How to improve customer satisfaction with concrete language

Imagine two customers call a contact center at the same time.

They're both experiencing the same issue—a promised discount wasn't applied to their last order. The two reps taking their respective calls follow the same routine:

1. Listen to the customer

2. Apologize for the issue

3. Solve the problem

The only difference is how each rep communicates.

Alton uses general language. "I'm sorry for the error. Your account will be credited within 3-5 business days."

Laura uses more concrete language. "I'm sorry the promotional discount wasn't applied to your order. You'll receive a $25.37 credit back to your card by Wednesday."

That small change in language can have a huge impact. Research shows Laura’s customer is more likely to be happy with the solution and spend more in the future.

In this post, I'll show you:

• What is concrete language?

• How does concrete language impact service?

• Why do customers prefer concrete language?

What is concrete language?

Concrete language is clear and direct. It involves using specific details to remove ambiguity.

Let's go back to Alton and Laura.

Both reps apologized to the customer. Alton used vague language while Laura used concrete language to give specific details.

• Alton: “I'm sorry for the error."

• Laura: "I'm sorry the promotional discount wasn't applied to your order."

The way the two reps communicated the resolution also highlighted the difference between vague and concrete language.

• Alton: "Your account will be credited in 3-5 business days."

• Laura: "You'll receive a $25.37 credit back to your card by Wednesday."

Here's one more.

It's common for restaurant servers to suggest an appetizer when greeting guests. Notice the difference between vague and concrete offers.

• Vague: "Would you like to start with an appetizer?"

• Concrete: "Would you like to start with our signature table-side guacamole."

Okay, that last example might be personal. I rarely want to start with an appetizer, but I’m almost always down for table-side guacamole. Delicious food and a show?! Yes, please!

How does concrete language impact service?

Concrete language improves customer satisfaction and increases revenue.

Grant Packard and Jonah Berger did two field studies on the effect of concrete language in customer service.

The first study analyzed 200 customer service calls placed to an online apparel retailer. It found that customer satisfaction was 8.9 percent higher when customer service reps used concrete language.

The second study analyzed 941 customer email interactions with a consumer durables company. That study found customer spent an average of 13 percent more over the next 90 days when reps responded to customer emails using concrete language.

These results back up many anecdotes I’ve seen in the field.

When I managed a contact center, repeat contacts were also significantly reduced when reps used concrete language. If a rep said, “You’ll get a refund in 5-7 business days,” customers often called back five days later to ask about their refund.

We avoided this by being more concrete.

For example, “I’ll process the refund today, but you might not see it on your credit card account until the 29th.” That was much more specific and fewer customers called a second time to check on their refund.

Why do customers prefer concrete language?

There are two reasons why concrete language is so effective when serving customers.

The first is it demonstrates listening.

Listening is one of the three essential customer service skills. A big part of listening is making customers feel confident they’ve been heard.

Concrete language does that well. It demonstrates that you are attuned to your customers’ needs and understand what they are communicating.

Let’s go back to Alton and Laura again. Imagine you are their customer. Which of these approaches is the strongest signal that you’ve been heard?

• Alton: “I'm sorry for the error."

• Laura: "I'm sorry the promotional discount wasn't applied to your order."

The second advantage of concrete language is it helps avoid confusion.

Vague language is often unclear. For instance, if you tell a customer a credit will appear on their account in 3-5 business days, when will the customer expect to receive it?

“Business days” is a vague concept. Is today a business day? What if your company is closed on Customer Experience Day, but your customer doesn’t even know that’s a holiday?!

Nobody likes to stop and work out the math.

Date ranges are also a problem. Customers tend to hear the best-case scenario. They'll often hear "three days" if you tell them 3-5 business days.

Concrete language avoids all that.

There's much less room for confusion if you tell a customer, "You'll receive a $25.37 credit back to your card by Wednesday."

You can learn more about using clear language to set expectations from this guide.

Take Action

Here's an exercise to help you or your team develop concrete language skills.

1. Identify a list of specific situations where concrete language is useful.

2. Brainstorm examples of concrete language to use in each situation.

3. Practice using those examples for one week.

Regroup at the end of the week to review what worked, what didn't, and make adjustments.

Bonus: This short video will show you how concrete language can help avoid service failures.

Use clear language to avoid surprises from Customer Service: Managing Customer Expectations by Jeff Toister

How To Build Your Customer Listening Skills

Advertising disclosure: This blog participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means to earn fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.

I've got good news and bad news.

The bad news is something you already know. Customer service employees struggle with listening. They misunderstand customer needs, miss important service cues, and often fail to make an upset customer feel "heard."

Now the good news.

Listening skills are easy to train. This short post will share some straightforward training exercises you can use to improve your customer listening, or help the people on your team.

And these skills work whether you're communicating with a customer face-to-face, over the phone, or via written communication like email or chat.

