BY DARA BLOOM
Editor, TMCnet.com™

Don't Take That Tone (Of E-mail) With Me!

As a teenager, the transgression I was most often reprimanded for was the tone of voice in which I spoke to my parents. (Of course, that tone was usually accompanied by a dramatic rolling of my eyes, which infuriated my parents even more.) I wasn't actually saying anything horrible -- but the way I said it was enough to get me grounded for a weekend.

"Tone" is on my mind again, but it has been recast in terms of omnipresent non-verbal communication: e-mail. It's fine when you insert ASCII emoticons into e-mail to your friends. But business correspondence precludes those informalities, and therefore writing directly and without insinuation is critical. Nowhere is this truer than in e-mail-based customer service. Forrester Research, Inc. predicts that 40 million U.S. households will shop online by 2003. With that growth, it's inevitable that e-mail customer service will grow, too. Call centers will increasingly be faced with the challenge of providing the same levels of service via e-mail as they strive to provide over the phone.

How NOT To E-mail
This past Mother's Day, I ordered my mom a great gift basket from a prominent gourmet food and fruit company with an online storefront. I had been happy with previous orders I'd placed over the phone with this company, and I assumed I'd get the same treatment for an online order. Needless to say, that wasn't the case.

A day after placing my order, I received e-mail from a customer service rep (CSR) noting that they couldn't deliver my gift on the day I'd requested. A few e-mails went back and forth as they explained their shipper didn't deliver on Saturdays (which I thought was strange, since even the United States Postal Service delivers on Saturday, and I was paying exorbitant express delivery charges). Instead, they offered to deliver the present late in the week before Mother's Day -- for example, delivery on Friday for Mother's Day on Sunday two days later. That was acceptable to me, and I told the company to go ahead with the order.

A few days later, my mom called to thank me for the gift -- it had arrived on Monday, a full week before Mother's Day. Now I was annoyed -- had my back and forth correspondence with the company been totally ignored? I e-mailed them again to complain about the delivery, and received this response:

We are sorry about your disappointment in the delivery of your Mother's Day gift.

Please, understand. [Company name removed] does not set or determine the delivery standard. The delivery services do. We have no control whatsoever.

Thank you for asking.

No control whatsoever? What kind of customer service response is that? And how nave of the agent to think the delivery of a company's goods doesn't reflect on the company itself! Customers don't make a distinction between the product a company manufactures and the way it's delivered. In fact, this company in particular boasts about the delivery of their goods. Without including the full text of or a link to the company's online customer service policy, I must at least highlight one part of their service promise: "Nobody delivers like we do." No kidding -- those nobodies would all go out of business.

The company didn't offer an apology -- they simply blamed their poor performance on a third party. They offered no remedy to my problem, and showed no interest in making me a happy customer. In short, their response could be summed up as "Tough luck." I was flabbergasted to receive such a curt, unaccommodating e-mail. That's when I started wondering whether agents handling the ever-increasing flood of e-mail from online shopping were being trained for this specific medium.

GrammarHero To The Rescue
I turned to two call center training specialists, Anne Nickerson and Paula Hero. Nickerson is a principal of Call Center Coach; Hero heads up GrammarHero, and is currently working with Nickerson on an e-mail training module.

Hero agreed that my e-mail experience with this company was a textbook example of customer service gone awry. "They were very abrupt with you," she noted.

Nickerson pointed out that the newness of the e-mail medium is part of the problem -- many companies still don't have quality control strategies for e-mail the way they do for phone-based customer service. As call centers adjust to the new medium, Nickerson believes agent groups trained for and dedicated to just e-mail correspondence are the way to go. Whether these agents are culled from high performers already in a call center's phone pool, or are hired specifically as an e-mail CSR, they need special training to make the most of this medium.

Hero provides the following acrostic as a checklist for agents providing e-mail customer service:

• Grasp what the customer said.
• Read the e-mail carefully.
• Answer the question the customer asked.
• Maximize results by paraphrasing.
• Make a negative response sound positive.
• Avoid double negatives.
• Remember to "say it right."
• Help the customer find a solution.
• Eliminate jargon and acronyms.
• Return queries promptly.
• Overlook grammar at your own risk.

I should forward these guidelines over to the reps at that gourmet food company, but I won't -- I can't bear another e-mail correspondence with them. In the end (and only after I requested that my complaint be escalated to the call center manager), the still-cranky agent threw me a bone: a token 20 percent discount on my next order. I won't be using it, though -- they've lost me as a customer since they refuse to be accountable for their poor service. The written equivalent of a teenager's snotty tone and excessive eye rolling doesn't cut it in e-mail -- especially in customer service.

Dara Bloom welcomes your comments at dbloom@tmcnet.com.