On a typical day, most customers will understand what you mean even if you use less-than-graceful words when you speak or write. For example, lots of customers dislike the phrase “No problem!” but they’ll look past it if you’re providing great service. They’ll give...
Social Media Writing Courses
Yes, Writing to Customers in Social Media Does Require Special Skills
Wow. It's been a decade since companies began offering customer service via social media, and we certainly have improved over the years! We've shed outsized fears about being criticized by customers in public (gasp). We're using purpose-built tools to manage social...
How to Write Automated Texts That Sound Human, Not Robotic
By Leslie O’Flahavan, E-WRITE and Rich Weborg, OneReach If your customers have opted-in to receive texts from your company, they probably realize that some of your texts are going to be automated. They understand that sometimes texts from your company were sent by an...
Hotel Allegro, Get Your Customer Service Act Together: When Multichannel Goes Wrong
Last week, I stayed at the Hotel Allegro in Chicago. My stay was OK, maybe a C minus. The hotel's under construction, the wi-fi was sketchy, you have to leave the hotel to go to its 312 Chicago restaurant, and the room was really small. I might stay there again, but...
Using Twitter for Customer Service? Answer the customer’s dang question
I recently read Ashley Verrill'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:...
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,...
Seven Must-Have Elements of Your Social Media Emergency Kit
This guest post is by Andrea Ford, friend and colleague extraordinaire. Andrea is the Content Lead at Create Digital, an agency in Richmond, Virginia that works with Fortune 500 brands to help make their social media smarter. Create Digital specializes in three...
Download our “Guide to Writing for Social Media”
Check out our latest handy free download for wordslingers and communication campaigners: Guide to Writing for Social Media. We developed this 57-page guide for the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). The examples in the guide are health-related, but the advice about...
Help me solve the mystery of how I wrote the World’s Worst Tweet and killed interest in a great free resource
I really need your help. A few days ago I tweeted about a new resource I'm offering for download at my site, a Guide to Writing for Social Media, which we authored for the Centers for Disease Control. This is a really nice free resource; it's 57 pages long, chock full...
Twitter Customer Service: Two partial DMs from AT&T do not make a whole
If you're using Twitter for customer service, you've got to live within your means. Yes, the 140-character limit is a struggle. It's hard to solve a customer's problem or answer a question in such tight quarters. Even the Pledge of Allegiance (flowery wording, but...