When a customer writes in with a problem, most support teams reach for the safest possible response. Acknowledge the issue. Promise to look into it. Keep it vague. Don’t say too much. This is what support training teaches you. Stay on script. Protect the company. Don’t overshare.
I’ve spent a good chunk of my career in support. First doing it in the front lines, then building and leading support teams. And somewhere along the way, I started doing the opposite.
I started being radically transparent, as I like to call the practice.
Turns out, “radical transparency” is already a thing. Ray Dalio popularized the term in the context of company culture and decision-making. But what I’m talking about is more specific. It’s about what happens in the conversation between you and the customer. The moment you decide to share more instead of less. To explain what’s actually going on instead of hiding behind a polished non-answer.
Here’s a common scenario. A customer reports a bug. You investigate. You find out it’s a known issue, it’s been open for six months, and there’s no fix on the roadmap. The safe response is something like: “Thanks for reporting this. I’ve escalated it to our engineering team and we’ll keep you posted.”
That’s not a lie. But it’s not the truth either. It says nothing. The customer reads it, may feel unheard, and may walk away thinking you don’t care.
Now imagine a different response. You tell them it’s a known issue. You explain why it’s hard to fix. You share that the team has looked at it but other priorities took over. You’re honest that you can’t promise a timeline. And you tell them what workaround exists in the meantime, if any.
The bug is still not getting fixed tomorrow. But the customer doesn’t feel dismissed.
This works because people can actually handle bad news. What they can’t handle is the feeling that they are being managed. When you are vague, customers fill in the blanks themselves. And what they imagine is almost always worse than reality. They think you don’t care. They think you’re hiding something. They start to distrust you.
When you share the full picture, the dynamic changes. The customer stops being someone on the other side of the wall and becomes a partner. They understand your constraints. They might even empathize with you. I’ve had customers respond to honest answers with “thanks for being straight with me, I appreciate that” more times than I can count. That almost never happens when you give them the corporate non-answer.
There’s also a practical benefit. When you’re transparent about limitations, customers stop asking the same question over and over. They have the context they need. They can plan around it. Fewer follow-ups, fewer escalations, less frustration on both sides.
Sometimes it goes even further. When you share the technical details of a problem, customers share back. They tell you about workarounds they’ve built on their end — things they would have kept to themselves if you’d given them the vague corporate response. Why would they help you if you won’t help them? But when you open up, they open up. I’ve seen customers hand us solutions we hadn’t even considered, simply because we treated them like people who could understand the problem.
Now, I want to be careful here. Radical transparency doesn’t mean reckless transparency. You don’t share internal drama. You don’t throw your colleagues under the bus. You don’t reveal things that would genuinely hurt the company or violate someone’s trust. There’s a line, and part of being good at support is knowing where it is.
The line, in my experience, is this: share everything that helps the customer understand their situation. Stop before you share things that only serve to vent or assign blame. “This is a known issue and here’s why it’s complex” is transparent. “Our engineering team keeps ignoring this because they don’t care about support tickets” is not 😅.
The instinct to protect the company by saying less is understandable. But it’s often backwards. Customers don’t lose trust because you told them too much. They lose trust because they felt you were hiding something. Transparency, done right, actually protects the company. It builds loyalty. The real kind — not the kind you get from polished messaging.
If you work in support, try it. Next time you’re about to send a safe, vague response pause and ask yourself: what would I want to know if I were on the other side? Then write that instead.
You might be surprised by what comes back.
Here’s what I am doing
At Workbrew, I help our customers succeed, while working on docs, fixing bugs, and developing internal tools. At Amignosis, I pour my heart and skill into crafting slowly brewed software, one thoughtful line at a time. I am craftsman in a world of complexity and low-quality solutions. I am a shoemaker. I take the time to create simple, timeless software built to last. Check what I am doing now and talk to me.
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