MAINTAINING BUILDING
Just as in music, if your tone is off, the whole piece falls flat. For example, “Anything else? ” and “What else can I help you with? ” ask the same question, but they are wildly different in terms of tone.
As you define your support team’s collective voice, develop a set of standards for personal and human conversations. This allows each member to maintain their unique voice without sounding like they’re talking from a script.
Customers don’t care about what you can’t do; they want to hear what’s going to be done.
For those tricky situations where customers “have to” do something, you can use positive language to remind them ( and yourself) that this is a team effort:
With negative language
First, you'll have to check.
Now, you'll need to set up.
After that, I need you to.
With positive language
First, let's verify.
Now, we can set up.
After that, the best solution is if we.
Positive language keeps the door open for future interactions, and the customer won’t feel as though it was a waste of time to get in touch.
- Be brief but not brusque
It doesn’t matter how amazing your reply is — most customers are going to ignore a 1, 000-word email. Keep both sentences and paragraphs short. Large blocks of text will get skipped right over.
Use images, videos, and links to knowledge base articles to keep your replies concise. Bonus: When your knowledge base is integrated with your help desk, the process is easy because you can pull in articles without leaving your reply!
The goals of a support reply are to answer the customer’s question and to make them feel heard. You might be able to answer a question with a link to an article in your knowledge base, but couching that in a sentence or two is more human
- Thank You! We appreciate your effort.
