Interaction with clients

As a member of the EASI Web Team, interacting with clients is one of the most important aspects of our work. As a support team, people only reach out to us when they need some form of help, and it is important to recognize the impact our words, tone, and how they are perceived  have on faculty, staff, and students across the University.

This training will cover a few topics through providing in-depth examples, demonstrating the concept as a whole, then by contextualizing it to situations you might encounter during support tickets in ServiceNow or assisting someone in person during the Open Lab.

Word Choice

Overview and example

For any communication you use, the words you choose to convey your thoughts matter. Of course, this sounds obvious– but all too often, just a few words’ difference in a sentence can provide a very different meaning to a listener or reader. For example, perhaps a supervisor was checking in with their team lead on a project they have been working on that has been rather stressful, and approaches them with one of the following:

1. What’s the status on the TablePress project?
2. How are you doing with the TablePress project?

Although the baseline goal of both options is the same (figuring out how work is coming along on the TablePress project), they are asking different questions. Option 1 is approaching the goal by asking for a direct response; the answer here is just the  current state of the project. Option 2 is asking about the team lead’s perception of the project; bringing in their perspective and their opinion on the work, during which the state will likely come across.

It is important to note– neither of these options is better than the other, or even generally preferred. Each form has their time and place, depending on factors like:

• the dynamic between the team lead and the supervisor
  • If the two have only recently started working together, option 2 might seem too forward– whereas if the two have been working together for quite some time and have a friendly dynamic, option 1 might come across as a bit cold.
• where the conversation happens
  • In a scheduled check-in meeting, with the project on the agenda, option 2 gives time for the team lead to expand upon their thoughts and perspective. In an unexpected stop by their desk, however, potentially in the midst of working on this task or another, the direct approach of option 1 allows for a quick response and enables both parties to get back to their work quickly.

There are many more factors that affect how a conversation can go, and stopping to think about each of them before going into one would be exhausting– the goal here is not to require every conversation be planned down to the second. However, it is to prompt you to think before any important conversation. When approaching a colleague, a client, or a supervisor with a specific goal, thinking quickly about the situation and how that might affect your word choice gives you much better odds of that conversation going well.

How does this affect me?

This comes into play most directly when responding to support tickets, as it is our team’s most common form of communication. Often, you’ll be responding to people you don’t know, and all you know about their current situation is what the ticket says– which isn’t much. So what can you do? Write carefully, and lean on professional language. Any insights you get can be used to help you from there, but using polite and professional words is always the safe place to start. To demonstrate, we’ll look at an example message, along with a default professional response, then an example of how to tweak that response to fit what information is present.

Tone

Overview and example

Alongside word choice, the other major component of effective communication is the tone you use when conveying your message. In normal conversation, it is not often noticed– unless it seems wrong. There are many ways to say the exact same words, and the tone used with them is often what conveys the speaker’s true intentions; responding to an invitation to attend a gathering with “I’d love to go” sounds very different in an excited tone versus a flat monotone, for example, demonstrating the difference between someone who is looking forward to the event as opposed to someone who would rather not attend if at all possible.

For communicating with clients, tone is incredibly important, as it is often perceived as a direct representation of one’s attitude– and sending the wrong message can turn even positive clients into angry ones. Because of this, many people who work in jobs that require a lot of interaction with the public develop what is referred to colloquially as a “customer service voice”, a specific tone that is polite, upbeat, and calm, that is intended to be as inoffensive as possible. This generally works rather well, and is worth cultivating, but is only one tool in our toolbox, especially given how much of our communication occurs through text– no matter how well you speak, the person reading an email will not hear your voice when they get your message. How do we ensure our intentions are clear using written communication? Almost paradoxically, it comes down to your word choice. Unlike the spoken form of tone, where the vocal inflection weighs far more than words on the message’s meaning, the lack of inflection in an email means the words, as they are, are everything. To illustrate this, we’ll look at a few examples of phrases that might work in spoken support, but could cause problems in written support, and how they could be phrased to reflect the tone originally intended.