Monthly Archives: March 2019

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How to Convey Warmth and Competence with Chris Malone

Episode 84

Chris Malone is the Founder and Managing Partner of the research-based consulting firm, Fidelum Partners, and has previously held senior marketing positions at leading organizations such as Choice Hotels, ARAMARK, Coca- Cola, the National Basketball Association, and Procter & Gamble and has consulted to a broad range of Fortune 500 companies.

Chris is co-author of the award-winning book, The HUMAN Brand: How We Relate to People, Products & Companies.  He is also a frequent guest and contributor to CNBC, FOX Business, Bloomberg TV, Wall Street Journal Live, Forbes and Businessweek.

In this episode, Chris talks about the work he does with his current company, what the warmth and competence human perception model is, what led Chris to study this model and write his book, what we can do to ensure others perceive warmth in us, the role confidence plays in both warmth and competence, how his work relates to customer service, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Chris Malone Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

 

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From Interruption Marketing to Differentiating with Service with Stan Phelps

Episode 83

Stan Phelps is a Forbes contributor, TEDx speaker, and IBM Futurist who focuses on customer experience and employee engagement that can drive differentiation, increase loyalty, and create word of mouth in business. He holds a JD/MBA from Villanova University and a certificate for Achieving Breakthrough Service from Harvard Business School. In this episode, we discuss how Stan became interested in the field of customer service, how he believes marketing should focus more on the customer’s experience with your company or product, why he feels you either exceed someone’s expectations or you fall short, why he wrote his “Goldfish” book series and what they cover, the two sides of the customer experience coin, what he hopes those attending his presentation at the Smart Customer Service Conference will walk away with, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

83 Stan Phelps Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast! I know you really want you and your organization to have a voice of influence, and I recognized that you’re highly focused on doing the best for the people that you serve.  Well, I’ll be speaking at the Smart Customer Service Conference in Washington, DC on April 29th through May 1st 2019.  If you’re listening to this episode before that conference, we highly recommend you attend.   But over the next few weeks, we’re going to be featuring interviews with experts who will be speaking at that conference.  And each interview will feature insights related to different aspect of customer service.  So you can find out more about the Smart Customer Service Conference at smartcustomerservice.com and in our show notes at voiceofinfluence.net.   Well, today, we have with us Stan Phelps.  Stan Phelps is a Forbes Contributor, TEDx Speaker, and IBM Futurist focusing on customer experience and employee engagement that can drive differentiation, increase loyalty, and create word of mouth in business.  He holds a JD/MBA from Villanova University and a Certificate in Achieving Breakthrough Service, which I’m curious about that, from Harvard Business School.  He lives in Cary, North Carolina with his wife Jennifer and two boys, Thomas and James.  

Andrea:  Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast, Stan.  

Stan Phelps:  Thank you for having me, Andrea.  

Andrea:  Well, let me just ask what’s in your bio.  What is this Achieving Breakthrough Service?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, it’s a certificate that Harvard does.  They offer it a couple of times a year.  You get a chance to spend a week on campus with some of their top professors talking about how the ins and outs of how to achieve service that kind of catch through the noise and creates differentiation.  

Andrea:  Which is exactly what your area of expertise is in, I realized that.  So why don’t you tell us just a little bit about what you do?  

Stan Phelps:  So yeah, I don’t do much.  

Andrea:  I believe that.  

Stan Phelps:  I am an author and a speaker, so I spend my time kind of looking at the future of both customer experience and employee engagement.  And I’ve been fortunate enough and speaking in 16 different countries.  I spend my time travelling either doing keynotes or workshops on the different areas that I write about.  

Andrea:  How did you get interested in this particular topic?  Were you involved in customer service before?  

Stan Phelps:  You know, really, it’s interesting.  I studied both law and business.  But undergrad, I was a marketing major.  I was always intrigued by marketing.  And that was my first two decades working on both the agency and the brand side doing marketing.  I just realized that the type of marketing that I was doing kind of the traditional tell and sell interruption marketing, I didn’t think it was going to be the marketing of the future.  All I knew from my days of being a brand marketer was I was not part of the solution; I was just a huge part of the problem.   Andrea, I didn’t really know that fast forward and back about 10 years ago, back in 2009, I spent about a year writing about every element of marketing trying to search for this kind of key aspects.  I had, what I call my moment of truth and, decided that marketing should be more about the experience that you provide and how you do that in a very specific way that gets people to come back but also gets them talking about the experience.  

Andrea:  We absolutely agree with you here.  So I am curious what was the actual story of your moment of truth?  How did you figured that out or how did you come to that moment?  

