To some people’s chagrin, customer service has evolved far beyond traditional phone calls and in-person interactions. Emails, live chat boxes, and online customer support desks have all become core parts of the customer service experience, and demand unique skills that not everyone finds it easy to transition to—from adopting the brand’s tone of voice, to brushing up on your grammar.
Online customer service not only exercises different muscles for customer service personnel, but also means they face unique challenges from some even more irate customers. Here are a few things businesses can do to ensure that their service teams are as well-equipped as possible to handle the unique challenges of digital communication, and manage difficult online interactions.
The importance of tone in digital communication
When you communicate online, your words become your primary—and often only—way to convey both personality and professionalism. Unlike in face-to-face interactions, where tone, facial expressions, and body language play a significant role, online customer service relies solely on written communication. This is why mastering the tone of voice in your messages is crucial.
Part of this comes down to your fundamental customer service skills, and the way you judge and measure each customer interaction. However, customer service employees also represent their business, and should be to some extent an extension of the brand’s voice. By internalising the tone of the brand, you can not only build trust, but also set expectations with your customers.
Whether your brand is friendly and informal or professional and authoritative, customer service personnel should make sure that their online responses reflect this identity consistently. Developing a style guide or other guidelines can help to guide any customer service training you undertake, and act as a fallback when anyone is unsure about how to approach an online interaction. A good start is to specify things like preferred greetings, sign-offs, and general vocabulary, something that’s particularly valuable to help any new team members get up to speed, and maintain consistency across interactions.
However, it’s also important to give people a baseline for how to approach conversations. In any customer service interaction, it’s generally key to prioritise empathy. Customers are usually looking for help because something has gone wrong, and acknowledging their concerns and validating their feelings helps to build an immediate rapport, even if you cannot immediately solve the problem. Even simple phrases like “I understand how frustrating this must be” can go a long way in diffusing tension.
Adapting to different platforms
One of the difficulties inherent to performing customer service online is the variance in platforms you might be delivering it on. While the fundamental skills of online customer service remain the same, the popular platforms—from social media, to emails, to live chat—all fill a slightly different role, attracting different customers with different problems. As a result, it’s important to drill down into these differences, and the subtle shifts in tone and approach they can require.
Emails for instance are often used by customers to explore issues in greater depth. They might relate to an issue which would be hard to explain over the phone, or require attached pictures or videos to fully communicate. They might also be an escalation of an existing problem that started with a live chat communication, and wasn’t fully resolved. As a result, it’s important to consider the context of each email very carefully, providing a detailed and thoughtful response with a longer, more structured explanation than on other platforms.
By contrast, live chat provides a sense of immediacy. It’s often a way to drive conversions on websites as much as a way to resolve issues, helping people to find the answers they’re looking for more quickly. This means quick, concise, and friendly responses are key, with a conversational tone can help to build a quick rapport. Customer service personnel responding through live chat will benefit as much from studying common questions and memorising or even copying responses as they will from internalising your brand voice.
Customer support desks can often find themselves between both of these stalls. You may field FAQ-like questions from people looking for a quick answer, but they may also be used in a similar capacity to emails. Customer service desk software often allows for issues to be graded in terms of complexity and urgency, as well as for private notes to be left on entries, helping to flag up the tone staff should adopt and the approach they should take to each ticket.
How to manage challenging interactions online
Online platforms often give customers a sense of anonymity and empowerment, which can sometimes result in more aggressive or rude behaviour than you might typically experience in person. This might be less emotionally affecting than someone shouting in your face, but it nevertheless requires you to develop strategies to manage these interactions effectively, and leave people with a positive impression of the business.
One important (and often neglected) strategy is not to force staff into rushing through responses for the sake of efficiency. Empowering staff to thoroughly read a message, take a moment to think about their response, and even consult with others will help to ensure that they fully understand the customer’s issue, and improve the chance of a quick and satisfying conclusion.
It’s also important for staff to keep their emotions in check. It can be very easy to take negative comments personally, particularly if an interaction is proving difficult to resolve, and dragging on longer than you would like. Try to reiterate that the primary goal is to resolve the issue rather than to win an argument, and structure responses around this, rather than wasting energy trying to defend yourself or the company from any accusations.
Empathy and validation are valuable in this regard. Again, it pays to acknowledge the customer’s frustration, even if the validity of their points isn’t entirely bulletproof. Most people do not willingly contact customer service departments if they have no legitimate issue, and implying that they have no case or undermining the legitimacy of their messages can unnecessarily raise the temperature of a conversation.
The art of de-escalation
When negative situations do pop up in online customer service, the extra time you’re afforded to think and craft a response can be extremely valuable, helping to turn more of them into opportunities for building customer loyalty. An obvious approach is to lean into positive language, framing your responses in a way that encourages the customer that you will be able to resolve their problem, rather than making it seem challenging.
Over-positivity can also be grating however, particularly when the customer has already faced some frustration with their problem or previous attempts to resolve it. As such, this language should be measured, and only provide absolute certainty when you know there is a clear way to solve the problem, with actionable steps for the customer to take.
Customer frustration and the desire for positivity should also never be a reason to accept flagrant abuse. Customer service is a two-way street, and a customer should only expect a positive resolution if they themselves remain positive and respectful. This doesn’t mean telling them off for venting their frustrations, but any outright abuse towards you should be politely but firmly rebutted.
A valuable exercise can be to routinely review responses to difficult interactions, whether this means logging specific incidents, or simply reflecting on a number of interactions at the end of a given week or month. Sharing these experiences with others and undertaking customer complaints and confrontation training can help to better prepare you for future interactions, and provide a methodology for managing these conversations.
Evaluating your English skills
The value of strong English language skills is often underestimated in customer service, particularly among people for whom English is their first language. There’s a truth to the idea that talking informally and on a level with customers can be a better way to connect with them, but your writing also reflects the business, and can lead to miscommunication and misinterpretation. Acknowledging any gaps in your English proficiency and working to refine your skills can go a long way to increasing positive customer service outcomes.
An embrace of continuous learning is valuable in any business setting, but particularly in the realm of customer service. Something as simple as reading more widely (whether that’s books and articles or customer service manuals) can expose you to different writing styles and enrich your vocabulary. This is something worth considering for employers, as even a workplace library or book club could have a positive knock-on effect!
There are also general principles of good writing that are worth brushing up on. The Shakespeare quote that “brevity is the soul of wit” holds equally true in customer service. Try to use straightforward language that can’t be misinterpreted, and avoid jargon unless it’s relevant to the product, and necessary for the interaction you’re having. Short sentences also help to ensure your message is digestible, and no part of it is missed, while using the active voice (e.g. “We will send your package tomorrow” rather than “Your package will be sent tomorrow”) helps the customer to feel like action is being taken.
There’s also no shame in getting help with your proofreading. Just reading through an email yourself before sending it helps, but you can often get ‘error blindness’ after just writing something. Since it’s often not possible to leave an email or live chat message to check it later, error-checking software such as Grammarly can be extremely valuable in catching your mistakes, and helping you to identify repeat spelling or grammar errors that you can work on improving.
And finally…
Every online customer service interaction is an opportunity to build a lasting relationship, and to harness the unique assets of online communication. By investing time as an employer or employee to improve online customer service skills, you can not only enhance the quality of your customer service output, but also reinforce your reputation for helpful, responsive, and effective customer service.
If you’re interested in improving your online customer service skills, check out our Customer Service courses, including Professional Customer Service Skills and Dealing with Customer Complaints and Confrontation. Alternatively, consider our Personal Development courses for a range of options to improve your presentation, communication and confidence.
