Quite often when we are writing training courses, we often think

“People should know this..”

But quite often, they don’t – so we have to tell them.

Like the person who was having a facebook fanpage designed and asked the designer – “Is it a good idea to have a link to my website from the fan page”

Answer “Umm yes – that’s the whole point”

But you don’t expect the people needing the training to be your bank.

Last week, I paid some money in at my local branch.

Of course, the paying in machine was a usual rubbish tip with half written slips and scraps of paper.

I was in a hurry and so I stuffed my cheques and cash into an envelope along with a blank cheque. (There was no where obvious to write my details on the envelope).

Fast forward a couple of days and I received a letter address as you can see.

Now, we operate a ruthless regime with junk mail and the letter was almost in the shredder when the santander logo caught my eye.

So I opened the letter.

Talk about a ticking off…

Firstly, the letter was incorrectly addressed. (And not actually addressed to a person at all even though there are 2 named on the account).

Now it’s a school of thought in customer service that says that to make people do what you want, you have to make it easy for them.

Pay, turn up on time, buy something, make it easy for them and they are more likely to do it.

So what I call INCENDIARY words tend to stop people doing what you want because it raises their hackles. They become incensed and lose focus on the task in hand (like buying or paying) and focus instead on the letter and it’s author. It makes the whole thing more personal.

Let’s look at 2 incendiary phrases.

Your envelope ACTUALLY contained

ACTUALLY is a what I call “feet stood at ten past twelve type phrase.”

Think about it. (Oh and drop one shoulder and put your head on one side also).

Do you feel smarmy? Because you sure as heck look it….

“What I ACTUALLY said was…”

You MUST …

Huh ? MUST ?

I MUST wear a seatbelt. I MUST pay my mortgage every month. I MUST pay my council tax.

I MUST pay cheques and cash into separate envelopes???

Doesn’t quite have the same ring to it does it?

YOU MUST leads to the obvious reply “or else what?“

Now – what am I trying to tell you? (and this blog post has been very therapeutic for me by the way)

1. Writing to people when you could ring up is not to be recommended. A quick friendly phone call could have cleared all this up.

2. More people than I thought seem to need lessons in writing customer focused letters.

3. Words like MUST and ACTUALLY are finger wagging words.

4. Banks trying to outsource their admin to the customer (come on… why else is it that I MUST put my deposits into two separate envelopes other than to make it easy for their back office processes ) need to be more persuasive and less confrontational.

In a day or so, I will write what I would have written instead of this tosh.