Stan Phelps:  Well, I used to live in Connecticut and I was working for an agency that was a New York agency.  And I happen to be in Manhattan about to go in that working event with one of my colleagues and we were in one of these rooftop bars in Manhattan.  It was summer time, beautiful, and I joked, I was enjoying as you only can in Manhattan a $15 beer, if you can even enjoy that.  But it was a crowded place and we’re waiting for a couple of people to show up and I noticed this older gentleman sitting right across from me.   He was by himself, and everyone _____ scanned the room like he was looking for someone and, it becomes obvious to me that he was waiting for someone to show up.  And like a half hour goes by and no one has showed up for this guy, so I just started a conversation with him.  He started talking about the _____ you know waiting and being on time.  And this guy, Andrea, told me something that changed my life.  He looked at me in the eye and he said, “No one in life is ever on time.”  Wait a second, I been on time before, not often, but I’ve been on time.  He raised his finger to me, and you can’t see it but it gave me a kind of Dikembe finger wave and he said “No.”  He goes, “In fact, on time is a myth.”  He said “People in life are either early or they’re late.”   I took the train home that night to Connecticut and I thought to myself I said, “That same reasoning applies in marketing in business with the customers that we serve every day.  No one in business simply just meets the expectations of a customer that they serve.”  In fact, I think if the only goal that you have is satisfaction or meeting expectations, I think that’s a losing battle.  So people, you know, and brands in life you either exceeds someone’s expectations or you fall short.   And literally, I went on a mission that next week to say, I’m going to purposely look for brands that aside to do a little something extra to go above and beyond just the transaction, to stand out and differentiate themselves.  And that was the start of the journey.  

Andrea:  Hmmm.  So when you were back in marketing and you noticed this issue of being an interruption marketing kind of a situation and you said that you realized that you were contributing to the problems instead of helping solve it, was there something about that felt personal to you?  What drives you about this, like why did you end up going in this direction do you think?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, I mean, like the old school thinking was how you measure effectiveness in marketing was through the concept of impressions.  How frequently did you get your brand in someone?  How were you able to tell that message?  Did you get any earned media?  Did you look at owned media, paid media?  And I just realized that “Hey, your brand is no longer what you tell people it is.”  It just isn’t.  It’s what somebody experiences.  It’s what they feel and most importantly, it’s what they tell other people about you.   I just thought that marketing, the paradigm needed to shift and I just realized that I had something to add to that conversation. And my goal was, Andrea, at the end of the day to get brands to think at least as much about the customer that they serve rather than the prospect that they’re chasing.  I think, we’re so concerned with getting people in the “funnel” that we fail to understand that the best marketing that we do is the experience that we provide to the customer that we serve.  

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  That’s so good.  OK, so you obviously have this quality, and I’m talking about you personally, of being a thought leader.  You’re somebody who sees the problem and wants to help solve it from what I can tell.  I mean, that’s everything that you’ve said so far.  Is that a quality that you think you’ve always held?  Have you always have that desire to contribute to the bigger conversation to help solve these problems and that sort of thing?  Is that been something that you’ve always experienced?

Stan Phelps:  Yes and no.  I think I’ve always looked to see what the issue is or where I think thing should go and to try to be part of that change.  But to be honest, if I learned anything through my legal education was, to be able to look at a set of facts, to be able to spot any issue, to be able to understand what maybe the overarching rule or current practice was, and to be able to maybe look at a different way going forward.  But I think you’re probably giving me too much credit as a thought leader.  I saw what I thought was a problem and I wanted to be just part of what I thought the solution could be.  

Andrea:  Well, I think maybe thought leadership is a lofty term.  But at the same time when you’re a writer and a speaker, you’re certainly somebody who is contributing to that dialogue in a very important way and having influence on it.  

Stan Phelps:  What fascinates me and I tried to in all the books, Andrea, and there’s now eight different colors in the Goldfish series but all of them were based on the idea of looking at hundreds and hundreds of examples.  

Andrea:  Can you share with us for a second what is the Goldfish series?  I know what it is but I don’t think the audience knows yet.  

Stan Phelps:  Sure.  So after that moment of truth, I started to look for companies that did that little extra and so I needed a project or like a crowd sourcing name for it and so I called it the Purple Goldfish.  And the Goldfish has a lot of kind of, there’s a lot of plot behind that metaphor.  But just for now, it’s the idea that it’s something that small, right?  And the first three books were; Purple, Green, and Gold and that was a reference to Mardi Gras because the word that I absolutely fell in love with that I felt embodied this comes from New Orleans.   And so Purple, Green, Gold; and now there’s just been a series of books that I’ve tried to tackle of what I think is an emerging issue with an either _____ or the employee engagement side of the coin, which I think you can’t have one without the other.  

Andrea:  Right.  But why is that?  Why do you see that as pairing of both of those?  

