Petros Amoiridis

When you contact customer support via email, you inevitably reach the end of the conversation. Whether you had your issue resolved or not. How does that look like? Both from the customer and the customer support expert’s perspectives?

Customer

As a customer you may have just had your issue resolved, or you just want to end the conversation. Do you send out an additional response acknowledging that?

Support

As a support person you have either read an acknowledgment from the customer, or you were the last to respond offering what you know is the solution and never heard back from the customer. Do you send out an additional response thanking them or asking if their issue was resolved and if they need more help?

Being polite vs reducing back and forth

In both cases for both parties, there’s a question of being polite vs reducing back and forth. On one hand, you want to be polite and communicate effectively by making sure the other party knows what is happening or isn’t still struggling with an issue. On the other hand, you want to reduce the back and forth.

Reducing back and forth is also being polite in a way. Imagine a support conversation with 40 messages. At the end the solution was offered. Adding one more exchange (2 messages at least), doesn’t make a huge difference by itself. But if the customer support expert is having 54 conversations with different customers at that point, one more exchange can make a difference to them.

Not so much so for the customer, who’s been having this one on one conversation. If you are a customer that is aware of that fact, you will probably choose to not send yet another response. If not, and you are the polite kind, you will probably choose to send it.

Checking back if you haven’t heard from the customer

As a customer support expert, you may have offered the solution and haven’t heard back from the customer. Do you send another message asking if they need more help?

You may choose to do so, because you want to make sure you have helped your customer.

You may also choose not to do so, as this will add extra noise. Sometimes customers aren’t keen to extra noise either.

There’s one small caveat here though. If you choose not to ask, there’s always the chance the customer still has the issue. However, they are not ready or they don’t have the time to deal with the issue and they let it go. Obviously it’s not a pressing issue. What they might do, though, is get back to you after a month. Maybe they will choose to use the same thread or open a new one. That’s when you have already lost the momentum, the context, and even the knowledge if you are not the same support person and you don’t have a good helpdesk software. Or the customer chooses to email from a different email address.

What should I do then?

There’s no right or wrong answer here. It depends. I would say, aim to reduce noise if possible, but keep an eye if you want to make sure the customer has resolved their issue before you call it a day.

I am not in favor of overly and artificially happy support people that keep sending messages. Yes, if I need anything else, I will of course contact you again. No need to break my balls about it. Also, why the hell are you so happy? Can’t you see what is going on in the world?

Of course, that’s the stand up comedian in me kicking in. What I want to say is, not everyone is in the mood for an overly happy support person. So best strategy is to be yourself in most cases. Don’t try to be happier than you really are. And, yes, if you are not happy (life happens), work on your techniques to not let it leak. Or just take a break from front-line support that day.

Hope that helps.

What are you up to Petros?

Working as a software writer during the day. Making games during the night. Streaming and vlogging. Building Calm.jobs on the far side. Check what I am doing now and talk to me.