As Founder of E-WRITE, Leslie O’Flahavan, is a problem solver for work-related writing challenges who has helped thousands of people learn how to write well. She helps customer service agents write on-brand emails, chat, and social media posts. In this episode, Leslie discusses what led her to create her business back in 1996, why she’s so passionate about helping customer services representatives, the top skills she helped several major airlines incorporate into their customer service writings, how personal connections with your customers offset repeat complaints about the same issue, what a “brand voice” is and how she helps customer service agents write in that voice, and more!
Mentioned in this episode:
- Leslie O’Flahavan’s Website
- Leslie O’Flahavan’s Writing Matter Blog
- Leslie O’Flahavan on Twitter
- Smart Customer Service Conference
Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! Now, as someone who wants to have a voice of influence or you want your organization to have a voice of influence, I know that you’re pretty highly focused on doing what’s best for the people that you serve. And so in the next few weeks, we’re going to be featuring some interviews with experts who are going to be speaking at a conference that I’m going to be speaking at in Washington D.C. It’s called the Smart Customer Service conference. And it’s from April 29th through May 1st 2019. So if you are in that area, or if you are in industry where customers service is important to your business then that would be a fantastic conference to come to. But even if you’re not, we have some really interesting interviews coming up for you. And the one today is going to be a blast. So today I have with me, Leslie O’Flahavan. Leslie has helped thousands of people learned to write well. That’s right, we’re going to be talking about writing. As founder of E-WRITE, she is a problem solver for work-related writing challenges. She helps customer service agents write on brand, email, chat, and social media post. And Leslie has worked with several international airlines to update their style of communicating with customer. She has done so many things. She’s also an instructor for Lynda.com.
Andrea: So Leslie, is it great to have you with us here on the Voice of Influence podcast.
Leslie O’Flahavan: Well, thanks very much! I’m really excited to speak with you and thanks for inviting me.
Andrea: Well, I’m curious. How did you get started with teaching people about writing? Is this something that you have always been particularly good at and then you wanted to teach or how did this go for you?
Leslie O’Flahavan: Well, I tell the story quickly and in reverse chronological order. So my business is called E-WRITE and you can guess when I founded it by the name. I founded it back in the e-hyphen era. I founded it in 1996 and this is when email was just becoming a common way people communicated at work. And I thought “Well, shoot, that’s gonna change everything. People who have not been writing email to each other, now they’re gonna be writing email to each other. They’re gonna need help writing it well.” And that was a little wrong and a little bit early because, you know, it was so trivial and mundane in 1996 when I started the business. People didn’t really want any help learning how to write email well. But what they did want was help learning how to write with web content. So, I launched the business in 1996, as I said, and started offering customized onsite writing workshops for people who wanted to learn web content, e-newsletters, and all other kinds of online writing because it really was quite new to them. Before I started E-WRITE, I was a college writing instructor for nine years. Before that, I was a high school English teacher. Shout out to all the English teachers out there, and I did that for nine years.
Andrea: That’s great!
Leslie O’Flahavan: So that’s a brief history of my life as a writing instructor.
Andrea: Love that you taught school. I was a music teacher as well. OK, so that’s your brief history as a writing instructor. So you were teaching for a very long time and then you turn that into a business where you’re helping businesses with this. What do you do with that now? What are you doing with your business now in terms of teaching people how to write?
Leslie O’Flahavan: Well, my business is like a nice big dining room table with many, many strong legs under, and that’s one reason that I’ve been able to stay in business for all these years. You know, essentially, I’m a writing instructor. I developed writing curriculum and I deliver it. But it’s way more complicated than that and way more broad. For many years, I did offer web-writing courses for corporations, for associations. I live in the Washington D.C. area, so there’s a lot of headquarters of nonprofit here and _____ agencies. But somewhere around 2001, I started to learn more and more about the work life of people who had been answering 1-800 phone numbers in the customer services role. You know, many companies employed them in a hundreds or even thousands customer service agents or customer service reps, and their writing life was getting more and more complicated. And it continuous to be quite complicated because, you know, back in the days, they answered phone calls and postal mail and then they added emails and then they added life check and they added social media and then they added text. And now they’re doing all those channels supported by a_____, so it’s really, really complicated. And there’s a workforce, they’re not the most writerly. It’s not like sitting down with a bunch of PR professionals or with a bunch of marketers. These are not the most writerly people and they needed help. They work in a factory of writing. So for about the last 15 years or so, I’ve offered a lot of writing training, custom curriculum, training delivery, and other types of support to large customer service organizations. And as you mentioned in my intro, since maybe 2012, I’ve worked with, I think 10 or 11 big airlines to help them update the way they communicate with customers and enable their frontlines customer service agents, even their reservation agents to write better.
