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...
Web Writing
What’s a Quick Start Guide and Why Do Your Customers Want One?
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...
GrowthDot Interview: Effective Service Conversations – with Leslie O’Flahavan
Effective service conversations - the basics of writing to customers with Leslie O’Flahavan I loved being interviewed by GrowthDot's Natalia Zhontsa, who asked me 11 provocative questions and somehow got me talking about a dead airline passenger, customer service,...
The Fine Print: What to Write When You Must Explain a Policy to a Customer
Your customer should’ve read your company’s policy before purchasing your product. They kinda lied when they clicked the “I accept” box without reading a word of the fine print. Now, they’re requesting a return, refund, or exception that your policy doesn’t allow....
Remote Workers Need Better-Than-Average Writing Skills
Whether you and your team are working remotely a couple of days per week or you’re remote all day, every day, you’ve probably found that being remote has made you better at some tasks than you were when you worked in an office. Maybe you’re better at actively...
What to Write When You Must Tell a Customer “No”
While it’s never easy or much fun to tell a customer “no,” you can write it the wrong way—causing write-backs, harming satisfaction, destroying rapport—or the better way. The better way doesn’t mean saying “yes” or making exceptions for super-persistent customers. The...
How to Write Email Templates That Build Rapport
If you can serve a bakery-bought birthday cake at the party you’re hosting for your mother, you can use email templates for customer service without destroying your relationship with your customers. Yes, the words “template,” “script,” and “form letter,” have...
This 1973-Vintage Feminist Isn’t Giving Up
This is me in 1973 when the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision. I was 13 years old. I'd been menstruating for less than a year. To me, Roe was just another reason to believe grownups were making the US a better place to grow up female. Title IX had...
Writing Digital Content People Will Want to Consume: Syracuse University
1. American Association of University Women: Broken Ladders: Barriers to Women’s Representation in Nonprofit Leadership 2. Metropolitan Museum of Art: Met Stories landing page. Choose a story and watch a couple of minutes 3. American Bankers Association:...
Trying, Failing, and Trying Again to Balance Parenthood and Your Career
If everything had gone as I’ve always planned, I’d be writing this article on a quiet workday in my pleasant home office. I’d have gone on a long walk in the woods before starting work sharply at 7 am (I'm definitely a morning person). I’d have made progress on a big...
