The Surprising Reason Customers Trust a Real Personality Over a Script
“As soon as you show that you really need help they treat you like an imbecile.” That is not me making a point about big companies being cold. That is one of my own help desk customers, describing an experience she’d had somewhere else, long before she ever spoke to me.
It stuck with me because it is the opposite of what people want when they are stuck. They do not want a perfect, polished response. They want a real personality, someone who sounds like an actual person.
I have been thinking about that a lot lately, after coming across a story about a much bigger business discovering that a real personality beats a perfect script, in a much more public way.
When Scripted Answers Make People Feel Small
Most companies still assume that professionalism means sounding the same every time to every customer, including you. Consistent. Polished. Careful.
There is a place for that. But there is a big difference between sounding professional and sounding like nobody in particular.
When someone is already feeling out of their depth, tech, money, whatever it is, a flawless script can make things worse. It reads as though you’re talking to a wall that happens to be very good at grammar. You didn’t come to a business hoping to talk to a wall.
People do not build trust with wallpaper. They build it with a real personality, even an imperfect, slightly odd one.
The Owl That Wouldn’t Stay Dead
Earlier this year, a language learning app killed off its own mascot. Not quietly retired him, killed him, with an obituary, a funeral, the whole thing, all over social media.
It sounds like a strange thing to do on purpose. Except within two weeks, the story had been talked about more than most of the big adverts that had aired just days earlier. If you’d blinked, you’d have missed how fast it spread.
The interesting part wasn’t the stunt itself. It was why it worked. That owl had spent years being given a proper personality, running jokes, odd little habits, a slightly unhinged sense of humour. People weren’t reacting to a mascot. They were reacting to someone they felt they knew.
People rarely share advertisements, but they happily share things they helped create.
Then the company asked its whole community to earn the owl’s return by finishing lessons together. Millions of people stopped watching and started taking part.
Personality is what makes people care enough to stay. Participation is what makes them tell other people about you. That is the real lesson, and it applies just as much to a one person business as it does to a huge app.
What My Own Help Desk Taught Me First
I didn’t need a viral marketing story to learn this. I learned it years ago, working the Promote Labs help desk.
One customer had a medical condition that made tech harder for her to follow than most people. She’d had a rough time of it elsewhere before she ever reached me, and she’d been made to feel stupid the moment she admitted she needed help. You have probably felt some version of that yourself, wanting help but bracing for someone to make you feel small for asking.
When she wrote back after we’d sorted her problem, she said something I’ve never forgotten. She said I “came across as a normal person, not some pre-programmed individual with lots of ready answers but zero personality.”
She wasn’t grateful because I knew more than the last person she’d spoken to. She was grateful because I sounded like a person, patient, a bit ordinary, not a script wearing a headset. That’s probably what you want too, when you’re the one asking for help.
That’s the standard I still try to hold to on every support ticket I answer, and it’s exactly what that owl story reminded me of, just on a much bigger stage.
Building the Personality Into Your Own Business
You don’t need a mascot, and you certainly don’t need a funeral. But you do need to let people see a real personality.
Write emails the way you’d talk, not the way a marketing textbook tells you to. Let a bit of your own history show through, mine happens to involve punch tape and a husky, yours will be something else entirely.
Answer support questions like you’re talking to one specific person, not a category of ticket. Admit when something didn’t go to plan. I’ve written before, in other articles I have shared recently, about a launch of mine that didn’t land the way I’d hoped. That honesty tends to build more trust than pretending everything’s perfect.
Give people something small to take part in too, a question, a poll, a reply you take the time to read. A dinner party works better than a lecture, and your business is closer to a dinner party than most people treat it.
Where This Pays Off
Once people trust that there’s a real person behind your business, the next natural step is usually your email list. That’s where most of the ongoing relationship happens, long after someone’s first visit to your site. You keep that relationship alive by staying just as real in your emails as you were in that first conversation.
If you want a structured way of building that side of things properly, Lazy Way To Email Riches is worth a look. It walks through building an email list that responds, rather than one that just sits there going quiet. That suits you if you’d rather follow a system than work it out as you go, the way I mostly did.
The Bit Nobody Tells You
You are allowed to sound like yourself. Odd little habits included. So are yours.
People aren’t looking for the most polished version of your business. They’re looking for someone worth trusting when things go wrong, and someone worth telling their friends about when things go right. That’s the kind of business you can build, one honest exchange at a time.
Be that person, not the pre-programmed one. It’s a much smaller ask than it sounds, and it’s the one thing nobody else can copy.
Talk soon, Jennifer Caroline