Stan Phelps:  Well, I think we’re all of the value driven.  A friend of mine _____ like the value zone is the distance between the frontline, you know the front of the brand, that person serving the customer and the customer themselves.  That’s the value zone.  That’s where everything is created.  So you can have this lofty idea in terms of what you think the experience you should provide.  But if you don’t have people that are bought into that on the frontline and that value zone then you’ll never going to be able to make that change.   So what I personally found is the companies that really got it for the customer, Andrea, even got it more so for the employees.  In fact, nine out of ten times they’re actually placing a greater emphasis on the employees and the culture that they want to drive than they are in the customers themselves.  

Andrea:  Sure.  Absolutely, I mean, if the frontline folks, like you said buy in, almost embody the brand in their conversation and in the way that they serve then it totally changes the game.  

Stan Phelps:  Right.  Yeah, so all the books in the series have kind of focused on, and some, I think, the best books in the series have touched both sides of it.  So for example, I wrote the Red Goldfish is entirely about purpose or the Yellow Goldfish is all about happiness.  But here’s the deal, purpose is magical because it catch across both the customer side of the equation as well as the employee side.  And yellow is all about happiness, so it’s about making sure that your customers are happy but, at the same time, your employees are happy as well as the fact that you’re looking at society and should then give back to societal happiness.  

Andrea:  OK, let’s take a look at some more specific around differentiation for customer service.  What are some different things that you talk about that are really important for somebody who wants their company or their brand to be able to have a voice of influence, to be an influence in the world and with their customer themselves?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, you know, so I’ll touch on Purple because that’s what I’m going to be talking about in DC and I hope everyone comes out for Smart Customer Service 2019.  Purple is really about understanding that I think there are two sides of the coin when it comes to customer experience.  The first side of the coin is all of the value that you provide.  And so throughout Purple Goldfish, there are six different ways you can provide a little bit of added value.   The other flip side of the coin is the concept that I call maintenance.  So value is all the things that you do for your customer.  Maintenance is all of the things that your business processes due to your customer.  Meaning, how easy do you make it for them to be able to do business with you?  And so how do you do the little things to reduce friction and improve the experience?  So I think at the end of the day, there’s no big magical answer but it’s about finding the small and little things that you can do that can make a big difference.   You know, this isn’t a Trojan horse, right?  There’s no one big catch all.  It’s a lot of little things that if you can understand your customers and what drives them and you can design these little things and you can deploy them effectively that’s going to be the key to success.  It’s something I called the “3D development.”  

Andrea:  OK, so do you want to take that any further, that 3D development?  

Stan Phelps:  Yeah, I mean it’s not complicated.  Again, the first ‘D’ is Discovery and understanding who you are as a brand and what your customers value the most, not to over think it, right?  You want to be great to the things that your customers value the most and you want to understand where you want to be in the market place.  Once you understand those two things, you can then go to the “D” of Design.”  So you go from discovery first to design.   And Design is thinking ways that you bring those things to life.  How can you accentuate the things that matter the most to your customers and how can you do the way that reinforces who you want to aspire to be as a brand.  And then third is this idea of Deploy.  So how do you test, pilot, and validate those things as well as how do you make sure that your team has bought into it, that you create a process around it, and that you have the resources that you can do it again, again, and again.  And what do you do once you deploy, you go right back to that first day of discovery.  I say it as it’s a continuous development idea.  

Andrea:  Yeah that sounds great.  Alright, so do you have any examples of little things that you’ve seen companies do that really make that big difference.  Now, I realized that this might not be applicable to every single company that’s out there but perhaps there are some ideas that could spark other ideas.  

Stan Phelps:  So I’ll give you a couple on the value side of the equation.  And so we spend a lot of time on this idea.  One of the categories is first and last impressions and doing a little something extra to make that strong first impression.  You know, there’s this idea of _____,you remember the first thing and typically the last thing we experience and maybe it peak somewhere.   So like the DoubleTree hotel, they’re one of my hall of famers.  That chocolate chip cookie, it’s that warm, great first impression and it’s something that they have down to a science in terms of the consistency of doing it.  I think it embodies what they want to be seen as a brand.  They wanted to be seen as that kind of warm, welcoming place.  And so it’s very well-positioned as a great strong first impression.   Another example in the value category is a category we call sampling.  And so one of my favorite examples is an ice cream shop in St. Paul, Minnesota called Izzy’s Ice Cream.  It’s such a simple thing but when you buy a scoop of ice cream at Izzy’s, they let you pick a second flavor for free and this small little mini scoop and they actually _____, so you can’t copy if you’re an ice cream shop.  But it’s this small little mini scoop and that little mini scoop is called the Izzy.  

Andrea:  That’s cool!  