Andrea: Hmmm. Just briefly, I really want to get how you help write to customers in their company’s brand voice. But what are just like some of the maybe top three or five things that you actually helped those airlines to incorporate into their writing?
Leslie O’Flahavan: Well, one is the skill of responding with empathy and replacing knee-jerk insincere sympathy with empathy. So for an airplane when a person emails in and says “I am so angry, I have to sit at Baltimore airport for six hours for weather delay and when I looked out the window, the weather looked fine to me.” That’s an angry email from a customer. Most airlines are built to respond, “We regret any inconvenience this delay may have caused,” which is just passive-aggressive nonsense. So one thing I do is train the frontline agents and gain support from their managers to have them respond with empathy and, if necessary, to apologize because airlines really needn’t apologize for the weather. But what they can say is “Thank you for contacting us. I do understand that travel is stressful and sitting at the Baltimore airport for many hours must have been especially tiresome.” That’s empathy. That’s I see your way. And customers appreciate this. It doesn’t make the weather delay go away but it does make the airline sincere. Not only sound sincere, that is a sincere behavior.
Andrea: Sure.
Leslie O’Flahavan: Shall I give you another one?
Andrea: If you’d like, that’d be great.
Leslie O’Flahavan: Sure! Well, lots of big customer service organizations airlines or other ways rely on formed letters or formed answers even if it’s not a full letter, they rely in formed answers or prewritten content. One thing I do is help the frontline customer service reps learn how to customize those contents. So for example, if you have a little snippet of prewritten content that says when you’re open, when your stores are open, you don’t need to customize that if you’re open Monday through Saturday from 8:00 a.m. till 9:00 p.m. that should be prewritten. But I help them learn how to add a little bit of personal information such as, “So we hope you’ll come in this weekend.” So the prewritten content doesn’t come across as robotic.
Andrea: Hmmm. I love that! And it really does kind of speak to the personality. All of a sudden, it’s not just a corporation and it’s not just a company, there’s an actual person behind that and you’re actually connecting with that person.
Leslie O’Flahavan. Indeed. That’s it and that’s what customers crave from a practical point of view that personal connection offsets repeat complaints about the same issue. Because when you’re a customer and you don’t feel anyone’s paying attention to you, you’re going to make a lot of noise, repeated amount a lot of noise and that’s expensive for company.
Andrea: So what is the company’s brand voice? Let’s talk about this a little bit. Let’s talk about first of all what a brand voice is, especially in terms of writing.
Leslie O’Flahavan: OK. Well, a brand voice is set of writing choices that support the personality your brand conveys through many means, through its logo, typography, mascot, or advertising campaigns. Brands have personalities and personalities have a voice. And the definition of what your brand voice might be or what the writing choices you might make to sustain that brand voice. This is information that is very commonly understood from marketing and PR and graphic designers, and all that community in any company. But it’s information that’s rarely shared with people who work in customer service and they’re expected to kind of soldier on without it or to write the customers with not much awareness that they’re sustaining the brand voice. So a lot of my work involves taking the brand voice guidance that’s already in the big company and basically showing it to the customer service management. We have just never seen it before. It’s the bad byproduct of a siload organization. They have often just never seen it before. So sometimes, I’ll ask “Can I see the brand voice guidance that your marketing team gives to your ad agency?” And they’ll retrieve it and I’ll say, “Let’s figure out how are we gonna use this for the person with the headset on who’s answering the phone or the person who is answering your support Twitter handle. You know, how is this person going to be able to read this guidance and make it real in their own life?”
Andrea: Oh yeah absolutely.
Leslie O’Flahavan: We want customers to have the same experience with your brand personality after they have a problem or when they have a question. If they did before the spent the money with you back when they were falling in love with you. And that’s why it’s so important that the people who provide support help service whatever you want to call it. They’re aware of the writing craft that goes into sustaining that brand voice and they know how to make those same writing choices.
Andrea: So how do you actually translate the document that you got from the marketing team and help the customer service agent to actually be able to write in that. And whether that be the really big companies or even small companies, how do you translate that for them?
