In Search of a Better Support Email – part 1

If you are a Customer Service agent, it is likely that you respond to dozens or even hundreds of emails per day. And these are not ordinary emails that pile up in your inbox, on the contrary, you are in a direct communication with your clients and you are representing your company. The impression you make will directly impact the company’s brand, i.e. you are accountable for representing your company in the best possible light.

There are a couple of rules I follow when it comes to writing a support email:

• Make the email personal and let the clients know that they are communicating with a human, not the machine.

Spare your clients templates and predefined replies. No need for that, I bet the clients will appreciate if they realized you took time to write your reply. And they will appreciate it even more if you take a personal approach and empathize with them. I guarantee that!

Bad example – Greetings, $client. I have read and understood your ticket. I will contact you again once I find the right solution. Best regards

Good example – Hi, $client! Thank you for using our app! The issue you reported seems a bit more complex than I expected and I will have to investigate everything thoroughly. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible! Thank you for your patience! Best

• Never lie!

Don’t sugarcoat the information you provide to your clients. Personally, I would value a lot more a sincere reply which brings bad news than the one with empty promises. Sooner or later, those promises will get broken and on the long run, the truth always comes out.

Bad example – The feedback you submitted was received and we will definitely implement your feature request at some point in the future.

At some point in the future (in a month, 2 months, 3 months) you will lose this client. You will also weaken the brand of your company, becoming one of “those” companies that lie to their clients in order to keep them.

Good example – That’s an interesting feature request, thanks for submitting it! Unfortunately, we have a completely different roadmap for our app and this feature will not be presented there. However, our new $awesome_feature_of_awesomeness will have a similar functionality. Make sure you check it out!

You may lose this client immediately. Or not. In either case, you will strengthen your company’s brand and show your integrity instead of increasing your MRR for ~$10 that month.

• Always provide a next step. Don’t leave a client clueless and without any guidance.

Bad example – Unfortunately, because of $incredibly_annoying_problem_on_the_client’s_side, you cannot do that with our app. Best regards

Good example – Unfortunately, our app cannot work properly if there is $incredibly_annoying_problem_on_the_client’s_side activated. Any chance you could deactivate it? There is a great substitute I personally use and it works perfectly with our app – $link_to_the_substitute. We’ve already tried making our app compatible with $annoying_other_app and we also contacted them directly but we just couldn’t find the solution and bypass the problem. If you could contact them and ask them for assistance in this matter, that would be much appreciated! And they will probably pay more attention to one of their client’s request than when we contacted them. Thanks!

End of In Search of a Better Support Email – part 1!