Stan Phelps:   It’s brilliant.  I mean, this is an amazing strategy for the customers that already do business with you, Andrea.  On average, they only know 20 percent of what you can do for them. So with the people that are already customers with you, why wouldn’t you invest a little buck to give them a little taste of something else?  So I think, unfortunately, we most often think of sampling as something we do for prospective customers.  Why can’t we use it for the customers that we already have?  So that’s the value side.  I’ll be giving an example or two on the maintenance side of the equation and so a couple of those over there, one is convenience.   So how do you do little things to be more convenient?  One of my hall of famers there is that company called TD Bank.  They’re on the East Coast open seven days a week.  Some nights there are open till 8 o’clock at night.  Even if they don’t decide to be open seven days a week or open till 8 o’clock, you can take this thing that they do.  They actually open the doors of the branch, Andrea, 15 minutes before what scheduled opening is and they actually keep the doors open 15 minutes afterwards.   So think about it.  Each day, you might have some people four or five customers that show up before the bank officially opens, but what do they do, they open the door and greet those customers as a way of reinforcing that convenience.  And we’ve all been there rushing to get to the bank before it closes; they open the door for 15 minutes for people and that scheduled in, right?  That’s scheduling in a little more convenience to reinforce what they’re all about.   Another great example is what we call an added service to make it easier to do a little something extra.  So, Safelite, when they come and do a repair of your windshield, you know, while that Epoxy is filling that crack and setting, it takes about 10 minutes, they typically will vacuum the interior of your car.  They’ll get glass cleaned or do all of your windows.  Now, that was never part of the deal, but they have that little extra time and they invest that as a little extra buck.  And their front line, I think each and every week, every person on the front line gets their own NPS score at Safelite.  

Andrea:  Nice.  That’s really cool!  Those are great examples.  Thank you for sharing those.  Alright, so Stan, why should somebody attend your specific breakout session at the Smart Customer Service Conference?  

Stan Phelps:  Well, I’d like to think there’s probably going to be a lot of people that already understand the importance of providing that great customer service where I would say overarching experience.  My hope is that their perspective might even get slightly shifted and they’re going to walk away with kind of the recipe for being able to create signature differentiators for their brand to create that experience that people talk about, to read about, and post on Instagram about.  

Andrea:  Awesome!  OK, so how can people find you?

Stan Phelps:  A couple of ways, StanPhelpSpeaks is my personal speaking site and then I’ve got about eight other co-authors for these books, so purplegoldfish.com is kind of the Goldfish collective and the think tank.  

Andrea:  Perfect!  Well, thank you so much for taking time to be with us here on the Voice of Influence podcast and I look forward to seeing you in DC.  

Stan Phelps:  Awesome, can’t wait!

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How to Connect Your Life to Your Customer Service with Derrick Ricca

Episode 82

Derrick Ricca is a 25+ year veteran of the hospitality industry who has been the Senior Sales Manager for Greenleaf Hospitality Group for the past 17 years. His true passions are customer service, mentoring, coaching, and food. In this episode, Derrick discusses how he got into the hospitality field, why he believes you have to drop your ego to provide good customer service, what he feels makes the biggest difference in getting a group of people to implement and adapt to changes, how he gets a transient workforce to embrace the “environment” of the business, why he strives for a blend of work and life instead of balancing the two, what he’ll be speaking about at the Smart Customer Service Conference, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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 you and your organization to have a voice of influence, I recognized that you’re highly focused on doing the best that you can for the people that you served. So over the next few weeks, we’re going to be featuring some interviews with the experts who will be speaking at a conference that I’m going to be speaking at, it’s called Smart Customer Service in Washington, DC April 29th to May 1st 2019.  And each of these interviews will feature insights related to a different aspects of customer service. So you can find out more the Smart Customer Service Conference at smartcustomerservice.com and in our show notes. Today, we have Derrick Ricca with this.  Derrick is a 25 plus year veteran of the hospitality industry.  He has been the Senior Sales Manager for Greenleaf Hospitality for the past 17 years.  His true passions are customer service, mentoring, coaching, and food; not in any particular order (he says).  Derrick is married with two sets of twins, which keep him actively coaching sports year round and trying his best to relearn algebra which I completely understand.

Andrea:  Derrick, it’s great to have you here with us on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Derrick Ricca:  Thank you so much, Andrea.

Andrea:  Derrick, I have to tell you this.  This is a running joke in my house.  It’s not a joke though.  I worked in a hotel in college for probably about a year.  So whenever we go to a hotel, I tell my husband things or I would tell him things when we first got married about “Well, we probably do it this way because of this or that sort of things.”  And I would share with him some of the things that I’ve learned and he kind of makes fun of me for thinking that I know what I’m talking about just because I was at the front desk of a hotel.  But I think it’s a big industry.  It’s an important industry.  So tell me, Derrick, how did you get involved in the hospitality industry?

Derrick Ricca:  Well, you know, the first thing you can do is you can tell your husband, “You probably do understand what’s going on.”

Andrea:  That’s right.

