by Leslie O'Flahavan | Nov 11, 2018 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
With the rise of SMS, chat, and social media, is using email for customer service as quaint as sending postal mail? “Tell us about the old days, Grandpa. Did you really have to lick an envelope to seal it?” No, the customer service email channel is not the...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | May 31, 2018 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
Stay with me here as I connect this sad spelling test story to the task of scoring email quality in a contact center. When managers score agents’ email quality in a “gotcha” fashion, or when they score agents on writing skills that haven’t been explained, taught, or...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Apr 13, 2018 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
I. Am. Pumped! Last October, I met consumer advocate and syndicated travel writer Christopher Elliott when he gave a wonderful presentation at a customer relations conference. When I proposed that we co-author an article about airlines’ communications with...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Apr 10, 2017 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
My Lynda.com course is live! Yep, you read that right! My first Lynda.com course, “How to Write Customer Service Email” is ready to view, and I am thrilled to share it with you. The course is made up of 29 short videos (about 3 minutes each) and loads of...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Dec 17, 2016 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
If your company’s advertising makes your product sound fun, practical or hip and your customer service emails, chats or tweets sound scoldy or legalistic, you’ve got a problem. It’s not good for your company to use one voice when it’s trying to make a sale and another...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | May 5, 2016 | Featured, Plain Language Writing Courses, Social Media Writing Courses, Writing Matters Blog
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...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Feb 26, 2016 | Writing Matters Blog
When it comes to writing emails to customers, contact center managers fall into two camps. The first is the “Have You Seen Their Writing?” camp. In this camp, managers are so concerned about their customer service agents’ poor writing skills that they require agents...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Dec 9, 2015 | Writing Matters Blog
So, it’s like that, Princeton Review. You loved me when I subscribed to receive your weekly School Research Service e-mails, but now that my daughter’s been accepted to college and I’ve unsubscribed, you can’t even be polite. Here’s the...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Oct 21, 2015 | Writing Matters Blog
While on a work trip to Las Vegas, I found a long, straight hair in my Starbucks oatmeal. I wasn’t happy. With stomach rolling, I put down my spoon and reached for my phone to tweet Starbucks. I was impressed with the speed of the response from @StarbucksHelp....
by Leslie O'Flahavan | May 3, 2015 | Writing Matters Blog
In this blog, I often comment on the best (and worst) ways to write email to customers. Today, I’m honored to feature two excellent, productive customer service agents who do this important work. Heidi Ossian (on the left) and Betty Nielsen (on the right) work...
