If I could run a jewelry brand with zero customer emails, my beads, tools and Tickle (the cat!), I absolutely would. But here we are. Big girl pants go on daily.
The good news is that 99.9% of my customers are genuinely lovely, grateful, and a joy to help. But what leaves me sad about customer care is, there’s always one, isn’t there? One mythical never-happy customer lurking. When their email comes in (I call it a ‘Howler‘ 😮) – the one you open with mild dread. Well your happy, relaxed day is all of a sudden hijacked for sure! 😔
Boundaries: good customer care does not mean being a doormat
I don’t subscribe to the “the customer is always right” myth 😮. I never have. But I do believe in always pausing to zoom out and ask myself one simple question:
Did I do anything wrong here?
If the answer is yes, I own it. Quickly. Calmly. Without excuses. I find customers respond incredibly well to responsibility, and most situations defuse the moment you own it and then give them a solution to fixing it.
And if the answer is no? If I genuinely haven’t done anything wrong and a customer is, let’s say, trying it on – I do stand my ground. Politely. Clearly and without drama. I know there’s a juggling act between standing your ground and a awful review, this is something you have to weight up.
But I do love a challenge, turning a grumpy customer, into a really happy customer (Love that!)
Where customer care and reviews collide
There’s a clear link between customer care, customer experience, and customer reviews – but it’s far from balanced.
In my experience, unhappy customers are far more likely to leave a review than happy ones. Most happy customers simply get on with their lives. Frustrated customers go looking for somewhere to vent – and they’ll usually find it.
That’s why platforms like Trustpilot and Feefo often present a skewed picture. Happy customers are asked to register, verify, and actively opt in to leaving a review. After twenty years in ecommerce, I can say with confidence: that rarely happens unless you push for it. But when someone wants to leave a 1 star review, they’ll happily go out of their way to do so.
If a business doesn’t actively nurture its review profile, what’s left is a very lopsided public record – a collection of negative experiences that doesn’t reflect the majority of customers, but is still visible to everyone.
Like it or not, most businesses don’t have much choice but to engage with these platforms. Which is why good customer care and a strong customer experience matter so much – not to chase perfect ratings, but to prevent small issues from escalating into public ones in the first place.
My Little Observation
Over the last twenty years, the way customers get in touch has changed massively – and not always for the better. What used to be a polite phone call has slowly turned into a blunt email that simply says: “Where’s my order?” No hello. No context. No order number, No name, No could you help me.
It’s easy to forget, when everything’s typed on a phone and fired off in seconds, that there’s still a real person on the other end reading it and it is hard to deal with each day. A little humanity goes a long way – and it’s something we’ve quietly lost along the way.
The little things that make customer care feel effortless
Set expectations early.
Clear product descriptions, honest delivery times, quality products and realistic turnaround windows prevent most customer care issues before they ever land in your inbox.
Refine listings based on real questions.
If customers keep asking the same thing, it’s rarely their fault. It’s a sign your listing needs tightening. Fix it once and save yourself answering it again.
Keep contact options clear and intentional.
You don’t need endless ways for people to reach you. One or two channels you can genuinely manage well usually leads to better, calmer conversations.
Create templates – then keep refining them.
Templates stop you rewriting the same emails every day and help keep your tone consistent. They’re not about sounding robotic – they’re about protecting your voice, especially if more than one person handles customer care.
Aim to solve the issue in the first reply.
Clear answers, reassurance, and next steps in one email reduce back-and-forth and lower anxiety on both sides.
Respond within 24 working hours.
Acknowledging someone quickly makes a huge difference to how the situation feels.
Be intentional about AI.
For handmade and small brands, human customer care is a genuine advantage. I don’t use AI for customer emails – this is one place where a real person, with judgement and empathy, can quietly outshine much bigger brands.
Use a proper system when your business reaches a certain size.
Once customer emails become more frequent or involve multiple team members, tools like Gorgias, Help Scout, Zendesk, Freshdesk are absolutely worth considering. Gorgias is my chosen CRM. Most makers deal with a mix of email, social and live questions – Gorgias centralises that really neatly.
A final thought
After twenty years, I have plenty of customer stories I could share – the good, the bad, and the downright ugly. I’ll save those for another day 😅.
For now, this is what matters: be honest, care genuinely, take responsibility, and treat customers how you’d want to be treated. And remember – review sites rarely show the full picture.
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