You’ve probably figured out by now that most of my interaction with customers happens via email.  And if you’ve ever interacted with customers that way, you know that emails can be notoriously tricky to convey tone.

In a typical conversation, we get about half of our cues from tone, inflection, and body language.  The same sentence can be said two different ways with two totally different implications.  I remember being at a store in the mall once and overhearing two girls shopping. “You’d look great in that!” was said on multiple occasions with two entirely different tones to convey if the girl would look great or if it looked horrible.

With emails, I don’t have that luxury.  It’s only the words on the screen that I have to work with.

You have to nail every single word in an email.

The best example of this one is the idea behind “appreciate”.  We’re bombarded every day with “customer appreciation”, “we appreciate your business”, “I appreciate you sharing that”, etc.  That constant over-use leads many of us to be jaded with the word in any context.

However, I know people who I can genuinely use the word “appreciate” with.  Just the other day, I had a friend look over an idea I had.  Over a text chat, I said, “I really appreciate you sharing those ideas with me.”  I truly did appreciate it and since we talk each day, I could convey that over text and it not sound cheesy or insincere.

But over email with a customer I’ve never talked to before, I could never use that phrase.  Believe me, I’ve tried and each time, the customer let me know that it felt cheesy, like it was part of some script or automated reply.

So I dropped it in favor of just saying “thanks for…”.  That simple tweak worked a ton better.  Gone was the perceived robotic feel.  In it’s place, customers pointed out that they felt it was more honest and open.

When you go to reply to an email, remember to choose your words carefully.  Look for ways that a customer could read them wrong or interpret them differently.  The cleaner and more concise you can get your reply, the better your conversation with that customer is going to be.

Looking for some other tweaks to make your emails cleaner and better? Check out my entirely free Brief Guide to a Better Email. You’ll be writing better emails before the day is out.

This is part of the Lessons from the Classroom series. Read more articles in the series.

Photo from Flickr – Colleen

I’m sure you’ve heard of the Golden Rule sometime in your life. Taught in the earliest classrooms, everyone learns that you should treat others like you want to be treated.

When it comes to customer support, the same rule reigns. We can tweak it a bit to target more towards customers but here’s the gist of it.

“Treat your customers like you want to be treated when you’re a customer.”

As a customer, a few key points will make or break an interaction with customer support. If I have to contact the support team, I want

• Quick answers that don’t leave me waiting around.
• Clear answers so that I can understand them.
• Personality and friendliness instead of a robot reply.

So whenever I work with another customer on their support ticket, I make sure to give them the same treatment that I’d want. The reason why most support teams suck is because they don’t follow this rule.

Print it out, write it down, or even tattoo it to your arm. Do whatever you have to do to remember this simple rule. When you call into support, you’d want the other support agent to have done the same thing.

What other “rules” would you have for support teams?

The protection of our customer’s privacy is of utmost importance to the employees and management of the AT&T family of companies (AT&T)*.  Please take a moment to read the following important message about the privacy of your customer information.

AT&T companies that provide telecommunications and interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) service (which permits VOIP customers to both send and receive calls to/from customers with traditional telephone/telecommunications service) would like to share your customer proprietary network information within the AT&T family of companies for our own marketing purposes, including using that information to offer you additional products and services.

That’s the letter I got from AT&T (although their logo says at&t so I don’t know which capitalization to use). I haven’t seen writing this bad since Twilight.

I honestly want to meet the person (or committee) that wrote this.

From Flickr Artist Hryck

That’s kind of strange advice in this day of teamwork and all, right? So let’s square this away right from the beginning. I don’t mean try to do all the support for something on your own. You’ll need others on your team to help out.

What I mean here is this. Have the customer do as little as possible to fix their problem. As much as possible, go it alone and handle the customer’s problem on your end.

• If your customer wants to cancel their account, go ahead and do it for them. Don’t send them a long set of instructions with links on how to do that from their end.
• If you customer wants to switch their cable TV package, go ahead and switch it for them. Don’t shuffle them off to some other department or require them to go into an actual store.
• If a customer wants to return something to you, pay for the shipping and send a label to them. Don’t make them to figure out how much a package weighs and which option to choose to send it back.

Last week, my card that I have on file for my phone expired. I tried the confusing phone tree options for self-service and go no where. Finally, I just went down to the local AT&T store to have them take care of it. Turns out that it’s something that even they have to call into customer service for.

Thankfully, I had a great rep that did it all on his own. He jotted down some notes about the new card number and what other account changes I needed. He then called in and sat on hold for me. He handled all the back and forth with the other support rep. I literally didn’t have to do anything.

That’s how it should be as a customer. If someone reaches out to you with a problem, fix as much of it as you can on your end. The customer doesn’t want to tie up more time with this ticket.

Take care of it yourself so the customer can get back to work.