Derrick Ricca:  Yes, the front lines of a hotel, especially when you’re a front desk agent, that’s one of the more challenging jobs that are out there.  So anytime that you see a really good front desk agent, you know, you can tell that that person has a lot of qualities that most people don’t possess.  And so you should be very proud of yourself because a year of doing that is many more years in other professions.

Andrea:  Thank you.  I will definitely do that.

Derrick Ricca:  Yeah, and I kind of back toward by accident in the hospitality.  It was never really a dream or a goal of mine.  And what I did growing up was I battled my dad who was in sales and said “I don’t wanna go to sales.”  He said, “Hey, you’d be perfect for sales.”  And I’m like “I don’t wanna do that.”  And for me, it was kind of one of those things where I had started a job working for a restaurant group and doing everything but food.  And then I realized that, you know, I was a big fan of food and I was a big fan of selling and I was also a big fan of really making people smile. So I put all three of those together and I ended up interviewing at this hotel.  And at the time, the hotels under construction and, you know, Kalamazoo was not really anything you jump up and down about, and the owner of the hotel said “Hey, this hotel is gonna be really something special.”  I trusted him and 17 years later, it is really a special hotel.  It’s funny to look back on it and say “Gosh, how did I ever end up here.”  But it’s been a really fun journey.

Andrea:  I love what you said about; you like to make people smile.  Is that something that you’ve always noticed about yourself or where did that comes from?

Derrick Ricca:  I think I’ve always been a people pleaser and those types of people belong in hospitality.  If you really care about people and you have a little bit of empathy that you can spread around and you enjoy interacting, you know, hospitality is such a great career.  And a few don’t enjoy that then that’s the last career you should probably get into.

Andrea:  Have you _____ in making people smile?

Derrick Ricca:  Yeah, and that’s the whole thing is you have to really kind of have something happen in your life where you can really appreciate people going out of their way to make your life better.  Because a lot of times, in hospitality situations whether you’re a restaurant or a hotel or wherever you are at, it could be a retail situation.  A lot of times, you’re not comfortable in that environment.  It’s not your house.  It’s not somewhere you’re used to.  So a lot of times, people won’t go try out new restaurants because they don’t feel comfortable there. I’m just the opposite.  I’m the person that would go to any dive bar or any dive restaurant just to kind of check it out.  I think for me, it’s always been one of those things where, you know, I just enjoy life.  I enjoy meeting people.  I enjoy having conversations.  I enjoy so many different opinions and so hospitality I guess was kind of made for what I like to do.  And it’s kind of one of those things where as much as I have thought it in the past, I have been told, “Derrick, you’re kind of introverted but you’re kind of extroverted,” and it’s hard to really get out of it once you’re in it because it is really enjoyable.

Andrea:  Well, there’s something really special about that feeling of knowing that the other person is better off because of you.

Derrick Ricca:  Yeah.  You know, to be good in customer service, it takes so many different things.  You have to really be able to drop your ego.  And if you can do that, you can really do some magical things in customer service because customer service has gotten harder and harder over the course of time.  And people, you know, always talk about going into places and just having such horrible customer service. And I agree, you go into fast food or you’re going to some of these places where the employees are hard to come by and they’re always short staff and they’re trying to get people in there.  Sometimes, they’re working with the younger group that doesn’t have the experience.  And it’s really hard for somebody to come out of there and say “Gosh, I really just have a great experience customer wise.  So, you know, it’s something that’s always kind of needled me a little bit where I just kind of have looked at it, felt it and said “OK, I need to embrace this and I somehow need to push a better feeling to those people so that when they leave the feel good.”

Andrea:  You just mentioned that you have to be able to drop your ego.  What is that look like for somebody who’s in customer service to really drop their ego, what do you mean by that?

Derrick Derrick:  I think that, for me, it’s one of those things where I really learned to drop my ego by coaching youth sports.  I know that’s sounds really strange but, you know, I’ve been lucky.  I’ve got some kids that are pretty athletic.  I’ve always been able to _____ the chips are down and they need to win a game and they come in and hopefully do something good.  But I learned that that’s not always the best thing to do and that sometimes you have to put some faith in some kids that may not have that much talent or what so that they can grow and develop. So it’s one of those things where there’s a person, the best thing that I can is get as much knowledge as possible and go into a situation to help the consumer or the guest or whoever it is.  Not brag and boost about what I know but try to help them and figure ahead of time “OK, where is this person going and how I can help them the best way possible?” So it’s little silly things that people do that make a big influence that you don’t realize.  You know, I had a consumer the other day or guest come in the hotel and he wanted to go off property and he wanted to get pizza but he was a little older and he just wasn’t sure of himself.  So I walked him down there.  And for me, it wasn’t a big deal.  It took about 10 minutes and we had a really good conversation on the way down.  I dropped him off for some pizza and it was funny he came back to the hotel and he asked, “You know, I’d like to go back there again tomorrow, would you come there and have lunch with me?” For me, it really kind of felt good like “OK.”  You know, I found exactly what this guy wanted and I put him in a place where he’s happy and he wanted to share that with me.  So you know, I went back the next day and made new friends.  So it’s kind of cool where, again, you can drop your ego and you can look at something and you can just understand like “Hey, I just want to help this person and I want to make their day more enjoyable.”