Leslie O’Flahavan: Well, sometimes I do within the form of customized onsite training or online training. Sometimes, with the customer service management support, I will write a customer service brand voice guide, a separate reference work. But mostly, I plant the idea and support the behavior change that enables people to write in their company’s brand voice. Because remember when customers write for help that’s usually emotionally neutral, but when they write to complain, the people who answers those complaints day in and day out, often become very protective of the company. They can sometimes become defensive, because all day, every day, people are complaining at them and it’s painful.
Andrea: And it can feel personal.
Leslie O’Flahavan: And it can feel personal, and defensive writing is rarely in a brand voice. Because the more you’re trying to protect your company or insist on a policy or reject the fourth request for a refund, the more you’re trying to say no essentially, the more difficult it is to use that kind of candid a flirty language that we use in marketing. It’s hard work. It’s hard work. But I forgot to say something that’s really at my core and that it sustains me as we do this hard work is, I believe workplace writing is a learned skill. While I completely accept and recognize that there’s some kind of gift involved with poetry, fiction, writing drama, or reading a play; I believe that for most people, being able to perform competently as a writer at work is something they can learn. And I believe it’s not almost a civil right issue, to me, it is a civil right issue. If you hire somebody to do this hard job and this person who’s a customer service rep is probably not bringing down the big box either. If you’re the employer, you’re obliged to provide the training they need to do job well. Power to the people!
Andrea: Absolutely. I mean, there’s so much to that. I mean for so long, it felt like customer meant sort of like the dark people in the basement that have to deal with all of the yucky stuff. And we just want you to get it done as fast as you can. We don’t have to make this go away. I don’t even want to know that it’s there. But those people are the most powerful people in the company and they don’t even realize that there’s some definite contradiction there in between what they’re actually doing for the company and the amount of respect and support that they receive.
Leslie O’Flahavan: That’s really true and really wise observation. And perversely, social media has kind of blurred the lines between marketing and customer care in a way that some companies are managing very well and some aren’t. But it doesn’t really matter in the sense that all of these customer communications are coming in through, for example, Twitter. So, some very big companies separate the functions of handling customers’ complaints or questions about purchases or about subscriptions or about account information. They _____ separately from their marketing in social channels and some smaller companies can’t do that. So the person who is pushing an offer for 15 percent off coupon or something is the same a person who’s answering questions about why, what to do, how to reload the app when it’s not working.
Andrea: Right, right.
Leslie O’Flahavan: And I think that’s actually giving the leaders a little bit more respect and the customer service rep are less like the people in the basement with the headsets on and they very gently chained the ankles to the desk, you know.
Andrea: Yeah, absolutely. And I know that there are lots of really great companies that are thinking progressively on that and doing some really good work and obviously hiring people to come in and help with this sort of thing. So do you have any tips for writing in a brand voice? For example, if a company’s brand is based on prestige and needing to establish trust with their customer that sort of thing, what kind of things do you suggest that they do or don’t do in order to write in that voice?
Leslie O’Flahavan: Let’s take an easier example because when you’re thinking of a prestige brand like a five star hotel or something like that?
Andrea: Sure. You can take whatever example you want to take.
Leslie O’Flahavan: OK. Yeah, let me think about that. Writing in a brand voice has to do with some very easy to describe writing behaviors and some that are more difficult. So for example, is usually branded language, so part of writing in a brand voice is using the very terms that your company uses for such things that people can purchase elsewhere. So for example in an airline, do you call it a flat bed seat when it’s in first class or do you call it lie flat feet. So one part of writing in a brand voice is keeping everybody up to date on the term that we use and making sure they use it. Another part of writing in a brand voice is choosing a level of formality and sustaining it through all your writing choices. So if you’re talking about clothing _____,you’ll notice that a lot of their writing, even the writing in some channels that we would consider kind of playful like Twitter, they’re rather formal. They don’t use a lot of contractions. They don’t use as wide a range of emojis this kind of thing. They stay kind of formal because they’re close are kind of formal. A lot of times when answering completely casual company will write “Oh no!” Well, a form of company whose brand voice is formal doesn’t do that. They’ll say “We’re sorry to hear that.” Or “This is not good to hear,” these kinds of things. So the first thing is choosing and using the language our brand users, another writing choice is the level of formality in the word you choose or in the structures such as contractions or full form of the word. Another is the kind of extent of the irreverence you use or the snark or the mock or all of that. In contemporary customer service writing, there’s a lot of irreverence and snarky writing and a lot of brands are built on snarks. So we have to approve of it because if the brand voice before you purchase is snarky one or sarcastic one then it make sense that the brand voice app you purchased will be the same. But kind of how much of the brand voice is snarky, that’s an issue or reverent. I put snarky at one and in reverent at the other. And then I think another quality of brand voice is, I don’t know, how much of the responsibility for the service breakdown are you willing to shoulder? And that’s come out in your writing. Some companies by brand are extremely reluctant to shoulder much of their responsibility for the breakdown and others are quite willing to shoulder responsibility for the breakdown. So once that they’re unwilling, they might write things such as “We’re sorry to hear this, please contact us with full details of where you purchased the product and what kind of damage you observed in the packaging.” But if they’re kind of less standoffish, they might be willing to write something like “Oh no, we hate to hear this happen again.” Which comes across a schedule but it’s actually a different feature of the brand voice.
