by E-WRITE's Leslie O'Flahavan

Posts within the category: Customer service

April 26, 2013

Why a 280-Character Customer Service Tweet is a Bad Idea

This is a tale of social customer service. The main characters in this story are Bluehost, the company that hosts my website, and me, the customer. Our "happy marriage" has lasted about 4 years, but now we are on the rocks because my website keeps going down. In frustration, I send out this tweet:

A mere seven minutes later, the strangest thing happens. Bluehost sends me a two-tweet response. No, not two tweets. That wouldn't be quite as strange. Bluehost has sent me one 280-character response that's been broken mid-sentence into two 140-character tweets. And in my inbox and my Twitter Interactions, the second one showed up first.

Why a 280-Character Customer Service Tweet is a Bad Idea

Don't even get me started on the content of the tweet(s). (In my opinion, Twitter isn't the best place to urge an angry customer to upgrade and pay more.) Here are three reasons why using Twitter in this fashion is a bad idea:

  1. If separated from the other, each tweet looks like a mistake. Plus, this two-tweet weirdness makes it seem like Bluehost doesn't understand how Twitter works.
  2. Customer service writers are obliged to work within the requirements of each channel. If you write a customer an e-mail, you have to use a subject line. That's one of the requirements of the channel. If you mail a customer a letter, it should have a greeting, closing, and the signature of the person who wrote it. Those are the requirements of the channel. If you tweet a customer, you've got to present your message in a 140-character box. If you have more to say, tweet or DM the customer and ask to switch to a "more words" channel: e-mail or phone.
  3. This two-tweet set is impossible to share. The best social customer service is easy to share. While a customer service agent may not have crafted a tweet to an individual customer so it could go viral, it's just dumb to write tweets that cannot ever be shared.

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Maybe I need to get with the times and realize that the two-tweet message is a thing. Are you as put off by Bluehost's two-tweet message as I am?

It's not like this is the first time.  The I-can't-fit-everything-I-have-to-say-into-140-characters problem is pretty common. (See my previous post "Twitter Customer Service: Two partial DMs from AT&T do not make a whole.") But a 280-character just seems wrong to me, like violating the rules of the game, like being both the shoe and the Scottie dog in Monopoly. That's just not fair.

Want more posts on writing to customers in social media?

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February 15, 2013

In live chat, don't argue with customers who are trying to pay

This year, I've been helping customer service agents learn to write high-quality chat to customers. And if I had to give them (and their managers) just one piece advice about chat, it's this: "Writing good chat is WAY harder than it looks."

My recent chat with Lord & Taylor is a case in point. This agent, "Paige V" does little to help me and succeeds in antagonizing me in a few ways. Take a look at the chat transcript:

Please hold while we find a customer service agent to assist you…
We thank you for your patience. An agent will be with you as soon as possible…
Welcome! My name is Paige V, how may I be of assistance?
Paige V:  Good evening, this is Paige speaking.
Leslie O:  Hi. I am having trouble placing an order online. Every time I click "Check Out" to pay for my shopping cart, I get an "Access Denied" error message. Why is that happening?
Paige V:  I would not know why unfortunately. You can call into customer service to place the order at 1-800-223-7440.
Leslie O:  ok
Paige V:  Is there anything else I can do for you?
Leslie O:  Please hold on the chat.
Leslie O:  I am on the line waiting for Lord & Taylor to answer, but I have been on hold for a long time
Paige V:  I would not know why. There is not a wait.
Paige V:  Are you still there?
Paige V:  Ma'am?
Thank you for using Lord & Taylor's Live Chat. If we can be of further assistance please Chat with us again or contact us at 1-800-223-7440.
Your session has ended. You may now close this window.

  1. Lack of empathy. When I asked why I couldn't pay for my items, Paige should have scrounged up a bit of caring. "I would not know why..." doesn't work. How about "I am sorry that happened, but don't worry. We can process your order over the phone."
  2. Insincerity. Don't ask "Is there anything else I can do for you?" if you don't mean it. I asked Paige to stay on the chat in case I wasn't able to place the order over the phone. She didn't agree to do this.
  3. Picking a fight with the customer. I said I had been on hold on the phone for a long time. Paige's sassy answer, "I would not know why. There is not a wait" antagonized me. Even if I had been lying about the long hold on the phone (and why would I do that??), the live chat agent should not contradict me. Her writing sounds sarcastic.

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In the end, this chat did little to build my rapport with Lord & Taylor, a store that sells the same items as many other retailers, I might add. Even if the live chat agent's best advice about placing my order is that I should call the customer service line, she still should have taken the opportunity to make this exchange more pleasant. In the future, I'm not likely to purchase anything online from Lord & Taylor. The shopping cart is hinky, and the live chat agents are crabby.

