Give Us Your Feedback and Get a Free Copy of Our New Clear, Correct, Concise E-Mail Workbook

We need your help! We’re revising Clear, Correct, Concise E-Mail: A Writing Workbook for Customer Service Agents. We need your real-world input. Give us your suggestions for what to include in our revision, and we’ll give you a complimentary copy of the new workbook.

Workbook Users
If you’ve used our Clear, Correct, Concise E-Mail Workbook and/or E-Mail Writing Skills Competency Exam, we’d welcome your feedback:

• Which chapters or activities did you find most helpful?
• What new subjects or topics would you like to see included in a revised workbook? (We’re planning to include new chapters on formatting e-mails and writing useful subject lines, plus exercises specifically for help desk support staff.)

Contact Center and Help Desk Managers
If you haven’t used our workbook, but you are a seasoned customer service or help desk manager, we’d welcome your input:

• What writing problems or issues do your agents struggle with? 
• Download the workbook Table of Contents. What’s missing? What other topics would you like to see covered in a writing workbook for customer service agents?

And Finally, Customers! 
We’d like your input too:

• What writing problems do you find most prevalent (most annoying!) in the customer service e-mails you receive?
• What suggestions do you have to improve the writing of customer service agents?

Give us your suggestions as comments on this post, send us an e-mail, or give us a call. We’d love to chat with you about customer service e-mail writing.

Thanks for your comments and suggestions!

--Marilynne Rudick
[email protected]
301-986-9627

Comments

[David Kay]

For most of my clients, customer-facing staff are the people who knowledge that will be shared with other agents/analysts/engineers and directly with customers.

Good knowledgebase writing shares much in common with good customer emails: it's clear, understandable, and useable. But many specifics are different.

Knowledgebase content should be structured, findable, and extremely crisp. Complete sentences and prose structure can get in the way of clarity. Think "recipe," not "manual." Good symptoms may be noun phrases or simple clauses; good resolutions might be a series of numbered steps in the imperative.

Capturing and improving knowledge, especially while working a customer issue, is difficult. But it's a great way to eliminate rework and please customers.

Cheers,
David

[David Kay]

Make that, "...customer-facing staff are the people who capture, improve, and update knowledge that will be shared..."

Sheesh.

[Elise Hoffberg]

The Table of Contents looks great. An important part of any customer response is first taking the time to understand the question or problem. In both written and oral communication, we ask that our community support team either restate the problem as they understand it or include a (very) brief summary of what the email contains, so that a customer knows right away if they'll find the answer they're looking for. This also serves to personalize the email and assure the customer that a real person is reading their question.

Looking forward to seeing more!

Best,
Elise

Online Community Manager
Idealist.org