Just help well

Now let’s talk about how the average customer experiences webcare. Let go of the urge to score with jokes. Try not to think for a moment about the vultures that will dive on you if you make a wrong assessment, and you have thrown your tweet into the world in a rage or full of annoyance. Let’s talk about simply helping customers well. Because that is the essence of webcare.

At the risk of becoming a bit boring, I will pick up a study. The SWOCC publication ‘Webcare: from experimenting to professionalizing’ by Lotte Willemsen and Guda van Noort. The study is from 2015, but the content is still perfectly applicable to the current world of webcare. The researchers say that human sound is an important predictor of successful webcare.

Inviting rhetoric

Organizations use various techniques to appear human. For example, there is the technique of inviting rhetoric. This  phone number list means that organizations invite people to give an opinion or ask a question. This rhetoric can be found, for example, in the profile texts of Twitter accounts.

Personalization use
Another technique is personalization. Think of mentioning the first name, ending a message with the initials or first name of the webcare employee, but also speaking from the first person as a representative of the organization.

Informal language use

And then we have the technique of informal language use. Think of abbreviations, word use such as ‘oei’, ‘wow’ and ‘oh’, and the use of emoticons. Just help well

Recognizable for how webcare teams work, right? I dare say that the majority of webcare teams mix all these techniques together and use them all.

And that’s where it goes wrong. Because, say the researchers, more is not necessarily better! They presented a group of test subjects with four china numbers different responses from a virtual webcare team. The first response was businesslike/impersonal, the second was businesslike/personal, the third informal/personal and the last informal/impersonal. As expected, the businesslike/impersonal response scored poorly with the test subjects. But the informal/personal response did not appeal either. And that is surprising, because that is the way most webcare teams use their socials.

Choose your tactic
How then? Fortunately, the researchers also provide an answer to that. The best tactics are a combination how top firms are transforming investment management  of business/personal or informal/impersonal. A company is most likely to be perceived as honest if a human tone is used in an apology. The use of the first name by the Keolis employee in the accompanying apology tweet is therefore a smart move.