Want more advice about writing live chat to customers? Read on:

Update: Polite, quick response from Lord & Taylor to my tweet about this post

Mere minutes after I published a tweet about this blog post, I received a polite and considerate response from Lord & Taylor. Very impressed! Maybe they should let the customer service agent who tweeted write live chat!

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February 7, 2013

Using Twitter for Customer Service? Answer the customer's dang question

I recently read 's write-up on "The Great Social Customer Service Race," an experiment by her company (Software Advice, Inc.) that put 14 top consumer brands to the Twitter support test. As you might imagine, some of the brands fared poorly in this test:

  • Coca-Cola sent one reply four days after the initial question. In Twitter-time, four days is an era or an epoch.  (Which one is longer? That's the one I want.) And customers don't want to wait an era for a reply.
  • McDonald's failed to be helpful. The "customer" from Software Advice asked "If I wanted to pick up pre-made orders for my office weekly, how do I set that up? Can the order change? Is there a min spend?" The McDonald's customer service agent tweeted back, "Hey Kyle, I would contact the manager at your local store. Stores work differently when it comes to prearranged orders." Verrill argued that the agent could have asked where the office was located and provided the nearest store’s address, phone number, and manager’s name, or answered, "Yes! Some stores can do that. Let me see if I can help!" I agree. The McDonald's agent should have helped more.

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Verrill is echoing the core principle of my courses about writing high-quality responses to customers. When writing to customers in any channel, social or otherwise, the agent must answer the customer's dang question. That's the minimum requirement of any customer service communication.

So I'd like to take issue with Verrill's rewrite of a Wells Fargo tweet. Her piece criticizes the Wells Fargo's tweet for being robotic. The customer wrote:

  • "I'm thinking about switching banks. @WellsFargo what kind of fees do you charge for personal checking?"

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Here's Wells Fargo's reply:

  • "@HoneyBeeRich Hi Brittany, please visit: wellsfargo/checking/ for information regarding our checking accounts. Thanks. ^SP"

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Verrill suggested that a better response would have been something like:

  • "@HoneyBeeRich Thx so much for ur interest! We'd to have your business! Here's more info. on fees: http://bit.ly/GKn0S Hope 2 'see' u soon!"

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I don't agree. I find the rewrite grating: too many !!!s and too many tweet abbreviations; that's not the right tone for a buttoned-down bank. But the biggest problem is that neither the Wells Fargo tweet nor the rewrite answers the customer's question about fees for personal checking. Here's my version:

  • "@HoneyBeeRich Personal chkng fee is $0 w/ $1,500 min daily bal OR direct dep of $500 per statmnt cycle. Learn more bit.ly/YGt3Xt Thx!

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My tweet is kind of lumpy with abbreviations, and I used every last character, but at least it answers the question. If you have a better rewrite, please share it here. Tweeting to customers is  much harder than it looks, so it's always useful to have good models..

Interested in apples-to-apples comparisons of customer service quality? Download our whitepapers:

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Read our blog posts about Twitter communication with customers:

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January 24, 2013

Six Things that Won’t Change About Writing to Customers

This article was first published in the Winter 2012 issue of CRM Magazine.

In the last few years, almost everything about writing to customers has changed. The number of channels has gone from three (letters, faxes, and e-mails) to at least seven (letters, faxes, e-mails, texts, live chats, tweets, and wall posts).  The way customers receive our written communication has changed from mailbox to desktop computer to mobile device.  And customers’ behaviors have changed. Today’s customers won’t wait very long to hear from us, and they won’t read much of what we write.  

So how are we to get our bearings in this world of rapid change? How can we provide high-quality written communication to customers? By focusing on the things that haven’t changed. We can write well to customers in these new channels by realizing that at least six things about writing to customers just won’t change.

1.    Customers need a correct answer.
This has always been true, and it always will be. It doesn’t matter how the customer receives the answer; the answer must be correct. And in the uber-fast-paced world of social media customer service, correctness is even more important, as it’s easy for customers who receive incorrect answers to share, share, share.

2.    Customers need a complete answer.
For customers and contact centers alike, a complete answer is essential. Complete answers are the key to first contact resolution. But it was a lot easier to write a complete answer when we were sending one-page letters or one-screen e-mails. Giving a set of instructions or explaining a company policy was easier to do in the old written channels than it is in the new social media ones.

One strategy for providing a complete answer when you only have 140 characters (Twitter) or 250 characters (Facebook) is to give the answer and link to the explanation.  So your tweet in response to a customer’s question about whether she can return an item might be “Yes, you can return the microwave. Here’s how link.”

