Most companies haven't tried it yet but user experience (UX) writers teaming up with customer support service has become a major point of discussion in 2021. As the name suggests, user experience starts from understanding user's (customer) expectations and nobody understands people better than customer rep themselves. They get to attend to customers' inquiries, reviews, and complaints. So they know what to do when improving users' experience.
According to Tech Jury's UX research, 52% of customers leave websites without intending to return due to poor aesthetics. Users who are dissatisfied with what they learn on one website are more likely to switch to another service and continue their research there. Even your domain name has a significant impact on your brand identification and might detract from the user experience of your leads.
By anticipating and, ideally, preventing customer misunderstanding, good UX writers deliver proactive service. UX writing, like customer support service, leads to interactions that prioritize people. UX writers have been known to refer to their work as "the words on the buttons". However, it's more than that, because the collaboration between customer support teams and UX writers has a lot of benefits. Before delving fully into why they should team up, let's talk about UX writers.
What is UX Writing About?
The practice of designing the words, users see and hear when interacting with software is known as UX writing. It's all about figuring out how to make a product and its customer have a dialogue.
One of the most difficult aspects of product copy is that it is frequently written by the same individuals who are constructing the product. They may unwittingly turn a blind eye to the difference between what they imagine the user does with the product and what the user actually does with the product since they are involved from the beginning. Consequently, the copy ends up not being effective.
This leads to the question: who should be working on the product copy?
This is when a UX writer comes in handy. A UX writer improves a user's experience with a product by improving the product's communication. A skilled UX writer spends time going through tickets and listening to customer calls to understand the issues that customers encounter, and then works towards resolving them.
However, sifting through a sea of support tickets for incidents that can be traced back to poor product copy is a time-consuming task. While it isn't hard to complete this task on your own, a little assistance from someone who has worked with the customer support service team before can go a long way.
What UX Writers and Customer Support Service Have in Common
Customer Support Service is a Resource for UX
In an ideal world, all products and services would be simple to use and comprehend, and users would never need to contact customer care. Regrettably, this isn't always the case.
Even with an excellent UX write-up, users may have problems or have queries at any time, and they will contact or call you for assistance. During this time, the team of UX writers may be so preoccupied with crafting perfect write-ups for your company's product or service that they would overlook the fact that the experience is far more essential than the product they are creating.
However, one important source of information on user expectations is often overlooked: customer service. Customer support service refers to any action that involves anticipating and offering professional, helpful, and high-quality service and assistance to customers before, during, and after their needs are addressed. As a result, in addition to user experience research, customer support is another powerful source of knowledge about your users.
You can bet that if something is a hassle for your users, it will be a pain for your customer service personnel as well. Customer service and the UX team both want people who don't have any inquiries or problems when using the product.
They Both Share Common Goals and Methods
As stated earlier, customer support service and user experience both strive for the same goal: a user who has no queries and encounters no problems when using their product.
When a user has a question, however, customer support's goal is to discover the best method to answer it, using the best language possible, so the user understands and doesn't have to ask again. When writing content for a certain feature or page, a UX writer's role is to anticipate these questions.
When a user has an issue, customer support's role is to come up with a solution within their means and limits. This entails considering what the product can and cannot achieve, as well as providing a different option to bring the user as close to their desired outcome as feasible. Again, a UX writer's job is to come up with the greatest possible solution to the user's needs while working within the limits that they have.
They Both Impact One Another
UX writers and customer Support have similar aims and use similar strategies to achieve them, but they also have a direct impact on one another.
Customers will complain less about an easy-to-use product, giving your customer support team more time to handle the concerns that do come in. They will be able to respond more swiftly and with more personalized responses, increasing user satisfaction with your product. As a result, there will be fewer complaints and more time to respond, among other things.
Consider this... Every user who has ever emailed customer support has taken 5 –10 minutes out of their day to tell you how they feel about your product. This shows that customer support and UX writers must pay attention to user complaints because they are a treasure mine of user expectations. Listening should be their strongest suit.
How UX Writers and Customer Support Service Can Collaborate
Design Better Interface
Designers accept input from multiple teams when designing a product's interface and customer service should be one of them. Involving a UX writer and a customer support representative early in the design process benefits all three teams – design, support, and UX. Of course, there's also the user.
Support representatives have hands-on experience talking customers through features and proposing solutions when they run into problems. They are a better judge of the flow of a feature from beginning to end as a result of these experiences. They also get frequent feedback on the product and are familiar with a variety of feature requests, which helps them make design decisions.
Understand Users Pain Points
Apart from understanding the audience, you must also consider their pain points when writing text that improves the user experience. To accomplish this, you must identify and eliminate hitches in the product's use through good copywriting.
Taking customer calls will allow you to discover situations where the customer is having difficulty completing a task on their own. Speaking with support personnel, in addition to taking calls from consumers, can provide you with a more complete view of the issues users are having with the product. One method to achieve this is to talk about features (particularly those with low uptake) and request a download of various use cases and usability issues from the customer care team.
Know the User Better
To write copy that benefits your users, you must understand:
- Who the user is
- How the user interacts with the product in various situations
As a result, UX writers and designers make use of the user's persona. Contrary to popular opinions, user personas are utilized by designers and customer support teams, and not simply marketing and product teams.
Designers create user personas to better understand the target audience's needs, goals, and personality traits.
You must go beyond user personas to truly understand the user to develop great copy. To accomplish this, you should collaborate closely with customer service representatives, who spend a lot of time talking to customers and will have a thorough awareness of their viewpoints. Customer Support representatives are well-versed in the optimum workflows, use cases, comprehension, and expectations of various user groups. Working with them can assist you in putting yourself in the shoes of your users.
Use a Language That Customers Understand
A UX writer's major goal is to provide copy that is appealing to the user. Thus, you must ensure that the language you employ is consistent with that of your customers to achieve this.
Customers tend to refer to your product's qualities in a variety of ways. They may borrow vocabulary from previous products they've used, or they may invent new phrases depending on their understanding of the functionality.
Final Thoughts
Customer support service representatives in any firm can be found attempting to limit the number of how-to queries they receive so that they can focus on assisting clients with more complicated issues. A UX writer aims to improve a product's usability through words, reducing the number of how-to queries in the process. When two teams with the same aim collaborate, the result is twice as satisfying: better UX writing and a significant decrease in how-to queries.
If you're looking to outsource your customer support service and improve your user experience, look no further than Wow Customer Support. Contact us today to learn more about our services.