Andrea:  It sounds like good.  It’s not about you.

Derrick Ricca:  It was funny, I remember in college, I took a course and the professor was big on servant leadership.  And I never understood really what he was talking about even while I was in the class.  And then as I got into the real world, you kind of look back at things that you’ve done in your past and you say “Well, OK, now it all makes sense.”  You do things sometimes and it’s not about you, it’s about the situation.  So there’s a lot of times in my life where I looked back on it and I put myself in situations that don’t necessarily benefit me but they have taught me a whole _____ lessons. So today, I went to the grocery store and I decided that I wanted to make my kids a fun dinner.  So I was going to make them homemade mac and cheese and they really enjoy that and it’s a special treat.  So I went to the grocery store looking for some truffle oil and I find some truffle oil, and the gentleman was actually stocking in that area.  I looked at the price and it’s like $20 a bottle, and he knows like I am not going to pay $20 a bottle for truffle oil.  So, you know, I told him “No, thanks.  I appreciate you letting me know that you guys have this.  This is really not what I’m looking for.” So I went shopping around the rest of the store, and he actually came and found me and he said, “You know, I totally forgot, we have our own house olive oils that we infused of flavors and there’s a truffle one and it’s only $5.”  So it’s this huge bottle of truffle oil.  And I just thought it was cool that the guy understood what I was going through and I understood what I was concerned about and then helped me. Because for me, you know, like I grew up working in grocery stores.  And to this day, still people think I work in grocery stores because what happen is I come home from work and typically I’m dressed up from work in a hospitality and I usually have a suit on.  Every time, I go to the grocery store, I usually take my tiles and I walk to the grocery store and I get my groceries. Well, there was one time where I was in a extreme amount of hurry going through the grocery store because my wife was home and she called me with the “Oh my God, we need milk.”  And when you have four young children and you get a call “Oh my God, we need milk,” that is a “911 gotta get home.” So as I’m going through the store, I’m going towards the back of the store to get milk, and of course, I ran into a little lady who is so nicely asking me to get items off the top shelves.  So I slowed down for a second and I understand “OK, I should do this.”  And so I helped her get _____ top shelves.  Then she proceeds to ask me if I know where Marsala wine is because she was making chicken Marsela.  And where the wine was in the store, it’s not easy to find.  It’s not in the wine and it’s not in the vinegars, they put it somewhere else. So I walked her to get this then she says, “I need to find this.”  So literally for 20 minutes, I’m helping this lady go through the store.  We say good bye.  She says, thank you.  She was so sweet.  I go back to pick up the milk.  I finally get the milk, go to the front of the store and I just had milk and I was in this line waiting.  And I listened to the lady and she was checking out in the line next to me and she was telling the cashier about how this wonderful man helping her and the people at this grocery store are so very nice and he is such a nice man. And so at that point, I just kind of give _____ to myself and I thought “Gosh, I’m so glad I slowed down and I’m so glad that this grocery store is benefiting through my work.”

Andrea:  Yeah, exactly.  They were so glad that you stopped in that day.

Derrick Ricca:  Yes.  You know, it’s one of those things where I’ve run into people that I’ve worked with before and not knowing walking in the _____ or department store and they’re in front of me and they don’t hold the door.  And working in hospitality, I didn’t kind of get after a little bit like “Hey dude!”  And then they kind of understand and get through it but those one of those things where when you’re in hospitality it’s ingrained in you.  And when somebody, like today, where the guy understood what I was feeling and was able to solve my solution.  For me, it was a big deal like I thank him a lot and he said, “No, you don’t need to thank me.”  I was like, “No, I do because that was really, really cool!”

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  That’s great.  I love the story. So what exactly do you do?  What’s your role or your job, your position that you do at the hotel?

Derrick Ricca:  So my job is basically to fill the medium space in the hotel guest rooms.  You know, we have 40 guest rooms and we’ve got about 50000 square feet of meeting space.  Typically a hotel that size has about 20000 square feet of meeting space.  So having that much more meeting space is something that obviously needs to be filled.  So my job is to get people to stay in the hotel to have meetings, holiday parties do all that.  And for us, it’s been a lot easier, I mean, when I first started there, it was not easy.  And as time has going on, we just continually added better people.  And last year, for the second time in the last five years, we won Renaissance National Hotel of the Year.

Andrea:  Wow, congratulations!  That’s really great!

Derrick Ricca:  Thank you.

