Communication with customers: the perfect message
We will today talk about improving your communication with customers and how to create the perfect message — or at least a message template that covers all the points, how about that?
If you have been working in customer care for a few months, you may have already realized that several interactions end up following the same structure: greeting, listening, explaining, giving an answer, confirming that you understand, closing. Right?
Well, let’s revisit this and learn how to better structure our communication with customers and to adapt it to different contexts. We will see positive, negative messages, for when the customer is angry or even for situations in which you want to incite the purchase. To achieve this, I created the Customer Road to Success framework, a series of steps for you to follow.
Why having standard messages can improve communication with customers.
Here is what happens: I always rejected the idea of a customer service script. I had the impression that necessarily people on my team would sound very robotic, lifeless and concerned with understanding more in which model the client fits into, than genuinely listening to them carefully.
But I couldn’t help but notice that the cases do repeat themselves. And my team even had a document or text file from which they copied their most used messages. Each with their own model. And, in some cases, they even shared these models amongst themselves and improved their communication with customers from time to time.
Independence is clearly not bad.
This isn’t a bad thing, it’s important to make it clear. Just beware that I, as a manager, was noticing that there were responses that worked better to solve the customers’ issues. And even others that created sales opportunities and some that caused more confusion.
In addition, there were several answers that a single attendant used once a week, so there wasn’t a standard response. But if you combine the number of times per week by the whole team, a big number would come up. That’s inefficiency.
Until a day in November in 2018, I sat in a cafe to think about the most frequently asked questions. Then I wrote my dreaded and first customer service script. Always with my feeling that it couldn’t be rigid.
The idea of this lesson is to guide you on this script model that I created that is used for practically all interactions. Especially in asynchronous communication, in which you can write a more complete answer to the person. But don’t take it too literally, because in a human conversation, that goes back and forth, you will be interrupted and maybe even interrupt the other side of the conversation. So don’t get stuck in following precisely the model unilaterally, but rather in fulfilling the requirements for a conversation and the results will come. Always be attentive to what your customer wants and needs.
The perfect message structure for customers.
Essentially, every conversation will have four steps: opening, acknowledgment, answer and closure.
The Opening is the initial moment for you to transmit warmth and make the first impression. It consists of the greeting and the introduction. You will greet your customer, pass on some value of your company or your identity. The introduction is the moment when you introduce yourself: who you are, what you are there to do, from which department you come from, these things. It’s the ideal time for you to show some confidence, more enthusiasm, more authority, and the like, depending on the context.
Next is Acknowledgment. In this step you will give the emotional response that the situation needs. Does it need you to show more empathy for the situation or is it possible to display some enthusiasm? There are cases you will even want to be excited about and even celebrate.
As a third step, we have the Answer. Here, you have the standard answers that I mentioned in the beginning, where you can copy and paste them. I will comment more on some principles on how to use scripted responses in a second.
In the final stage, the Closure, when we confirm that the call has been resolved, that everything is fine and we say goodbye.
How NOT to communicate with the customer:
One thing to take note is that the Customer Road to Success is based on these four steps, but the customer service script is only there for the third step, the Answer. Here, you shouldn’t allow too much change, for it ideally contains the best possible answer for your audience.
There should be no better answer given based on how your customer behaved or whether they are “better” customers than others. Your answer should be the optimal one. And on that we will improve over time.
Why? You cannot script excellence. Remember that? The script does not serve and should not be intended to emulate human touch. You use the script as the actual answer, and the rest must be “open” for the attendant to be the most human, spontaneous and to act according to the situation. Of course, and I recommend it in my Excellence Service course, you can write some sentences as guidelines on how to behave outside the scripted part.
A script serves for compliance and best practices. So it’s confined to the Answer section. This is where you need to be most compliant and this is where best practices should be employed. There’s a mechanism that I teach in the course on how to draw from the scripting techniques for these off-hand parts.
Finally, the script is great for training. In this way, you can train new attendants, check adherence to the standard and verify if the answers are in accordance with the expected and trained. At least part of them you can check.
How about that?
When to give care and attention in your communication with customers.
Finally, if you look closely at the image of the Customer Road to Success, I painted certain parts with the colors of the Care and Attention framework, but not the Answer section. Why? Because here you don’t change your behavior according to your customers. The answer is unique, standard and has no variation.
The moments for you to give care and attention when communicating with your customers are at the opening, acknowledgement and closure. Depending on the level of relationship you have, you will be warmer, or more serious, or more distant in opening and closure. In Acknowledgement, it’s the moment for you to give more or less attention, expressed as empathy or enthusiasm, respectively, according to the situation you find yourself in.
There are several techniques for this to happen, I hope to talk about it soon. Cool? As we say in my hometown: better than that, just twice that.
The article’s treasure:
In the end of each article, I will write a final recap for you to memorize the main takeaways.
This is what I presented in this article:
- We talked about why having a standard message can improve your service, the advantages.
- Also we commented on the perfect message structure for your communication with customers.
- Every conversation will have four steps: opening, acknowledgement, answer and closure.
- How not to put together a perfect service message: scripting the human part of your service. Don’t do it.
Great?
In the next lesson, we’ll start to address how to deal with angry customers. It will be split in two lessons. In the first one, why customers get angry in the first place and how to react when you are in the middle of the situation. In the second part, I will introduce a model for dealing with these situations, with questions and guidelines.
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Always look both ways. See you in the future.
