Delivering exceptional customer experiences is becoming a source of competitive advantage across many industries. It leads to rising revenue and profit, helping businesses grow and increase market share. Companies are thus working hard to leave a positive impression on customers. And the key to these efforts is enabling people to interact with your brand through multiple digital venues ranging from messaging apps and email to social media and live chat.
But doing so adds an extra layer of complexity. For one, customers want the same quality of support on all channels, and yet, just above 10% of companies give consistent answers across live chat, Twitter, and email. One way to tackle this issue and ensure consistency is building scripts that provide agents with ready-made responses and phrases to different inquiries. And although this practice can lead to timely and personalized responses, it needs to be deployed with the best practices in mind to avoid the risk of alienating customers.
Using scripting the right way
Scripts have an important role to play in customer service.
Whether you’re scripting emails, social media responses, or simple requests on live chat, ensuring agents have the right words to say moves customer interactions in a productive direction.
But it’s also important not to overdo with this practice. Software Advice, a provider of software recommendations, reported that 84% of surveyed customers felt their experience improves when a representative doesn’t sound like they’re reading from a script. Avoiding this pitfall requires finding your brand’s tone of voice and using it to produce content in a consistent and clear manner.
Tips for better brand messaging
Customers are building up an impression of your brand every time they talk, write, thank, and connect with your agents. That’s why your team needs to speak in a unified tone of voice. Getting to this point, however, requires knowing what your brand is all about. Is it friendly and warm or inspirational and uplifting? Are you speaking to a young and modern buyer persona and thus need a chatty tone of voice or do you sell to families and need to appear as a friendly and approachable business? Once you decide on this, it’s recommended to create a customer experience mission statement and actionable steps on how to implement it.
And now that you’ve found your voice, use it consistently across the scripts you write. Communicating in a single voice in different channels ensures customers remember what your business is all about, and consistent brand presentation can lead to 23% in revenue increase. Your team can also benefit from communication guidelines. By creating this document, you would ensure that your employees know how to speak with your brand’s audience, whether they’re creating website copy, newsletters, help desk messages, or social media content. Providing customers with the same experience and messaging on Facebook, Instagram, emails, WhatsApp, and any digital touchpoint they use goes a long way in building brand loyalty.
Your scripts should also sound like natural conversations. Write them like you talk, in a simple and positive way.
Avoid jargon and fancy terms that customers don’t understand. Be truthful and honest and think from the reader’s perspective, constantly reinforcing benefits you deliver to customers. Everyone wants to know what you offer to them, not the other way around. And although you’ll use brand guidelines, don’t shy away from incorporating content that digital channels are best at such as emojis, gifs, and links. Lastly, double check grammar and tone because sentences can read very differently and it’s easy to misconstrue sentiment via text.
Using canned responses to help customers
Scripting can be applied in different ways and one of the most popular is canned responses. These pre-populated help desk messages allow support agents to deal quickly with customer inquiries by selecting from a catalog of ready-made replies. And this method can be used in various scenarios. Agents can use canned responses to let customers know that they’ve received the message and are working on it. Pre-written assets can also be sent to email customers about delays in solving their problems or to ask them if they were satisfied with your customer support.
Canned responses are a valuable tool to any support team but they mustn’t sound canned. Also, high-quality canned responses should be written emphatically, admitting when the company is wrong and offering a way out. Sentences need to be clear and personalized. Customers will also appreciate if you set expectations on the future steps and whether their problems will be solved in a day, a week, or a month.
Agents should also know when not to use a canned response. Sometimes a personal response is needed to address problems when your product or service really fell short and customers feel upset.
Contact center tools make scripting more effective
By refining your support methods across digital channels, you’ll be able to deliver excellent customer experiences and increase brand loyalty.
Once your scripts are up and running, the work is far from over. You need to regularly test their effectiveness and make updates based on how customers react.
Your agents play a significant role in these efforts. They’ll talk to customers on various communication channels, translating your brand strategy into concrete actions. You can make them more productive by deploying cloud-based contact center technology offered by RingCentral. These tools will enable your team to work from anywhere using a single interface instead of going back and forth with multiple platforms.
RingCentral’s solutions also enable you to build automated systems that reply automatically with canned responses or pieces of information to customers that text you. Contact us now to learn more about these and other features our technologies offer.
Originally published Jun 05, 2020, updated Dec 30, 2022