Andrea:  You know, that’s an interesting point that you bring about that the people kind of change at a slow pace too.  I’m assuming this based on what you just said but maybe you can correct me if I’m wrong.  Is it hard to make big changes with like a current group of people and getting everybody to buy in to those things or that sort of thing?  Does it help to just kind of waited out overtime and start to replace people or what kinds of things made those people better and better as you went along?

Derrick Ricca:  You know, I think it’s a combination of a lot of things.  I think it’s getting a very good leadership group in and that makes the biggest difference where you have leaders that are compassionate and they’re trigging people with empathy, authentic, and they have high levels of integrity.  And then it’s also one of those things where a few people that don’t fit and they’re not on the right seat on the bus, you either reorganize them or you find a new place for them. And we have a ton of employees that have been there for a long time and it’s a test on it to just really what a great organization we work for, but it’s really when you look at everything in how it works.  We have managers that are leading by example.  We have people that truly care.  It’s just makes a big difference when you get good people and they’re all working together.  You know, with hospitality, you have a very transient workforce.  So for us, we’re in a college town, we have a lot of college employees and they don’t always stick around for more than two or three years.  Some of them do and we have a number of them that we’ve promoted from within.  So it’s a thousand little things.  There’s no silver bullet and it’s not necessarily, you’re right, it’s not one big sweeping0 change.  It’s so many little things.

Andrea:  How do you help the transient workforce to embrace the DNA of your hotel and sort of be the kind of person that you want serving your guest, how do you do that?

Derrick Ricca:  I think it starts off when we train our associate.  You know, we put a little extra TLC into it.  They have days amount of training before they even get out on the floor and engage with a customer or guest.  I think they see a lot and they observe a lot and they see people doing things.  I mean, that’s part of the big thing with customer service is.  You have to actually see it in action.  You can’t just teach it and expect people to do it. I think it’s basically, and I hate this word, I hate the word culture, because it’s so overused and sometimes misused.  But it’s more of like an environment I think.  And I think once people understand the environment of what we’re trying to do and you enjoy it and you’re working for the other people that you work with, I think that’s what changes that.  I mean for me, you know, I’m the floor frontline service all the time and so I enjoy it because I love to be out there and I love to interact with our operations team.  We have so many good people but it makes it fun like you enjoy when the hotel is really busy.

Andrea:  You enjoy when it’s busy because why exactly?

Derrick Ricca:  Yeah, you get certain energy from it.  I mean, you’re working hard.  It’s fast paced.  It’s not stagnant.  It’s always moving and it’s not predictable.  It’s not easy, but you get this feeling of like, gosh, it’s really, really cool.  You see so many people and you’re interacting and there’s so much going on and there’s so many moving pieces.  And sometimes, you’re wondering like “How, did just happen, like how did we transition from a five person group to an 800 person group, like how does that physically happened?”  It’s a fun environment to be in because it is a fast paced moving organism basically.  It’s never boring.  So I think that being on your toes and always having to be up on a stage performing for all of these people, you know, you really have to put your game on and pull up your boots and work hard.

Andrea:  I like the way that you put that, the idea of being on stage.  Is that something that you talk about the team that you have?  How do you help them to think about that in terms of like you know when you’re with people on stage?  How does that go for you?

Derrick Ricca:  You know, we had that kind of discussion before where people were always watching.  And it’s really kind of cool because what we’ve done is we’ve used tons of metrics but we’ve also taken in customer cards.  So we get so many customers comments and we go through them and understand them so that it makes us better.  Because there were things we’ve done in the past that have just been cleaned out stupid and you learned not to do those anymore.  And then you talked to the guests more and they tell you “Hey, here’s really what we want.”  And so for us that helped us become better customer ambassadors because we can do small things to make their stay better.

Andrea:  Sure.  That makes a lot of sense.  OK, I know that you’ve mentioned your kids before and coaching, do you ever bring in your personal experience at home to be able to relate to how you want to do and you want your team to do customer service at work?

Derrick:  Oh God yeah.  You know, a lot of people say, you know don’t bring your home life to your work and vice versa.  For me, I’ve never been one of those people that says, “Oh you gotta have this work-life balance.  You have to do things a certain way.”  For me, it’s always kind of work out where it’s been great.  You know, if you work in a safe work environment where you have that feeling and it’s like “Gosh, I really belong working here,” it makes work a lot easier. But I’ve always been the type of person that says, instead of having work-life balance, why don’t you have a blend of work life.  I’m not saying that you always have to bring your home life into work but I think sometimes it is good.  I mean, there are times where I’ve had really good things happen to me outside of work and I bring that feeling into work and it just helps you perform in a better level.  Now, you look at the opposite side of the road, of course, if you’re going through rough times, it’s hard when you have to go to work. But for us and to myself, I work with such a good team.  But I’ve gone through some difficult times in my life and I’ve brought it to work and I’ve been helped out.  And so, I think if you have that greater understanding of what you’re trying to do and those people around you have that, it makes it a lot easier.  So yeah, I would say if you are doing while things are happy and things are good, bring those to work and share it with the people that you work with, your guest, your customers, or whoever you’re coming with, you know, who will appreciate that. It’s one of those things where people call my voicemail and leave a message and say “I really like your voicemail message,” and I laugh about it because I recorded it like six years ago and while I was recording it, one of my cube mates was trying to make me laugh so I’m kind of giggling on the message.  And I never really listened to the message and I went back and listened to it and I was like “Oh, it makes sense.”

