Customer Care Content as User Experience: Writing Cost-Effective Customer Service Emails, Help Text, Forms, and Consumer Forums
- London: Monday, May 17
- Toronto: Friday, August 13
Catherine Toole
Full-Day Tutorial
What business doesn't want to provide great customer service, reduce call center costs, and yet still
have people fall in love with their brand? Right. So why do such businesses pay so little attention to
customer care copy?
The way your online customer service messages are written profoundly affects how customers think,
feel, and act online. Whether it's bad news (a payment has been rejected), good news (here's how to
receive free shipping), or simply something you’d rather not get calls about (the returns
policy), you can write customer care copy in a way that builds brand advocacy
rather than makes you an online enemy for life.
This course focuses on those often-overlooked areas of Web and email content that can cost
companies dearly in both reputation and customer service costs. From the FAQ to confirmation
emails, from delivery updates to error messages, and from “contact us” to customer
queries, we'll discuss how you can ensure that such content both builds your brand and shows best
practice.
What You’ll Learn
- How to cut call center costs by delivering effective customer service through web and email copy
- Practical, low cost ways to improve your existing customer care content
- How to deliver customer service and reputation management through social media (consumer forums)
- How to make the case for improving customer care content within your organization
Course Outline
- The value of pushing customer service online - and the pitfalls
- Which companies deliver great customer service online? How do they do it?
- The business case for investing in online customer service copy
- Developing a content strategy for your customer care
- Developing customer service personas
- Training customer service staff to write for the web
- Tone of voice
- Plain language
- Quality control
- Examples: how to do it; how not to do it
- How to deliver great customer service through email
- Transactional emails
- Confirmation and sign-up, including “forgot your password?” emails
- Your delivery and returns cycle
- Non-automated emails (from call center staff)
- Delivering bad news by email
- What makes great customer service online?
- Login and register pages
- FAQs
- Error messages
- Online forms—reassurance text
- Contact us and about us
- User guides and troubleshooting
- Copy around tools: calculator, store finder, etc.
- Mobile sites and apps: can they support your customer service cycle?
- Social media: how to manage customer complaints through forums
Format
This full-day tutorial includes lectures, Q&As, extensive examples of customer
service copy, and practical exercises.
Handouts
Copies of the presentation slides and a set of customer service email samples, with a
scorecard to help participants decide which customer service copy to tackle first.
Who Should Attend
This course is for anyone who produces, manages, or influences content on a website
where customer service copy is important. These will tend to be transactional websites or sites supporting
offline commerce, as opposed to brochureware sites. A basic knowledge of the principles of writing for the
Web is assumed.
Instructor
Catherine Toole is the founder and CEO of the British digital copywriting agency Sticky Content.
A former press journalist, she has spent the past 12 years specializing in Web and email content projects for a
wide range of clients, including the UK government, Nokia, HSBC, Orange Business Services, Regus, Heinz, AOL,
Xerox, London Stock Exchange, Hilton Hotels, Sony, the UK Post Office, and Europcar. Sticky Content also
provides content strategy, Web writing training, and copywriting services to many of the UK's top digital agencies.
A well-known speaker and blogger in the UK, Catherine is currently coauthoring a book on the
“nine new rules of ecommerce,” which will be published internationally in early 2010. She sits on the
British Interactive Media Committee.
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