General Meeting: Dealing with “Customers”

by Mark Grausam

Is the customer always right? No, but they must always be respected. For anyone who has worked in any kind of service industry, they will surely have some interesting customer stories to tell! In my former days as a waiter, I have experienced the full gamut of customers. By and large, I think that most customers are decent if treated with respect and decency.

In our industry as technical communicators, we are not always aware that we have our own “customers” — the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) of our workplace. Without them, we would have nothing to write about. In our business we do things with and for other people. As technical communicators, we help people do things simply. With good communication, it is a lot simpler to do our work.

On Tuesday, November 7, Carolyn Watt, president of The Customer Experience Company, presented her ideas on how to make dealing with customers a little easier. The following notes are a summary of her presentation on this valuable topic.

Moments of Contact

Carolyn Watt defines a customer experience as “the collective moments of contact that your customer has with you measured against their expectations”.

These “moments of contact” can include:

• Written or oral communication
• Words, appearance, facial expression, body language
• Logos, corporate communication
• Telephone calls
• Deliveries
• Using your software, product, or user guide
• Meetings
• Websites

All of these moments of contact make up a collective experience and how the customer (SME) will judge you.

Creating a Customer Experience

Tips for creating an excellent customer experience:

• Write a “customer experience statement”. This will help you define more precisely how you will treat your customers.
• Emphasize to SMEs that you are there to help make them look good.
• Communicate clearly.
• Be easy to do business with.
• Send out questions to SMEs in advance to help them prepare their answers beforehand. This is especially helpful for those SMEs whose first language is not English.
• The first person’s action will set the mood. To guide the SME, it should be you who sets the tone.
• Make sure your SME feels good working with you. There’s an emotion associated with every moment of contact. Customers don’t remember what you do for them — they remember how you made them feel.
• Create a feeling of trust with your customer.
• Keep your promises. This includes submitting drafts on time and keeping meeting within the established time limits.
• Don’t have them expend more energy than needed.
• Create a consistent, common, and positive experience.

In other words

What is your role in the experience with your customer? You will need to craft an experience, and be totally responsible for your interaction with your customer.

Follow these guidelines. You will make your SME look good, and you will produce the best documentation possible! The two go hand-in-hand.

And finally...

The council would like to thank The Peer Group for donating the fabulous door prize! Congratulations to Paul Kostiuk , our lucky door prize winners!

About Mark Grausam

Mark is a recent graduate of Seneca College’s Technical Communication Program and a new member of the STC. He taught ESL overseas in South Korea for several years, and is a certified TESL instructor. Other than this brief foray abroad, he is a native Waterloovian having graduated from Wilfrid Laurier University with a degree in English. He is now happily beginning his new career as a technical writer at Research in Motion.