Andrea:  Do you have any particular insights that have really hit you from home that you bring to work then?  You want to share any of those?

Derrick Ricca:  For me, I’m lucky because I was blessed with, you know, marrying somebody that really made my life better.  And so I think having that support system at home has really helped me out a lot and I’ve been able to, as I said, dropped my ego with my wife and I’ve learned a lot from her.  You know, there were times in the past where I may have offering a certain way and she’s able to kind of say, you know, you should do this or do that.  Or it’s things that I can watch that she’s done and see how she’s handled things and then kind of applied that to my own life. So you know, I think about times in which she’s had to do things and she’s been immersed in all kinds of drama and she’s chosen not to go through and respond like I would.  I would immediately say, “This is stupid,” or whatever the case was.  You know, I’ve been able to really kind of look back and say “OK, now I understand why she didn’t do that.”  And so it has helped me know when to just stop talking.  But she also too is one of the other people that has helped me as far understanding when you’re having something good, share it.  And when something’s bad, you can’t let it negatively influence you or really kind of change your mood. And it’s hard when you have two sets of twins that are all strong willed and they’re loud and they never stop, it’s sometimes is you get through the day and you just take the deepest breath possible.  But sometimes you just have to understand like “Hey, this is the time in our lives.  We’ll get through it and you have to just kind of enjoy it.”

Andrea:  Love that!  OK, Derrick, let’s talk about your session at Smart Customer Service, what are you talking about there?

Derrick:  So each year, I’ve always have a fun topics.  And my thing is, it’s always been important to me to go to these conferences and provide people to take something home with them.  Because there are so many times where you go to conferences and you sit there and you go to breakout sessions and you listen and it’s good information but it’s not really applicable.  You can’t physically or mentally take it home with you or make changes. So every year, I try to figure out something where somebody can look at it and have a little bit of inspiration to go into their work environment and make it better.  So this year, really more the discussion is talking about how do you fix customer service and how do you provide good levels of customer service without really truly focusing on customer service?  And what I mean by that is what are the ways that you set yourself off to provide better customer service to your guests, and a lot of it has to do with things that you don’t really think about. In our case, we have so many different things that have happened over the course of time that had been changed.  One of the big things right now is technology, and technology is pushing, pushing all the time and that’s a big focal point, and it should be a big focal point of every single customer.  I don’t care every single industry; I don’t care what customer you serve or what you’re doing.  And so for us, there’s time where we have to look as an organization and say “OK, this is not about our guest or a customer, this is about us and how we do things.  We need to change it so that we’re more customer centric and how do we do that?” So the best example is I actually went to a customer service conference about three or four years ago and I thought to myself “Gosh, do you what’d be easy right now is the hotel that I was at in DC and I won’t way which one it was, their customer service was lacking and ______.”  And I was challenged because I needed some help and I didn’t know where to turn to.  And I thought “Gosh, how great would this be if I could just text the front desk and they could then respond to it.”  I didn’t want to call and feel stupid about my question, especially somebody that works in a hotel that should know all the answers. I brought that back to our hotel as well where a lot of our travelers, you know, the first thing they do when they check is they have their phones in their hands.  And then the second thing they do is have their phone in their hands.  So as soon as they unpack, they’re on their phones.  So it’s a lot easier for them to just text, “Hey, I need some more towels or how do I turn the air up in the room?”  So for us that’s a win-win situation if we can figure out how to incorporate that for our guest.

Andrea:  Sure.  Yeah, that sounds like a great idea there.  I think the session will be very interesting.  You bring a lot of great experience to this conversation and I thank you for being here on the Voice of Influence podcast and I look forward to seeing you in Washington, DC.

Derrick Ricca:  Yeah.  I think you will have a very enjoyable time.  It’s a good group, and every year I’ve gone, I’ve picked up some things and brought them home and I think it has helped out in my journey in customer service.  So it’s a great conference.

Andrea:  Awesome!  Alright, if you would like to learn more about the Customer Service Conference, you can go to our website www.voiceofinfluene.net.

Derrick Ricca:  OK!

Andrea:  Thanks Derrick!

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How to Write with the Voice of Your Brand with Leslie O’Flahavan

Episode 81

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!

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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.