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Tag: customer engagement

Formal vs. Casual: Which Style Is Best for Customer Service?

Posted on The Quiq Team

Key Takeaways

  • Use formal tone for B2B, medical, and legal contexts. In situations involving business clients or serious matters (e.g., medical or legal), a formal style can help build trust, maintain credibility, and demonstrate respect.
  • Adopt a casual style for B2C, lifestyle & consumer goods. For most consumer-facing contexts, a more informal tone helps agents appear relatable, friendly, and engaging.
  • Match customers’ style when uncertain. If you’re unsure which tone to adopt, mirror the style customers use (e.g., their level of formality, use of emojis) to create a more comfortable conversation.
  • Organizational or internal rules may override style guidelines. Even if more casual or formal tones make sense in theory, internal documents, brand voice policies, or management directives may require agents to adhere to set styles.

How to Win Over B2B Customers and Build Trust

Interactions with business-to-business (B2B) customers are usually best suited for formal language. The goals are to increase trust and solve problems for current or potential clients while maintaining high standards.

A formal tone supports those aims and allows customer service experts to nimbly navigate corporate structures. Agents may engage with several decision-makers to guide their choices. Formal language shows a consistency that impresses people from highly structured industries.

Questions about using a formal vs. informal communication style also arise when helping customers with medical or legal issues. Those people frequently reach out when dealing with serious matters. A formal style is typically best for handling them, even when addressing consumers.

An informal style could make people conclude customer service agents don’t recognize the severity of their circumstances. They could also decide getting in touch was a mistake and go elsewhere for help — creating missed opportunities for agents and their employers.

How to Facilitate Better B2C Interactions and Stay On-Brand

Business-to-consumer (B2C) conversations succeed when shoppers connect with entities that address their unmet needs and make things easier or more enjoyable. Adopting a casual style for most B2C interactions works well because it allows agents to come across as highly relatable and well positioned to understand individual situations.

Conversations about lifestyle products or consumer goods often resonate more with shoppers when customer service agents use informal wording. This approach lets service specialists avoid overly stuffy language.

Adopting informal language can also aid customer service messaging specialists who want to excite or inspire. Keeping the interactions casual supports a team’s efforts to convey how products tackle potential buyers’ challenges.

Many B2C companies gain ground in competitive marketplaces by using a humorous tone. An informal style supports such lighthearted approaches when they make sense for the audience or the products being sold.

Formal vs. Casual: Which Style Is Best for Customer Service?

No universal rules define formal vs. informal business communication, although the above examples provide useful starting points. If service teams feel unsure, following customers’ leads by mimicking the styles they use is an excellent practice. The use of emoticons can also help clue someone into the fact the person on the other end prefers informal language.

Employees who interact with customers may have internal documents or their supervisors’ orders to follow as well. Those elements take precedence over broader advice about how best to handle communications.

Learn How to Boost Survey Responses

Decisions about when to use formal vs. informal communication illustrate the evolution of how people engage with brands. The Quiq Conversational Customer Engagement Platform supports today’s business messaging needs by personalizing communications through consumers’ preferred channels. Contact us today or request a demo to learn about the benefits of instant messaging and text messaging in formal and informal settings.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

When should I use a formal tone in customer service?

Use a formal tone for B2B clients or sensitive situations (e.g., medical or legal issues) where professionalism and trust are key.

When is a casual tone more effective?

A casual tone works best in B2C settings, where warmth and relatability enhance the customer experience.

How can I decide which tone to use?

If unsure which communication style to use, mirror the customer’s tone and style, including their level of formality or emoji use.

Can humor be part of customer service communication?

Yes, many B2C brands use humor to make interactions more engaging and memorable when appropriate for the audience.

What if my company has its own tone guidelines?

Always follow your company’s internal brand or communication policies first, even if they differ from general tone recommendations.

How to Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Posted on Cristina Bravo-Olmo

Customer satisfaction has a direct impact on a company’s ability to retain existing customers and attract new ones. The level of satisfaction customers feel is largely defined by the experiences they have with customer service representatives. As a result, companies that succeed must monitor and improve call center and customer service performance continuously.

A customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is an essential metric companies use to determine how customer service teams are performing and how they could do better. This score is generated by asking customers to rate their experiences and provide feedback after interactions. A low overall CSAT score indicates a problem with the current approach to customer service. Even if a team has a high CSAT score, there is usually still room for improvement.

4 Steps to Improve Your CSAT Score

  1. Create a Customer-Focused Work Environment
  2. Conduct Customer Surveys
  3. Make Changes in Response to Customer Feedback
  4. Create Personalized Conversations With Customer Messaging

If you’re wondering how to increase customer service ratings, you are already on the right path. The following tips can help improve CSAT scores at your call center.

1. Create a Customer-Focused Work Environment

One of the best ways to increase customer satisfaction is to ensure agents put the customer first in all interactions. All aspects of workflow and policy should be designed to produce the most positive result for the customer. This includes giving agents the tools they need to serve customers efficiently in the manner they prefer.

To improve CSAT scores, companies should analyze the customer journey and consider how certain strategies may make customers feel. When the whole team places customer needs and expectations at the heart of operations, customer satisfaction goes up, along with sales.

2. Conduct Customer Surveys

Call centers struggle to make meaningful changes to the customer experience when they lack the data to back up their decisions. Unless you ask your customers how you are doing, you’ll never know exactly how they feel.

To make more informed adjustments to policy and show an active interest in your customers’ opinions, consider conducting customer surveys after every conversation. Just remember to keep it short and respect each individual’s decision whether or not to participate, as overly time-consuming surveys can backfire.

3. Make Changes in Response to Customer Feedback

Gathering customer feedback is only the first step toward improving customer satisfaction. Customers want to feel heard, so it’s important to listen to negative feedback and implement solutions designed to address the root cause.

To repair damaged customer relationships and further increase CSAT, consider following-up with customers. When you acknowledge the problem and explain how you are working to fix it, customers will be more willing to trust your customer support team in the future.

4. Create Personalized Conversations With Customer Messaging

While some customers may find phone conversations convenient, others would rather send a message using social media or SMS. People view text messaging as a comfortable, safe, and enjoyable form of communication. As a result, companies have the opportunity to significantly improve the customer experience and increase CSAT scores when they implement a business messaging platform like Quiq.

Our platform allows customer service agents to engage multiple customers in their preferred form of communication. Text conversations allow for more personalization, and rich messaging features enable agents to provide easy, direct, and actionable solutions. Agents can send and receive helpful pictures and videos to streamline the conversation, and they can even process secure transactions.

Get Started by Requesting a Quote

By reducing call volume, messaging systems allow call center employees to work more efficiently and ensure customers receive answers quickly. To find out how Quiq can help improve your company’s CSAT rating, request a demo today.