[This article was originally published by ICMI.] I wish FAQs were the 8-track players of customer self-service, but they are not. Lots of companies still publish FAQs pages and lots of desperate customers go to those pages for help. And though I usually avoid sweeping...
Public Domain
Four Ways to Handle Plain Language Pushback from Stubborn SMEs
[This article was originally published by WordRake.] In a just world, you wouldn’t have to convince your subject matter expert colleagues that your plain language edits make their documents better. And doctors wouldn’t have to convince patients to quit smoking, and...
Your “Contact Us” Page is Making it Harder for Customers to Contact You
[This article was originally published by ICMI.] Your company’s “Contact Us” page is the most utilitarian, least sexy page at your website. It has one job: helping people who need to contact you understand how to do it. But your Contact Us page likely contains flaws...
Five Tips for Using Gen AI as a Customer Service Reading Tool
[This article was originally published by ICMI.] As a lifelong writing teacher, I’m overwhelmed (traumatized?) by our industry’s gen AI frenzy. Yes, our agents will be faster if they use gen AI tools to reply to customers’ emails, chats, social posts, or ratings and...
Writing to Customers Whose First Language Isn’t English
[This article was originally published by Contact Center Pipeline.] All our customers deserve our empathy, but the ones who write to us in English when English isn’t their primary language deserve a heaping helping. For human kindness reasons, we should empathize with...
Writing Well When Your Attention is Divided
[This article was originally published by Contact Center Pipeline.] These 10 tips will enable you to focus on your message. Your heart is in the right place. You intend to focus on the important writing tasks on your to-do list: that detailed response to an angry...
Customer Service E-Mail Quality Review Tool
The Quality Review Tool presents seven industry-tested standards for e-mail quality and explains what constitutes excellent performance on each standard. Use the Quality Review Tool to score customer service agents' e-mails, coach agents, improve writing skills, and...
Guide to Writing for Social Media
We developed this social media writing guide for the Centers for Disease Control. While the examples will be most relevant to health communicators, the guidance about writing for social media is practical for any organization that wants to provide high quality social...
Which Online Retailer Does E-Mail Best?
Months before the hectic holiday shopping season, we decided to conduct an experiment to find out which online retailer does customer service e-mail best. We sent the same e-mail query to seven big-name retailers that sell a certain toy croquet set we were interested...
