{"id":3553,"date":"2015-03-16T14:06:42","date_gmt":"2015-03-16T18:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/?p=3553"},"modified":"2015-03-16T14:06:42","modified_gmt":"2015-03-16T18:06:42","slug":"be-personable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wrote-about\/be-personable\/","title":{"rendered":"Be Personable"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When you work in tech support, you often don&#8217;t know who you are talking to. You don&#8217;t know if they&#8217;re high-powered or the new intern. You don&#8217;t know their level of technical ability or their patience.<\/p>\n<p>But one thing you do know is they are human. So talk to them like it.<\/p>\n<p>So many times, I get an email back from a tech and all it says is &#8220;This account has been deactivated.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s nice, computer. I am happy you processed my request in an efficient and timely manner. But it would have been even nice if I knew you were a person too.<\/p>\n<p>Now let&#8217;s compare that to:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  Good Morning Monica,<\/p>\n<p>  I&#8217;ve deactivated the account for John Morris effective immediately.<\/p>\n<p>  Is there anything else I can do for you today?<br \/>\n  Thank you,<br \/>\n  Carl T. Holscher\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<ul>\n<li>I address Monica by her name.<br \/>\nShe is a person. I am a person. There&#8217;s no reason I can&#8217;t address her by her name. It&#8217;s add a little humanity to our interaction.<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>I told her exactly what I had done.<br \/>\nThat way, she knows immediately what this request is about. It doesn&#8217;t rely on her to remember what she had asked me for. She&#8217;s busy. She doesn&#8217;t have time to sit around and wait for me to get the work done. She is doing other things, so don&#8217;t make her guess.<br \/>\nIt also verifies to me that I have made the correct change. It&#8217;s easy to make a mistake, especially when dealing with a large number of requests. Repeating back the action I took helps me to double-check myself.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<p>I used my name.<br \/>\nI am not a team. I am not a group. I am an individual and I did this work for her.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Whenever I am about to send an email to someone, I ask myself if this is the email I would like to receive.<\/p>\n<p>If it is, I hit send. If not, I take a moment to improve upon it. Spending those extra seconds can make a big difference in how you come across to your customers.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s hard to be as warm and friendly over text. But it is easy to impart some humanity in your words. Use them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When you work in tech support, you often don&#8217;t know who you are talking to. You don&#8217;t know if they&#8217;re high-powered or the new intern. You don&#8217;t know their level of technical ability or their patience. But one thing you do know is they are human. So talk to them like it. So many times, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New Post - Be Personable","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[811,38,460,810],"class_list":["post-3553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-wrote-about","tag-be-human","tag-customer-service","tag-customer-support","tag-personable"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Personable-header.jpg?fit=1200%2C799&ssl=1","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3553"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3559,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3553\/revisions\/3559"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peroty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}