Why We Don't Listen

In my experience as a customer service trainer, most employees have solid listening skills. The challenge they face is their work environment actively discourages listening.

My book, Getting Service Right, explores a number of obstacles that customer service employees face when trying to understand their customer's needs:

• Time pressure: employees are urged to work quickly.

• Distractions: our work environments are filled with distractions.

• Customers: customers themselves aren't always great at telling their story.

One of the more surprising obstacles is experience. The more experience you have, the harder it becomes to listen. 

The reason is our brains have an instinctive pattern-recognition feature. When we sense a familiar pattern, we automatically shut off listening and jump to a conclusion. So an experienced employee who hears a customer describing a problem they've heard a thousand times before will quickly assume they know the answer.

The trouble with this is our instincts sometimes jump to the wrong conclusion.

I recently went around in circles with a customer service rep who was trying to figure out what caused a problem. “That’s great,” I kept saying. “But what I really need right now is to solve the problem. I only have five more minutes to spend on this issue.” I ended up having to disconnect the conversation and call back again later when I had more time because the rep’s poor listening skills made the interaction take three times as long as it should have.

So if you want to be a better listener, start by making it easier to listen. Try to remove time pressure and other distractions from the environment, or at least become aware of situations where they discourage you from listening.

Listening Skills Training

Here are a few exercises that can help you take your listening skills to the next level.

Tell a Story

This exercise proves you already have good listening skills, you just need to remember to use them on a regular basis. 

1. Find a partner.

2. Have your partner briefly tell you about a recent customer service experience.

3. Give your partner a brief re-cap of what you heard.

4. Discuss the specific skills you used to listen to the story.

The discussion at the end will help you identify some of the listening skills that you naturally use. Your challenge now is to be more intentional about using them with customers, even if you feel time pressure, encounter distractions, or the customer tells a lousy story.

Customer Listening Checklist

Start by watching this short video and observe the listening skills an employee, Janice, uses to listen to an internal customer.

Active listening techniques from Customer Service: Serving Internal Customers by Jeff Toister

Next, take a brief moment after your next five customer service interactions to self-evaluate whether you used the same listening skills Janice demonstrated in the video:

• Concentrate on your customer

• Attending body language

• Clarifying questions

• Listen for emotions

• Paraphrase to confirm

You can take this exercise to the next level by getting your coworkers to participate. Spend a few moments at the end of the day discussing what worked well, and which skills you need to use more often.

Bonus Resource

Many of these techniques apply to written communication, but serving customers via email, chat, or social media does provide some unique challenges. This on-demand webinar with customer service writing expert Leslie O'Flahavan provides some practical activities to help improve your skills.

How Experience Turns Us Into Poor Listeners

We’ve all been frustrated when someone wasn’t listening. 

Perhaps it was your boss, a co-worker, or even a friend. The really aggravating times are when a customer service rep doesn’t listen. After all, isn’t that their job?

In customer service, experience is one of the surprising culprits.

A natural instinct designed to make us more efficient actually hurts our listening skills. The problem is made even worse the more experience we acquire. 

The Pattern Recognition Instinct

Our brains are wired to look for familiar patterns. Here’s an explanation from my book, Service Failure:

This capability allows us to make quick sense of large amounts of data without getting bogged down in the details. It’s an ability that comes in handy in many ways, such as determining if something is safe or dangerous, recognizing people we know, or even when reading.

You may have seen this example:

People can easliy raed misspleled wrods as long as all the lettres are there and the fisrt and lsat letters are in the corerct position.

Crazy, right?

The challenge is the pattern recognition instinct can kick in at inopportune times. It’s like when you type an unusual word on your phone and autocorrect keeps changing it. You’re thinking, “No! I know what I’m typing! Stop!” 

A customer who asks a question that sounds like one you’ve heard before can instinctively trigger the same response. 

Your brain automatically stops listening and says, “I know the answer!”

In a perfect world, this makes you a mind reader. The problem is that mind reading isn’t usually what happens. What usually happens is bad:

• You interrupt the customer.
• You misunderstand the customer.
• You become convinced you understand even when you don’t.

Experience Makes It Worse

Weak patterns are easier to overcome than strong ones.

Maybe you’ve heard a story once. It's easy to listen intently the next time you hear a story that starts out sounding the same.

But try listening to the same story one hundred times. A thousand times. Maybe more. 

That’s a pretty tough pattern to break. The pattern is reinforced when you stop listening and get it right anyway. 

Your brain says, “Ah ha! I really am a mind reader.” 

The most experienced customer service employees really do develop skills that seem like mind reading. It’s pretty fantastic. That is, until is backfires and they miss a key piece of the customer’s story.

Some experienced employees still dig in their heels. There’s pride that comes with that experience. A little voice inside their brain tells them they can’t be wrong (even though they are).

