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Spoiler: it made no sense.

The other day my friend landed a new job and posted it to her LinkedIn profile. Naturally, I was asked if I wanted to congratulate her, but wait, I needn't come up with own my heartfelt message, LinkedIn already took care of that for me!

It’s a straightforward enough response “Congrats on the new job!”. It’s clear and it makes sense. True, it may not be very sincere but if you’re in a rush, and are not particularly close with the person, it works (if you have over 200 connections, can you honestly say you’re best friends with them all?).

But the prompts don’t stop there, my freshly employed friend then also got a set of three choices: “Thanks”, “Thank you”, or just a very concise thumbs up emoji. So, being first thing in the morning and having a lot on our desks, we decided to undertake an important task: carrying out a whole exchange according to the suggested code of conversation.

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It started off simple enough...

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and then it quickly escalated into a world of nonsense...

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This was all done in good fun of course and we didn’t actually expect to have a meaningful conversation, especially not with someone we actually want to talk to. The odd quick message has its place but in the long run it lacks one of the things we think is most important - humanisation.

Even though we are drowned in easy to get information, it’s often cold. If you want to stand out against the crowd, you need to remind people that your business is made up of real human beings.

If you want to read more articles about machine learning, click here.

The tips:

Show yourself! - On an ‘About’ page, on the ‘Thank you for your order page’ and in any correspondence, remind your customers of your human side, by showing it! Team pictures and individual staff pictures on chats, lets customers put a face to the name, taking away that cold feeling.

Chatbots as a PART of your Customer Service - Pop-up chatbots are a great way of showing visitors your support options. They can even be used to answer simple queries, but not all customers want to talk to a robot, so always give customers the option to reach out to a real human, for a real conversation!

Cut the jargon - It can be easy to get lost in technical terms when you’re surrounded by them but remember that your customers don’t always have the same background as you! Keep it short, sweet and simple.

Humanising is an important part of the world of e-Commerce, don’t fall short when it comes to offering support!

If you want to hear more about how important humanising is to Clerk.io, click here!

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