Support Emails Are a Good Thing

Joel Gascoigne recently shared an audio post summarizing his discussion with his team about their increasingly overwhelming number of support emails[1]. Here’s my audio reaction:

To state in written words…

A common approach to this problem is to create a detailed knowledge base or FAQ. Although these are useful and valuable for a subset of users, they can severely limit one of your most valuable interactions with your customers - support emails.

Support emails are a great opportunity to:

• Get Feedback - I don’t manage inbound support requests but I read every email that comes into support@playhaven.com. This gives me a pulse of customer issues and requests that’s fed into our product roadmap and company strategy[2]. It’s much harder to tease out these insights digging through knowledge base metrics logs.
• Turn :( Into :D - support emails are the best opportunity to turn frustrated customers into evangelists. In fact, these upset customers are a great qualifier for identifying your most avid fans, after all, they cared enough to contact you with their problem. Knowledge bases are much less effective at turning customers around and may hide your most loyal fans.
• Build a Connection, Personality - for most companies, support is the only direct communication customers experience. As personable as your website copy may be, it’s not a replacement for human-to-human interaction.[3]

Too often support is perceived as a cost rather than a competitive advantage. It’s a good thing that your customers care enough about your product to send an email. Use support@ as an opportunity to build a better company and be careful replacing it with a knowledge base.

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[1] The team at Buffer does an amazing job at customer support happiness. Check out some stats they recently shared on Measuring Customer Happiness.

[2] Twitter is another great source to capture a pulse of the market and your customer.

[3] Mailchimp is my go-to example for well-executed personality design. See Aarron Walter’s article on the topic at A List Apart.