by Leslie O'Flahavan | May 6, 2024 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
[This article was originally published by WordRake.] “How hungry is my reader?” When we sit down to write a web page, report, proposal, or blog post, we’re often plagued by uncertainty about our readers’ appetite for our content. Am I writing for a headline-only...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Mar 25, 2024 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
A version of this blog first appeared on the North Bridge Group website. Publication date: March 10, 2024 You’re a CSR, and there’s so much you hate about your job. Customers shriek at you all day. Your boss’s expectations are unreasonable: “Answer faster! Reply...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Feb 6, 2024 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
Despite the training, mentoring, coaching, incentives, macros, knowledgebase, and pizza Fridays you’ve provided, some of your customer service agents are still weak writers. Maybe it’s time to let these agents use a genAI tool like ChatGPT, Bard, or Claude, etc. to...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Jan 10, 2024 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
Chat has been around forever and customers love the channel. They choose chat when they need to multitask, when they want a written record of the agent’s instructions they can refer to later, and when they prefer not to be overheard. A 2021 survey of over 1,000 US...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Oct 1, 2023 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
I’m not sure whether it’s a turf battle, a sibling rivalry, or a custody fight, but whatever is going on between the Customer Service Team and the Marketing Team is hurting customers who reach out for help via social media. Granted, social channels are unpredictable....
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Sep 1, 2023 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
If you work in customer care, you’ve been talking about chatbots for about a decade. Your organization may have been using a chatbot for almost that long. You’ve heard or participated in all the chatbot debates, and likely heard the following: “Chatbots ruin the...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Jul 1, 2023 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
To help customers get up to speed with a product or service, companies offer many types of documentation: user manuals, video tutorials, in-product help, even good old FAQs. Why? Because customers need heaps of help when they’re just starting to use the thing you’ve...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Jun 18, 2023 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
You want to help your customers, you really do. So you write a gorgeous 75-page User Manual, which answers every conceivable question your customer might have about using your product or service. And then you learn the ugly truth. Nobody reads the User Manual, even...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | May 14, 2023 | Featured, Uncategorized, Writing Matters Blog
Maintaining a knowledge base full of well written articles is as difficult as keeping a preschool playroom tidy. Here’s why. Some KB articles are created to meet an emergency need, and they’re hurriedly, even poorly, written from the day they’re published. Other KB...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Apr 28, 2023 | Featured, Uncategorized, Writing Matters Blog
I’m not going to lie. Writing a great knowledge base article is a lot of work. Your writing must be precise, concise, and easy-to-read. You must know your topic really well, and then you must try to un-know it, so you can think like your reader—who wouldn’t be reading...
