Course Outcomes

This customer service and email writing course will:

  • Explain how to leverage email to build relationships with customers.
  • Discuss the importance of on-brand correspondence.
  • Provide participants with a framework for creating customer-centric messages.
  • Suggest relationship-building language.
  • Offer ideas for organizing templates.

Course Overview

Dear Customer, Your email is important to us…. Really? Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t, but you wouldn’t know it based on that opening. This interactive program focuses on email and how to use it as a tool to strengthen relationships with customers. The workshop addresses the importance of understanding a brand, knowing the feelings the organization wants customers to have about it, and what it takes to use language in such a way that those feelings are more likely to occur. 

Program Objectives

At this program’s conclusion, participants should be able to:

  • Explain the four or five words to describe their organization’s brand.
  • Identify words that fit the voice of the organization.
  • Explain the components of a customer-centric email message.
  • Confirm their understanding of problems or issues.
  • Express empathy for a problem or concern.
  • Offer solutions in such a way that customers feel respected and heard.
  • Choose positive on-brand language.
  • Follow the rules of good email etiquette.
  • Create a language library to reference as needed.

The following outline highlights some of the course’s key learning points. As part of your training program, we will modify content as needed to meet your business objectives. Upon request, we will provide you with a copy of the participant materials prior to the session(s).

Workshop Outline

Know the Target: An On-Brand Sound

From amusement parks, customers expect happiness. From the government, customers expect accuracy. In terms of branding, those types of organizations are hardly interchangeable. That’s not to say that you can’t be happy when hearing from the government or you should expect a fun park to be inaccurate. What you should expect, however, is a distinct voice from each organization. This program opens with a discussion about voice and identifying the words customers should associate with a brand. Next, we’ll talk about how that voice should look at sound in an email.

Narrow the Scope: Find the Feelings

In addition to being able to distill a brand down to a few target words, service-centric writers understand the feelings they wish to provoke in their customers. In this workshop segment, we will work through an exercise to identify those emotions and discuss actions and language that get us closer to or further away from the goal.

The Look of Listening: Showing Empathy in Writing

A service provider who has received first-rate training understands how and when to show empathy. When interacting in person or over the phone, these people know how to make a connection. The work gets a little harder, however, when the dialogue disappears, and the provider must show the same sense of concern without the benefit of a conversation. This part of the program examines techniques for doing just that.

Refer to the Recipe: A Customer-Centric Framework

With an understanding of their organization’s written brand, the feelings they want their customers to have, and techniques to show empathy without the benefit of real-time dialogue, participants will then explore the elements that comprise a customer-centric email. We will review each component and discuss its importance in the service conversation. Next, participants will evaluate and correct a number of samples. 

Service Language: Choosing “Can-Do” Words and Phrases

In addition to understanding the customer-centric framework, service providers using email should also know the words and phrases that establish trust, show an eagerness to help, and de-escalate tense situations. This portion of the program discusses the concept of filtering, the importance of choosing positive language, and methods for using words to achieve a specific service goal.

Learning Lab: Show What You Know

In this workshop segment, participants will apply what they’ve learned during the session by working through a series of case studies. This course component works best when some or all of the participants have access to a word-processing program in class.

Taming the Template: Building a Language Library

While it’s important to take the time to read and respond to each customer’s concern, it doesn’t make sense to ignore solutions that have worked well previously. In other words, if you discover the “perfect language” for addressing a particular problem, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel. This final part of the program discusses methods for organizing commonly used words and phrases and technologies that can assist in the process.

By the end of this interactive email writing and customer service workshop, participants should understand how to craft customer-centric email messages.