Today, we rely on video conferencing more than ever, and email, that necessary evil, has come under fresh attack from critics such as Cal Newport. Nevertheless, writing remains "the lifeblood of business relationships," as the writing consultant Lynn Gaertner-Johnston once put it. In hybrid and remote offices especially, employees work within a superstructure of language, of writing in tools as various as wikis and chat apps and support tickets––and, yes, email. So, you need assurance that employees can express themselves clearly, warmly, and professionally, especially when customer satisfaction is on the line. Lessonly's Written Response Practice Elements can help employees achieve this standard.

Lessonly offers six written practice activities, each of which can be found in the elements menu of the lesson builder. Click Add Element, then mouse over Practice to review your options. Each activity is described in greater detail below.

This is the most freeform, or least structured, of the written practice activities. When you add a written response element to your lesson, you're at liberty to devise whichever training scenario you wish. Free response questions are well suited to complex topics involving multiple factors or variables. They test how well a learner understands a given concept. In other words, it's not enough to give a correct answer; learners must also supply the reasons that answer is true.

This is an example of what learners see when they encounter a written response activity in a lesson.

This element enables learners to compose mock emails to customers or prospects, thereby refining their ability to articulate the value of your product or service. To complete the activity, learners must compose both the body of an email and its subject line.

This is an example of what learners will see when they encounter an email composition activity in a lesson.

The email composition and email reply activities are two sides of the same coin. If the email composition activity helps learners generate leads (i.e., send cold emails), the email reply activity helps them capitalize on replies, sustaining a prospect's interest in order to begin building a genuine relationship rather than the presumption of one.

This activity has a role-playing quality to it, inasmuch as you need to supply a persona to whom learners will address their reply.

This is an example of what learners will see when they encounter an email reply activity in a lesson.

Chat reply differs from email reply only in the communication mode being simulated. Learners complete this activity by composing replies to mock chat messages that you author. Consider the principles of chat etiquette that apply to your customer service transactions. You might create custom feedback criteria to help learners craft chat replies that meet your standards for professional communication.

This is an example of what learners will see when they encounter a chat reply activity in a lesson.

Boost the skills of your customer support representatives with Lessonly's ticket handling activity. In addition to standard ticket elements such as the subject line and body message, the ticket handling activity allows you to add secondary fields to mimic the support tickets of your help desk software. For example, you might add secondary fields to capture information such as ticket type, priority, or the business division impacted by the issue.

This is an example of what learners will see when they encounter a ticket handling activity in a lesson.

This activity creates authentic training scenarios by importing real Zendesk tickets into Lessonly. Zendesk ticket handling is an ideal way to train new hires, but tenured teammates can benefit, too, by practicing their skills in a risk-free environment.

Zendesk ticket handling is described in a separate article.