A retail chain that champions clarity and efficiency found these ingredients lacking when it came to correspondence with customers.

The company wanted written communications to be more professional, personalised, and polished -- missives that would make any language teacher beam with pride.

With social media and text messages relaxing the rules of writing so much, our client demanded higher standards for its customer communications. Email messages needed to be professionally written, even if informal and cordial in tone, tailored to the recipient, and free of errors because customer questions deserved a respectful response. Pre-written templates are useful to a point, but the company wanted to eliminate impersonal "cut and paste" responses to customer enquiries.

The challenge

The vast majority of contact centre workers were trained in American English, whose spelling and grammar rules are different than English spoken by the chain's customers in Europe and elsewhere. Whilst most associates know Europeans prefer the letter "s" in a word like "authorise" (as opposed to the North American zed in "authorize"), there are countless other language variations and nuances involving word choice and spelling, verb conjugation, and overall sentence construction. The contact centre team needed to suppress their innate American English tendencies and adopt King's English as their default.

The solution

To ensure emails were professionally written and mirrored how the language is used by customers, the client deployed TTEC Grammar Assist, a cloud-based, AI-enhanced writing tool. The solution's algorithms analysed writing for grammar, spelling, punctuation, clarity, word choice, sentence structure, and made context-specific suggestions for improvement. The tool also provided guidance for a formal or informal tone.

The results

The solution was broadly adopted by teams serving all markets. Associates used the writing tool for 87% of emails in one region and 91% of emails in another country. As a result, spelling and grammar improved 11.6% to achieve quality scores ranging from 94% to 98.6%, for an overall average 96.3% quality score.

Associates were more productive because they spent less time double-checking their writing and felt comfortable deviating from templates to write more personalised messages. This heightened confidence improved job satisfaction and retention.

Because Grammar Assist also serves as a training tool, its expected usage may drop somewhat going forward as proper language usage becomes engrained practise over time. The solution is browser-based so it can be applied to standardise back-office communications such as internal emails, case notes in customer relationship management (CRM) and customer experience (CX) platforms, knowledgebases, and presentation materials like PowerPoint.