6 Ways ProWritingAid Improves the Customer Service Experience

Good customer service is crucial to the success of your business. Here are some statistics that back that up:

• U.S. businesses lose $62 billion every year because of bad customer experiences
• 49% of Americans switch brands because of poor customer service
• 52% of consumers have made another purchase after a positive customer service experience
• 78% of consumers have abandoned a purchase due to a bad customer service experience
• 77% of consumers say they can recommend a brand to their friends after having a positive customer service experience

Here’s the thing.

The relationship between brands and consumers has drastically changed over the years. In days gone by, what mattered most were high-quality products and low prices. Advertisements focused on the tangible benefits of products. Back then, we believed brands with high-quality products were better.

But everything has changed.

Adverts are now more consumer-oriented and focus on the customer experience.

While consumers still care about the quality of products and the price, there's a new factor that helps them to choose between brands: customer service. Modern customers invest in brands that focus on their needs and offer value beyond the initial purchase.

There's a lot at stake with each brand interaction, and that's why you should focus on delivering awesome customer experiences. Good customer experiences are all about communication. Most people say that unclear communication is the biggest hindrance to having a positive customer experience.

What Does Good Customer Service Do?

It's important for brands to ensure that customer-facing messages are as clear as possible and convey the message the first time.

A recent study found out that eight out of ten customers who switched brands because of a poor customer service experience would have stayed if the problem had been resolved on the first attempt.

ProWritingAid can help your customer service representatives communicate clearly, concisely, and swiftly. Here's how.

1. Boost Customer Confidence in Your Brand

When you’re trying to build trust with clients, the last thing you want is to look sloppy or inconsistent. Unintentional typos and wrong punctuation can be all it takes to change a customer's perception of your company.

Exceptional customer service begins with confidence. After all, your customers want to know that the person they're dealing with knows what they are doing and can serve them in a professional manner. They need prompt and honest answers to their questions.

It can be hard for a customer service rep who writes badly to communicate with confidence.

ProWritingAid can help your customer service representatives to communicate clearly and effectively with clients. The editing tool offers real-time writing tips that enhance clarity, tone, and consistency. It gives detailed explanations for flagged errors to help customer service reps learn from their mistakes.

You can download ProWritingAid as a browser extension that integrates with most web pages. Your team will see spelling, grammar and writing style improvements wherever they write (though they can always turn the editor off when it's not needed). ProWritingAid analyzes your text and highlights key writing issues like repeated phrases, overused words, misspelled words, and punctuation errors. Customer service agents will learn as they edit and become stronger writers.

2. Use Simple Messaging to Communicate with Customers Effectively

Nobody likes reading lengthy messages, especially when they have to slog through rambling sentences and unnecessary words. Inessential words weigh down your writing and can make you sound uncertain.

While we all want to communicate clearly, wordy sentences can mask the best of our ideas. In a well-written sentence, every word has a function and occupies the right spot.

ProWritingAid's sticky sentences report, one of our most popular reports, tells you when a sentence uses too many 'glue words'. These are words that stick sentences together, but that have little meaning themselves:

The editing tool easily detects words and phrases that take up space in a sentence without adding any value. Removing some of these will stop your customers from having to fight to get to your meaning.

3. Eliminate Jargon From Your Writing

One thing that should never make its way into the correspondence between a customer service rep and a customer is jargon. Jargon is the silent killer of customer experiences. However, avoiding it completely can be difficult, especially if you use it on a daily basis.

Business jargon is quite confusing, but it remains a vital part of business culture. It creates a false sense of belonging because it's a secret language that only a few people know. Yes, jargon can be uniting, however, it can also be polarizing.

Every industry has its jargon, a specialised way of writing and talking. For instance, it is normal for servers in restaurants to refer to a table for two as a "two-top." And people in the hotel industry commonly refer to the night shift as the "graveyard shift."

However, if customer service teams use industry jargon when communicating with clients, they completely ruin the customer experience. Jargon creates more confusion than is necessary and can be very isolating. It's not a good idea to write in a language that means nothing to your customers or prospects.

Jargon can also be condescending. Your customers may feel that they are being talked down to or purposefully confused. Your customer service reps should not show off their industry vocabulary. It's more important for them to share their knowledge with customers in simple terms.

ProWritingAid is programmed to recognise the business jargon that people commonly use in their writing. The editor will flag the jargon, and suggest replacements. Jargon often approximates a meaning without actually getting it across. If the replacements don't work with your sentence, it may be a sign that you need to rethink it completely.

