I hate boilerplate. You do, too. I know you do.
When you hear the phrase “your call is important to us” while you’re on hold, you sigh deep down inside like I do, don’t you?
I call this “to better serve you” language. It’s often double-speak or language that purports to serve the customer, but really serves the company. Enough with the fake professionalism. Stop ironing out all of the emotion. I’m dying for some reality-based customer service.
Not everyone is like me (thank God, right?), but I think most people have reached a point where their anger reaches critical levels as soon as they detect boilerplate language in a customer service interaction.
Today, I was thrilled to find that a Get Satisfaction user after my own heart has composed a very terse — but very effective — list of ways to respond to customers. It was his way of recommending that a company step up and answer questions that have been asked on our site, but not yet answered. To wit:
“It would be great to hear one of the following:
1. Oh my God, we’re so sorry. Didn’t realize the problem. Fixing immediately.
2. Yes, sorry about that. We’re aware of it, and it’s on our list of things to fix soon.
3. Yep, unfortunately, it’s a complex issue, and we’re not sure if we’ll be able to do anything about it.
4. We appreciate your situation, but this is the way we intended our product to work. And we don’t see that changing.
5. Go to hell, buddy.”
Nicely done, sir.
If you want to break out of the mold of canned responses, start with something this spirited — and straightforward — and mold it to fit your own company’s culture. You might want to massage that last one a bit (#5), although people like me love that last one the most. Then again, not everyone is like me (thank God, right?).
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