Assignment: An “expert” blog that teaches something
In the days when computers were new, and I was a few decades younger, people wrote letters – to family, friends, and companies. I was chronically deficient in the first two but financially fortunate in the latter. I was a pen for hire.
Here’s how it worked. Let’s say you were getting ready for bed, squeezed your toothpaste tube, and saw something pop out that shouldn’t have been there. Yuck! What IS that? Whatever it was, it was enough to make you skip dental hygiene that evening and send you to bed with grist for a nightmare.
Next day you’d fire off a letter to the toothpaste manufacturer detailing your shock and questioning their quality control. In a week or two, you’d receive a thank-you letter back with a coupon for a free replacement tube. That was my letter.
I wrote customer service letters for more than a dozen of the country’s largest consumer product and food companies and financial institutions. They fell roughly into five different categories: complaint (the largest by far); query (“How should I use . . . “); praise; request (for samples, coupons, speakers); suggestion. Big companies then, 25-30 years ago, generally received 500 to 1,000 customer letters every week. A widely publicized mention in the press – good or bad – could bump that up another thousand or so.
Every letter received was opened and scanned quickly, not yet by a computer – that came later – but by a human. All mail was date and time stamped, with the exception of suggestions, which were directed to the legal department. Companies make product changes over time; a time-stamped suggestion could prove to be problematic if the company made a change similar to the suggestion in the future and the writer claimed ownership of the idea.
Before they began outsourcing customer service, it wasn’t unusual for corporations to employ dozens of CSRs (customer service representatives). Response letters were all over the place, depending on the reps’ writing styles. Risk was an issue because a CSR might inadvertently imply the company had done something wrong or had failed in its due diligence.
My letters ended such worries. They made all responses consistent, accurate, brief, timely, and they never admitted error; instead they expressed regret for the customer’s unfortunate experience. Most importantly, they eliminated the back-and-forth, penpal relationships that some CSRs developed with customers. It was a quick thank you, we’re addressing the issue, here’s a coupon. That seems simple, but the process itself was much more complicated.
Some corporations produce many kinds of products and services, often for a variety of audiences and users. There’s a difference between a candy bar and cleaning supplies, between home loans and bounced checks. My letters had to ring true. Different circumstances, different responses.
I wrote dozens of openings and closings. In between them was the meat of the letter – the content – sometimes a sentence or paragraph, other times two or three paragraphs. Every sentence and paragraph, configured by proprietary software, had to flow seamlessly, logically, and meaningfully from one paragraph to another throughout the letter. Nothing was stand-alone; everything was part of a whole, so dozens of paragraphs could produce thousands of replies. Letters were signed by a desk name, i.e., the name assigned to all the CSRs handling correspondence directed to a particular “desk” for response. Obviously, that person didn’t exist and couldn’t be reached by telephone.
Everything I wrote was sacrosanct. Nothing could be changed by a CSR – not a word, spelling, punctuation mark – because all my work was reviewed and cleared by legal. A misplaced comma could change the meaning of a sentence. Each letter had to be grammatically correct and understandable throughout every region of the country. Because some people may read a response letter aloud to others, especially on the phone, I avoided some sounds, such as sequential plosives (b, d, g, k, p, t) and sibilants (soft c, s, sh, z) so that the reader wouldn’t stumble when sharing their letter.
I learned from my writing assignments the meaning of foods’ mouth feel, importance of touch/feel, allowable percentages of rodent droppings and hair in consumables, and differences between corporate assumptions and customers’ perceptions. For example, banks’ use of “debit” and “credit” are the exact opposite from their customers’ understanding of those terms.
A word about refunds and coupons. Customers, especially those who expect a check for whatever reason, usually receive refund coupons instead. Giving customers cash is cumbersome and not in the corporation’s financial interest; sending coupons is. About 2 percent or fewer coupons, regardless of value, are redeemed.
Nowadays most company contact is online. The process changed, but the responses remain carefully controlled.
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