4. Respond to Your Customers Quickly

One of the biggest determinants of good customer service is speed, especially for time-sensitive issues. A while ago, a research study found out that the average email response time is 12 hours. The worst thing your customer service team can do is to keep customers waiting.

If you want to meet the expectations of 89% of your customers, your average email response time should be 1 hour. And if you want to offer world-class customer service, responses should be sent in 15 minutes or less.

One of the best ways you can show your customers they are important is by responding quickly to complaints. ProWritingAid can help improve your customer response times. Our Chrome extension allows customer service reps to edit anything they write online–whether it's on social media platforms or email.

ProWritingAid ensures that your customers are engaged across their entire service journey. It helps increase customer satisfaction and reduces your cost to serve. A reply that would have taken 30 minutes to write, edit, and polish may only take 10 to 20 minutes with ProWritingAid's real-time suggestions.

The extension integrates with Gmail, WordPress, Twitter, Facebook, and many other websites.

You can respond quickly without worrying that you're sacrificing quality.

Remember – good grammar is crucial, but it's also important for your customer service representatives to make sure they understand a customer’s specific problem before offering a solution.

5. Structure Communication For Maximum Clarity

Customer service agents can't always respond to questions using only five sentences. Sometimes, client queries require lengthy responses. Many related topics may have to be combined in one response to avoid sending one message after another.

In such cases, structuring and formatting responses correctly goes a long way in making writing clear. ProWritingAid doesn’t just check for grammar mistakes. Users can click on the ProWritingAid icon in any text entry field (e.g. in their email composition box) to open the whole editor. This gives them access to all of ProWritingAid's reports.

The Readability Report helps you see whether your paragraphs are readable. If you get a low readability score, you're probably trying to combine too many ideas in a sentence or paragraph. This report helps your customer service team know when they need to re-think their writing to make it clearer for customers. They'll learn how to recognize over-complicated paragraphs, and will soon know how to write simply and clearly first time.

Customer service reps can also use bullet points and numbers to clearly separate topics in a response. They should write one to three sentences per paragraph as this enhances readability. Every paragraph should focus on one main idea.

Your customers will probably read the messages on mobile phones, which is why paragraphing is so important.

6. Don't Confuse Your Customers

In today's business environment, you only have one shot to make a great impression. Consumers have a lot of options to choose from, and if your customer service is not up to par, they will quickly switch to another brand.

That’s where uniform customer service comes in. Your customer service team needs to deliver uniform and consistent customer service to create and maintain good relationships with customers.

With Style Guides, you can set grammar and writing style rules that are relevant to your team. For example, if you want to make sure that your customer service team all use the same terms to refer to the same things, you can set a reminder.

Here at ProWritingAid, we offer a Web Editor that you can use in your browser. If our customer service team referred to this interchangeably as the web editor, web app, or online editor, customers could become confused and be left wondering what all these different versions of ProWritingAid are.

We can fix this using the Style Guide:

Just enter an example of the incorrect usage, then narrow it down to the specific term and its replacement. Then, if a member of your team uses the wrong word or phrase, they'll be reminded in real-time, as below:

Now everyone is on the same page.

Customer service agents will be able to write uniformly and clearly. They will convey their authoritative understanding of the topic in straightforward terms. Your customers won't be left wondering what's supposed to happen next.

Retain Customers – and Gain New Ones – with Great Customer Service

Contrary to popular belief, a customer service team is just as important as the other teams in a company, if not more important. It's the direct connection between your business and your customers.

Customer service is critical to your business because it helps retain customers and extracts more value from them. When your business provides top-notch customer service, it recoups customer acquisition costs and nurtures a loyal following.

Investing in customer service is a no-brainer because loyal customers bring in new customers; they convince their friends to interact with your brand. Their testimonials are more effective than any of your marketing efforts–and a lot cheaper, too.

ProWritingAid will help your customer service reps to respond to customers quickly and gain their trust. Customers are usually influenced by experiences, even one positive experience can make them remain loyal to a brand.

Customer service can be a great differentiator for your company. Well-trained customer service representatives can make your brand the best version of itself. When they communicate quickly and clearly with customers, they can revolutionize your company and expand your customer base.

Want to Enhance Your Reputation, Improve Efficiency and Maintain Brand Consistency?

We offer secure, scalable, and customizable writing support for your team. Find out more here!