The result? Less listening.

Building New Instincts

Overcoming this natural instinct takes effort.

Start by being intentional. Make a concerted effort to give customers your full attention. 

It’s also helpful to employ specific listening techniques:

• Deliberately suspend judgement
• Ask clarifying questions
• Paraphrase to confirm understanding

You can learn more by watching this video on overcoming listening barriers. There’s even a scene at 1:22 in the video that shows what happens when the pattern recognition instinct gets it wrong.

Listening to customers is harder than you think

I was halfway through my question when the customer service representative interrupted me. “That’s actually a separate password than the one I’m resetting for you. That one is just for billing.”

Great, except that wasn’t the question I was about to ask. “I know, but I was going to ask if I can reset the billing password myself so that I…”

He interrupted again, “But you don’t need the billing password to access your online account.” 

Sigh… Still not the question I was trying to ask. Why do so many knowledgeable customer service representatives find it difficult to truly listen to their customers?

Believe it or not, one explanation is poor listening skills are a product of our brain’s natural wiring.

Our brains have a unique design feature that allows us to take a small amount of information and compare it to familiar patterns. This enables us to make quick sense of large amounts of data without getting bogged down in the details. It’s an ability that comes in handy in many ways, such as determining if something is safe or dangerous, recognizing people we know, or even reading.

Here’s a simple example. Try reading the sentence below:

People can easliy raed misspleled wrods as long as all the lettres are there and the fisrt and lsat letters are in the corerct position.

You can read sentences like the one above thanks to this handy pattern recognition ability. Your brain recognizes the pattern presented by the arrangement of the letters and the context of the sentence. It doesn't matter that the letters aren't perfectly placed. They are close enough for your brain to quickly interpret their meaning.

Unfortunately, this same ability gets customer service representatives into trouble when it comes to listening. The customer service representative I mentioned at the beginning of this post had likely heard questions similar to mine many times. The start of my sentence fit a familiar pattern so his brain naturally stopped listening and presented an answer to the question he thought I was going to ask. The problem occurred because my question was a new variation this pattern, so the answer that leapt into his mind was incorrect.

In other words, it was a natural behavior that caused the customer service representative to keep interrupting me.

We can learn to short circuit our natural wiring and become more adept at listening, but it takes training, effort, and practice. Here are a few things you can try the next time you are listening to a customer:

1. Eliminate distractions and concentrate on what the customer is saying.
2. Don't interrupt customers while they are speaking.
3. Ask clarifying questions to confirm you understand their needs.

Monday morning round-up: listening, identity, and competition

Here are a few quick-hit topics to start your week. Ponder, enjoy, and feel free to comment!

Listening - I hear you, but do I hear you?

My credit card is about to expire, which means I have to contact a variety of vendors to give them the new date. As you can imagine, the level of service I received varied widely. One vendor sent a reminder, but didn't include the information I needed to update my billing preferences. I managed to dig up an old bill to get my account number and then went to their website. This got me halfway through their process until I received an error message after entering the requested information. I finally had to call their customer service line.

The person I spoke with was very friendly and quickly updated my credit card expiration date. However, she wasn't very interested in acknowledging my frustrations or listening to my feedback on their process. In this case, she "heard" me well enough to solve my basic problem but didn't "hear" the underlying frustration. I'm sure the company's quality assurance department would give her a great score on that call, but as a customer I definitely wouldn't since she didn't address all of the reasons that prompted me to contact her.

Identity crisis brewing at Starbucks

(Get it, "brewing"? Ha ha ha!). Ok, that was corny, but a new initiative at Starbucks may be equally corny... or genius! The Seattle Times reported last week that Starbucks is opening three stores in Seattle that are named after their neighborhood instead of being called "Starbucks". Reportedly, the first of the three stores will be named "15th Avenue Coffee and Tea" and offer beer and wine in addition to coffee.

The big debate has already begun. Will this pilot project lead to a new chapter for Starbucks where they recapture their local coffee house roots? Or, will people refuse to buy-in to the idea of a major corporate behemoth re-branding itself as your local mom and pop? An informal poll conducted by the Chicago Union Tribune found that nearly 75% of participants say a Starbucks by any other name is still a Starbucks.

Fierce competition: Apple vs. Microsoft

Apple and Microsoft have recently been taking shots at each other in their commercials. The back and forth is amusing, but the consumer reaction is too! As a PC user, I must admit the Mac campaign has a certain appeal. I've experienced nearly every drawback of a PC highlighted in their commercials. Worse, Microsoft's technical support has been appalling. I've learned that if you have a problem with a Windows-based computer, you are better off getting assistance from a third party.

Check out this short article on Inc. where you can watch a recent commercial for both companies and learn (*gasp*) that at least one of the people in Microsoft's "Laptop Hunters" ad campaign is an actress.