Andrea: Hmmm yeah. These are all really fantastic tips and examples. I know that you’ve already mentioned that you care in a sense because it’s almost a matter of justice for you or taking care of these front line people, why do care about these topics so much?
Leslie O’Flahavan: That’s the Adam and Eve of questions isn’t it?
Andrea: Yeah.
Leslie O’Flahavan: Well, life work has been to help people write better. So that’s kind of simple. You know, I’ve been working in this field a long time and it means a lot to me for that reason. I think, I’ve seen people grow a lot and that’s very meaningful to me. Sometimes I help cause that growth, sometimes I was just at their shoulder while it happened. I do think that having me around helps people believe they can grow and be better writers. I also think that when you’re at work, some of the widest range of skills you have to come up with are ones you exercise in writing, and you’re rarely notified beforehand that you’ll need them. So if you’re a salesman or a saleswoman, you know you have to be able to give pitch and use it powerfully, you know that. But did you also know that you might have to write a blog post about a new offering that your company had, maybe not. But nobody says to you, “I just want you to get ready. You may have to write a blog post.” Nobody says that, they say, “Next Tuesday, we need you to do a blog post.” It’s kind of like being the person who picks up the golf balls at the driving range, you know, there’s just all of these things coming at you. All of these writing responsibilities even something as mundane as a substantive email to your boss is a challenging writing responsibility. So I believe people deserve the support to accommodate these changing demands.
Andrea: Absolutely! OK, Leslie, you are doing a session with another colleague, Smart Customer Service conference here in April 2019, can you tell us just a little bit about it?
Leslie O’Flahavan: Sure! I’ll be glad to. I’m speaking with Jeff Toister who is a close friend of mine and a much admired colleague in the customer service. I think over the last five years Jeff has run a survey at least three times to find out what are customers’ expectations for email response time. So, let’s say you have an insurance policy, you have an insurance policy and you have a question about it and you email in to your insurance company asking the question, how soon do you expect an answer. And it won’t be any surprise to anybody that people are expecting answers from companies via email really quickly, much more quickly than they used to. I believed Jeff did his survey for the first time in 2012 or 2013 and I think response time has shown by half. So he’ll talk about the results of his survey and the insights he has _____ from it. And I will talk about how to answer that quickly without using formed letters all the time or without sounding like a robot or a company that just doesn’t care. That’s what we’ll be doing.
Andrea: It sounds very exciting and it sounds interesting as well. Thank you so much for being here on the Voice of Influence podcast. We will have links to the Smart Customer Service conference in the show notes. But also, I know that you offer some things as well, can you tell us just a little bit about that then, Leslie?
Leslie O’Flahavan: Sure! I’d be glad to connect with anyone who’s listening on Twitter. And I’m proud to say that there’s no photos of eggs Benedict in my Twitter. It’s all about writing. So I’m at LeslieO. I’m not Leslie zero, I’m Leslie O, and of course, I blog at Writing Matters at my website ewriteonline.com. And I am really open to conversations about what’s bugging you as you write or how you’ve grown. In fact, I’m the person who wants to hear how happy you are with something you wrote, because I’ll be happy too. That kind of joy carries over. So if you have questions about how to respond to your customers or you want to show me something you’re using in a newsletter or another publication and just get my feedback, _____.
Andrea: Oh that sounds great! And you truly are a joy, Leslie. Thank you for being here.
Leslie O’Flahavan: It’s my pleasure! Thank you for listening as we were talking before it’s an honor to be listened to. I really appreciate it. Thanks for the great questions.