The Words and Phrases to Use — and to Avoid — When Talking to Customers
by Sarah Moore and Brent McFerran and Grant Packard
The key to any successful relationship is effective communication. In the business world, this means trying to understand what consumers and clients are saying, and responding to them in ways that reflect that understanding. For the most part, however, the way businesses have used language to persuade, satisfy, or rectify has been more art than science.
The retail world in particular abounds with catch-phrases, habits, and commonly copied templates: “Say it with a smile.” “Never say no.” “Sorry is a magic word.” “A person’s own name is the sweetest sound in any language.” But do these and other long-held tips about how to speak to customers really work?
Studying the effectiveness of the words businesses use to talk to customers is tricky, but the rise of digital communications, social media, and big data is producing massive amounts of text that researchers can analyze and interpret using sophisticated new techniques. By combining natural language processing, computational linguistics, and psychology experiments, we can now uncover the true importance of subtle variations in how customers talk to front-line employees, and how customers respond to the words chosen by those employees. This allows us to understand the ways people communicate in business settings with growing precision, and what language is most effective.
It is now clear, according to our research and that of others, that some of the time-honored truths of customer service interactions fail to hold up to scientific scrutiny. You can, for example, say “sorry” to a customer too many times. Even if you’re a member of the company’s team, it is often better to say “I” than “we.” And not every piece of communication needs to be perfect; sometimes, a few mistakes produces a better result than flawlessness.
Here is the latest on the fast-growing, insightful, and sometimes surprising new world of business language research. (Read the full article)
