When peo­ple talk about tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tions jobs or trends, employ­ers do not bring up cus­tomer ser­vice skills as a top skill.

While most of our jobs may be focused on writ­ten com­mu­ni­ca­tions or know­ing a col­lec­tion of soft­ware tools or tech­nol­o­gy skills, we still reg­u­lar­ly meet with col­leagues both with­in and out­side of depart­ments. Cus­tomer ser­vice skills come into play when we inter­act with col­leagues, respond to emails, take respon­si­bil­i­ty for mis­takes, pro­duce qual­i­ty con­tent on time, col­lab­o­rate and share knowl­edge, and man­age expectations.

Recent­ly, I read two books about cus­tomer ser­vice: The Star­bucks Expe­ri­ence: 5 Prin­ci­ples for Turn­ing Ordi­nary Into Extra­or­di­nary and Be Our Guest: Per­fect­ing the Art of Cus­tomer Ser­vice, a book that focus­es on Disney’s approach when it comes to exceed­ing expec­ta­tions rather than sim­ply sat­is­fy­ing them.

Here are a few things that I think about when work­ing for clients:

• Be diplo­mat­ic: As a con­sul­tant, I real­ized the impor­tance of diplo­ma­cy more than five years ago. At one client site, I wit­nessed a con­sul­tant say the wrong thing to the wrong employee—the next day the con­sul­tant was fired.
• Make an effort to meet col­leagues and clients in per­son: Even if I am not required to vis­it a client’s office reg­u­lar­ly, I still make the effort to phys­i­cal­ly be there, espe­cial­ly at the start of a project. I know it is more con­ve­nient to set up an online meet­ing. But vis­it­ing a client reg­u­lar­ly sends a mes­sage that the client and their work are impor­tant. In my expe­ri­ence, meet­ing the per­son helps build trust and often makes the sub­se­quent review of tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion that much eas­i­er. Think of that first meet­ing as an investment.
• Be approach­able and lik­able: I know this is obvi­ous but it’s worth repeat­ing. First impres­sions mat­ter and being friend­ly and easy to approach when you first start work­ing at a com­pa­ny makes your work that much eas­i­er in the days and weeks that follow.
• Man­age expec­ta­tions: If you tell a client or col­league that you will do some­thing by a cer­tain date, make sure you do it. Even bet­ter, if you say you will deliv­er con­tent to the client by Fri­day, pro­vide the con­tent a day or two ear­ly. I am fre­quent­ly sur­prised how many peo­ple make a promise and do not fol­low through.
• Lis­ten well. When I meet sub­ject mat­ter experts, I talk less and lis­ten to their needs. For long meet­ings, you may want to con­sid­er using note-tak­ing tools. Check out this pod­cast on note-tak­ing tools and technologies.
• Respond to crit­i­cism or mis­takes quick­ly. We all make mis­takes. If you’ve made a mis­take, own up to it, fix the issue quick­ly, and learn from it.
• Sur­prise and delight: In The Star­bucks Expe­ri­ence, author Joseph Michel­li writes, “Nowa­days, peo­ple have a cer­tain antic­i­pa­tion for some­thing spe­cial with just about every pur­chas­ing expe­ri­ence, or hope they will get sur­prised, even in the most mun­dane expe­ri­ences.” With this in mind, how can tech­ni­cal writ­ers sur­prise and delight clients and super­vi­sors? One way is to go “above and beyond” what is asked of you. For exam­ple, if your client asks you to re-write an online top­ic, you could improve the top­ic but also add an illus­tra­tion that clar­i­fies a con­cept as well as improve an aspect of the website’s navigation.
• Stream­line process­es. When you inter­act with col­leagues, make it easy as pos­si­ble to inter­act with you. In my opin­ion, reviews of tech­ni­cal con­tent are often cum­ber­some and are typ­i­cal­ly han­dled by send­ing draft PDF files to Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts, who edit the PDF and email it back. After a few months, writ­ers have col­lect­ed dozens of these PDFs from Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts in an email pro­gram. In con­trast, at one client site I worked at, they used Con­flu­ence to post PDFs so that Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts could eas­i­ly review and com­ment on the draft con­tent. Even bet­ter, Sub­ject Mat­ter Experts could see what oth­er review­ers had writ­ten on a giv­en top­ic, fos­ter­ing a dia­log on con­tentious issues. Fur­ther­more, writ­ers could respond to the draft com­ments by mak­ing com­ments back, such as “Made the edit in the source file.” Check out an ear­li­er blog post I wrote about using Con­flu­ence to man­age tech­ni­cal con­tent reviews.
• End a project or con­tract in a pos­i­tive way: Every con­tract comes to an end. When a con­tract is ramp­ing down, I make an effort to sur­prise clients in a pos­i­tive way. Recent­ly, I vol­un­teered myself to write some depart­men­tal pro­ce­dures that I knew were lack­ing and need­ed. I feel that end­ing a con­tact in a pos­i­tive way may increase the chances of being called back for future projects.

 What do you think? When it comes to cus­tomer ser­vice skills, how do you exceed cus­tomer expectations?