Plain language

[This article was originally published by WordRake.] If you’re a heartbroken poet living in an unheated garret in Paris, there’s no doubt your writing process includes suffering: the hours you spend gazing out the window, the inky splotches your fountain pen leaves on...

If you were building a playground for your local elementary school, you’d never install swings with chains that pinch little fingers or a teeter-totter that catapults kindergarteners into the air. A dangerous playground guarantees that half the kids end up in the...

To write great knowledge base articles, you should think like a tailor. To make a bespoke suit jacket, a tailor takes many measurements, everything from the width of the shoulders to the circumference of the wrist. All those measurements enable the tailor to create a...

[This article was originally published by WordRake.] I’m weird. I love editing. With a finished draft in hand, I’m eager to ask myself editing questions like “Is this document convincing?”, “Have I given too much detail or just enough?”, and “Have I written in plain...

“Too long, uncaring, and off-brand.” Three criticisms you never want to hear about your social media responses to customers! But it can be difficult to write posts that are short enough, empathetic enough, and on-brand when you have hundreds of cranky customers...

[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...

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...

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...

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...

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....