We talk a lot about verbal and nonverbal communication, but
there is also an email communication that needs to be addressed, especially in
the tech support email writing.
Email writing is great,
speedy, easy and concise. However I have been noticing in personal, business
and technical email writing, as well as on internet forums, the way that people
write emails is often very poor. Sometimes it is appalling. There is room to
improve email writing everywhere.
Too many do not bother to check their email writing before
sending out their email communication. The worst offenders are sales or
business and tech support emails that are full of errors. More and more, we even
see this sloppiness in the correspondence of tech support groups who are front
end customer service representatives!
Ok, small occasional typos are understandable. We all make
them. But unfortunately they are too common in the virtual platform of tech
support and email writing. Big typos, one after another, along the whole string
of e-conversations can be very unpleasant to say the least, and does not
express a demonstration of customer appreciation nor any type of professionalism.
Imagine standing in a real time face-to-face discussion and
the person you're conversing with stumbles at every other word, stringing
together a couple of words at regular intervals, skipping pronouns and endings,
and leaving off whole consonants and prepositions. Imagine if you had to put up
with several of these communicators in your place of business within the
inter-personal activities of management, customers and suppliers day after day.
Imagine a salesperson dropping in on you this way to try and get you to buy
from him or her.
How would that feel? What would it say about those people
you’re communicating with? Well, this happens all the time in the virtual
office under tech support and email writing! It covers all spectra of email
writings and correspondence. It is especially hard to take in Customer Service.
In the last while, I began to record a whole number of these
e-communications email writing while working with several technical support
groups at various e-service establishments. Some
of these are million-dollar outfits.
For example, with one on-going dialogue, after several email
exchanges, the tech support person 'suddenly' realized that I 'was an
affiliate' and therefore had been giving me the wrong information all along --
but I had told him clearly right at the beginning of our email writing that I
*was* an affiliate.
So, what is the problem here? That told me immediately that
the support person had not read my email properly right at the start. What does
properly mean? Well, too many are speed-reading and miss the critical points,
or don’t concentrate nor focus on the email communication, or don’t care at all.
On top of this, there were bad spelling and grammar items in
all of our lengthy correspondence. OK, I understand that support people are
busy and don’t have a lot of time. However aren’t we all? Isn’t this part
of doing business? And is there any place in business where we are
excused from being businesslike and professional – especially, again, in
customer service?
It truly only takes a minute to read over the email before
hitting the send button. But, wow, the clean-up that that minute will do! As
some experts have said, poor spelling and grammar show a lack of attention and
sends the wrong message about the company’s reputation. The badly formed
sentences can even give a completely wrong message that can irritate, frustrate
and even totally lose a customer.
In another instance I recorded two totally different and
opposite answers in email writings, to the same question that came from two
tech support people from the same tech support department. Again, why? Because
they don’t “r-e-a-d” the emails. They skip and scan. This is no time for
speed-reading.
And to write correctly, one has to also read emails
correctly. I remember one tech support person who totally lost the issue at
hand, after several emails, and apologized profusely to the customer for
"misreading" her email when, in fact, he hadn't! Why? Again, because
he had not taken the time to properly read the emails that had been written.
So let’s watch what we do when we set out to read and write
our emails, spell-check and save a great amount of time and money by actually slowing
down. An once of prevention is still worth a pound of cure. /dmh
.
