Last Updated on January 25, 2017 by David
We recently published an article on the faults of traditional name entry practices in modern web apps and services. The concept of first, middle, and last names simply don’t apply to your customers from around the world. While the majority of western customers will have names that fit the mold, customers from South America, Asia, the Middle East, and many more will have names that take on very different conventions.
You can now attach a “Friendly Name” field (in addition to a full name) for your customers by simply editing your customers’ profiles. The idea is to give maximum flexibility to how you can enter a name your customers’ prefer to be addressed with. For example, in the western world, William Clinton is often referred to as Bill Clinton. This is the name most of President Clinton’s friends would refer to him by and it’s his most commonly used name socially.
At the end of the day, addressing customers correctly and in the most friendly way possible creates the best overall customer service experience. We highly recommend giving the “Friendly Name” field a shot!
When you open the customer’s name editing box, the “Goes By” field corresponds to the friendly name. Auto-detection is on by default and we’ll do our best to predict a friendly name. However, since this field is designed so you can edit it however you like, simply erase the autopopulated name enter another one.
Friendly names also work great for response templates. We still support default variables such {{ customer.name }} for the full name, or
{{ customer.name | split: ‘ ‘ | first }} for splitting the first portion of the name from the rest, but we now also support {{ customer.friendly_name }} for pulling a name that the customer normally goes by.
The friendly_name variable is also accessible via the Reamaze API to better help your agents address customers in the most friendly way possible!
