I’m recommending that you speak in a way that touches the emotions of your client when you’re doing enrollment, because emotions directly affect the will.

Using concrete language significantly increased customer satisfaction.

Being nice is good, but eventually decisions need to be made and problems need to be solved.

And that is where less emotional, more cognitive language becomes important. Indeed, when customer service agents used more emotional language at the beginning of conversations, and more cognitive language in the middle, customers were more satisfied with the interaction and purchased more afterward.

Don’t just solve. And don’t just connect.

Connect, then solve.

The more emotional language an article used, the more likely audiences were to keep reading.

Behavioral scientists have conducted hundreds of studies about the differences between powerful and powerless words and phrases. We are especially smitten with research led by Jonah Berger at the University of Pennsylvania and by our Stanford colleague Jennifer Aaker. We draw mostly on their work to generate five tips about the kind of talk that provokes people to act, persist, and develop imaginative solutions.