In an era when 41% of consumers say live chat is their top support channel, and 73% report high satisfaction with chat compared to email, the way companies communicate matters more than ever (Pylon). Effective customer service writing isn’t just a nicety; it’s a critical driver of trust, retention, and real connection.
In this interview, writing expert Leslie O’Flahavan shares her decades of experience helping service teams craft clear, empathetic, and human-centered messages. From boosting agent confidence to balancing structure with warmth, her insights show how good writing shapes CX.
Leslie’s journey into customer service writing
Q: Leslie, you’ve been helping people write better for nearly three decades through E-WRITE. What first drew you to customer service writing, and how did this focus take shape over the years?
My lifelong mission is to help people learn to write well at work. I’m doubly motivated to help customer service agents write better email, chat, social media, and SMS responses because these people work in a high-pressure environment, and they rarely get the support they need to develop the writing skills particular to each customer service channel.
Over the years, I’ve addressed all types of customer service and self-service writing, including knowledge base articles, responses to ratings and reviews, and strategies for accurately measuring the quality of customer service writing.
Building writing confidence in customer service teams
Q: Many agents don’t see themselves as “writers.” When you start working with a new team, how do you help them build confidence and see writing as part of great customer service?
I agree. Many agents don’t think of themselves as writers. Many have spent years answering customers’ calls, so they see themselves as “talkers,” not writers. But any working person who spends most of their day writing is, in fact, a writer—a “real” writer.
I help agents build confidence by encouraging them to customize their written responses and not just copy and paste a template or a macro. I help agents reflect on their own deep knowledge of what customers understand and care about, so they can use what they know when they write. I encourage them to express empathy to customers, and I show them how to do this in writing.
These days, customers suspect they’re interacting with bots not people. Agents should express empathy in their responses, so they can create real connections.
What training works best for hesitant writers?
Q: You’ve worked with both experienced and “word-phobic” employees. What training techniques have proven most effective in helping them grow?
The most practical way to help an employee grow as a writer is to provide them regularly with examples of good writing and give them an opportunity to discuss the writer’s choices. Why is this a great email response to an angry customer? How did the chat agent use open-ended questions to diagnose the customer’s problem? Why are the steps in this knowledge base article so easy for inexperienced users to follow? Show them good writing and help them deconstruct it.
How do teams balance clarity and empathy?
Q: There’s often tension between writing by the book and writing like a human. How do you help teams find the right balance between structure, clarity, and empathy?
This is a complex question, but it has a manageable answer. Customer service writing is meant to accomplish something: solve a customer’s problem, answer a question, prevent a loss of business, prevent repeat contacts to the call center, enable self-service, etc. So, customer service writers are allowed to “break the strict rules of writing” if doing so helps them accomplish one of those goals.
While it’s not a good idea to break spelling or punctuation rules, agents can sometimes write a fragment instead of a full sentence, and they can use personal or informal wording to show customers they care. It’s more important to write a prompt, useful, customized response to a customer than it is to follow every strict rule for business writing that you learned in school.
Why plain language matters
Q: You’ve long championed plain language. Why is it so essential in customer service, and what do people still get wrong about it?
Plain language is a communication philosophy that holds that it’s the writer’s responsibility to write so readers can understand, use, and care about what they’re reading. The writer should do the work to create responses that are easy to read. The writer should protect the reader from wasting time or being confused. Plain language is essential in customer service because customers may not know the right questions to ask, and they aren’t always experts in the information they must read. Plain language makes understanding possible.
AI writing vs. human writing in customer service
Q: You’ve talked about using genAI tools to polish and revise writing. How can AI help customer service teams without taking away their human voice?
AI tools needn’t take away the human voice or the brand voice. If you provide the tool with your brand voice guide, it’s more likely to be able to create messages that “sound” like your company. And if you write prompts that personify the customer (For example, “Using a positive tone, explain to a skeptical customer why we need their credit card number to create a free trial account”), the AI tool’s output will be more relevant and more human-sounding.
What are the risks of overusing AI content?
Q: On the flip side, what are the risks when companies rely too heavily on AI-generated messages?
The worst AI-generated messages contain factual errors, so that’s the biggest risk of all. The other risks fall under the category of sounding fake, inhuman, or robotic. When this happens, customers distrust or dislike the messages, which causes customer service problems.
While it’s fine to have AI generate a message, a human must review and, if necessary, revise the message so it’s meaningful for a human customer.
Writing for email, chat, and social media
Q: You’ve helped countless brands refine their tone across channels. How should writing differ between email, chat, and social media?
The tone can vary a bit in formality; email is more strait-laced than social media, for example. The channels differ in how much they rely on emoji, too. But the factor that affects writing style most is whether the agent and the customer are communicating in real time (chat and social media) or not (email). When you’re responding to a customer in real time, your writing is more like conversation, so it will be less formal, shorter sentences, more questions, etc.
How can agents express empathy in text?
Q: Tone and empathy can be tricky in text. What advice do you give to agents who want their messages to sound more human and understanding, even when there’s no voice or face-to-face contact?
I tell agents who want to sound more human and understanding to use more personal pronouns (I, you, we) in their writing. Pronouns remind the reader that we’re engaging one-to-one.
Behind the “Fix This Writing!” broadcast
Q: Your LinkedIn Live series Fix This Writing! is such a clever idea. What inspired you to start it, and what kinds of writing problems do you enjoy tackling most?
I was inspired to start the Fix This Writing! series, so I could help people find it easier to write better. And I enjoy partnering with Professor Kim Sydow Campbell on the broadcast, too. She’s the best!
And in the age of genAI, I’m so happy our series focuses on how to make bad writing better. To use genAI, people need to know how to prompt the tool to produce a good product or tell the tool how to fix the banal, robotic draft it’s created. The fixes we share in our series help you write good genAI prompts.
What common writing issues arise again and again?
Q: You often analyze “not-very-good” writing and show how to make it better. What patterns do you see again and again, and why do you think people fall into those habits?
Two patterns I see all the time are (1) putting the main point at the end instead of the beginning and (2) writing too much. People fall into these habits because the process of writing helps writers understand what they’re writing about, so they often discover the main point (the request or recommendation, etc.) while they are writing. They place the main point at the end because that’s when they figured it out! But readers prefer the main point at the beginning, especially in customer service writing.
The second pattern—writing too much—is common because concise writing is more difficult than wordy writing. When people are hurrying to finish a draft or are unsure of what they want to say, they write too much. Ugh.
Echoing customers: a simple way to improve responses
Q: After years of coaching professionals, what’s one writing habit you wish every customer service agent would adopt?
I wish customer service agents would use the facts and feelings shared by customers when they respond. So if the customer writes “I purchased this suitcase for my mother, and after only two weeks, the handle is broken…,” I’d hope the agent would mention the mom or that the suitcase was a gift in the response.
Echoing the customer’s facts and feelings in the response demonstrates that the agent has read the email or chat closely. That builds the customer’s feelings of rapport and trust.
Writing well is at the heart of great customer service
Exceptional customer service starts with clarity, empathy, and actionable communication. Leslie O’Flahavan shows that helping teams write better messages across multiple channels builds trust and strengthens customer relationships. Writing well doesn’t happen by chance; it requires practice, guidance, and reflection.
Leslie emphasizes that every agent can improve their writing and make interactions more human. Her approach turns insights into practical skills, boosts team confidence, and ensures messages are clear, helpful, and engaging. Most importantly, customer service writing can be improved today—one message at a time.