3.    Customers need a prompt answer.
Here’s where we may be in a brave new world. Back when we sent customers letters, they’d wait patiently for a response for five business days or longer. And most customers considered an e-mail response prompt if it arrived within 24 hours. But the pace of social media service has changed the definition of prompt. A prompt response to a customer’s tweet must come in minutes, and a prompt reply during a live chat comes in seconds.

Sure, the pace of written customer service has changed dramatically, and contact centers have to staff service channels so customers receive prompt responses. But the measure of what constitutes promptness is the same as it’s always been: a written response is prompt if it prevents the customer from initiating another contact about the long wait. If customers send a second e-mail to ask when we’ll respond to their first one, our response time is too slow. If they tweet us to ask why we didn’t respond to their first tweet, we’re too slow.

4.    Customers want you to use a tone that shows you care, matches your brand, and helps them feel close to your company.
It’s not like this was different in the past. No customer ever liked receiving a “To Whom it May Concern” form letter. But tone is even more important in social media channels because they are, well, social. We use a more casual tone with customers in these channels because doing so builds rapport and makes customers easier to serve. So a live chat agent might write “Let me help walk you through this,” and a Twitter agent might tweet “I’ll look into it. Pls DM me.” We’re friendly and professional when we write to customers in any channel, but in social media we avoid the tuxedo tone and choose a blue jeans tone instead.

5.    Customers need access to other kinds of help.
This has always been true about written customer service. In the past, a customer service letter might have included a telephone number customers could call if they continued to have trouble with a product or the street address of a repair shop.

When they have a problem with a product today, most customers (Gen Y’s, Millennials, and Boomers) search for a solution online, so excellent written service must integrate other online forms of help. Your customer service Facebook page should include links to your company’s FAQs; your tweets should include shortened links to online demos or YouTube videos, and your e-mails should link customers directly to online user manuals or downloads.

6.    Customers respect correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.
Is it hip to be square? Do old-school rules about writing correctly apply to social media channels? The answer is yes. While few of us would think less of a friend who misspells a word in a Facebook post, most of us are not impressed if a customer service agent makes the same spelling blunder.

Customers don’t want to see grammar, spelling, or punctuation mistakes in any written channel. Those mistakes make them think less of your company or question whether the answer itself is accurate. But they don’t mind informal writing in most social channels. Informal writing isn’t the same as error-filled writing. For example, the space-saving abbreviation Thx (for Thanks) is fine in a tweet. Using a dash between two short sentences in a fast-paced live chat is an OK substitute for the slow-to-type period, space, and capital letter that ends one sentence and begins the next.

Don’t get me wrong. I realize that writing to customers has changed in many ways. Today’s customers read our e-mails on tiny mobile devices, so they prefer tiny amounts of text. Today’s live chat customers expect real-time answers to really big questions. Today’s Twitter customers wield outsize influence in social media channels: “You better give me what I want or I’m going viral with my beef.”

So how can contact centers cope with these writing challenges? By sticking with the basics. Write to customers in these new channels the way you’ve always written to them. Keep providing correct, complete, prompt, friendly, resourceful, tidy written service, and everything should be OK.

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August 22, 2012

Are 6 exclamation points too many? Punctuation's gone wild in live chat with Crate and Barrel

I recently had simple, direct, if somewhat slow chat (almost five minutes long) with Susan, a helpful customer service representative at Crate and Barrel. My question: "Do you sell bird baths or bird feeders?" Crate and Barrel's answer "No, sorry. Not any more."

Live chat is perfect for this kind of interaction. For the customer, the chat freed me from digging around the entire website looking for products Crate and Barrel doesn't sell. For the company, chat offers the opportunity to suggest a substitute item for one that's no longer available.

But why the abundance of exclamation points? Susan's writing sounds over-caffeinated. The wording in her sentences is upbeat and helpful enough; she just doesn't need the exclamation points. Even innocently friendly comments like "I will check for you" or "Enjoy your evening" sound like barked commands when followed by an exclamation point. In my opinion, such insistent enthusiasm can be too much of a good thing.

What do you think? Trying reading each of Susan's chat statements without the exclamation point. In your opinion, are any of them necessary?

Need more advice about writing great chat to customers? Read these posts:

 

Update: Crate and Barrel offers a gracious reply to this post

Props to Crate and Barrel. When I tweeted about their exclamation-happy live chat, Crate and Barrel replied with thanks and a promise to forward my feedback to the head chat honcho. Now that's how to take some light constructive criticism. I'm impressed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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