Support Email Mashup

That’s a real support “button” I found for this article.  

The app itself had nothing to do with airmail or aviation in any form or fashion.

In getting ready for UserConf, I’ve been watching every other speaker I can get of a video of lately. With support, there’s not many in our field but hey, that’s what UserConf is for.

Sidenote: Did I mention I’m at UserConf and you should get tickets? Use the code “chaselikesyou” to get a discount when you buy yours here.

Back to the videos – our friend Sarah has a great one from LessConf where she present an intriguing idea. In short, she emailed lots of online support teams about their apps and then merged those emails into one that summarized all of the replies. Check out her talk to see more.

I figured I’d try the same thing to see if I got a similar result. Over the past week, I’ve emailed both big and small support teams to see what type of answer I’d get. In each case, I send in a ticket asking if they had a certain tool, which I tailored to each one so that tool was missing. Basically, it was a feature request email.

The Numbers and Stats

Before we get to my mashup of them, here’s the numbers that I tracked just to give us an idea of how other teams are doing.

• Longest wait time – 4 days.
• Shortest wait time – 17 hours.
• Average email length – 80 words
• Emails from an actual person – 2 (17%)
• Emails from an auto-responder – 10 (83%)

The Email Mashup

Warning: What follows below is the culmination of a dozen email support requests to different online apps and tools. Names of those said apps have been removed because… well, they were just that bad at writing an email.

Hello,

Thanks for your feedback. Our app does not include that tool at this time. I apologize for that inconvenience.

We get lots of requests each day so we’re not able to respond to each one. But do know that we read each and every one of them.

Let us know if you have any questions or comments. We appreciate you using our app.

Have a great day.

Sincerely,

John Doe

The App Team

Seriously?

What an absolutely horrible email.  You have to be taught in the ways of bad writing and communication to create this kind of email.  It requires real effort to write something that’s this much of a mess.

The saddest part is that the mashup itself was easy. Every single email was this basic email with the words just re-arranged, often in a more confusing manner.

Fixing It

For the next few articles, I’m going to break down this email to show you how to fix it. At the end, we’ll have a feature request email that we’re proud of – one that your customers will love.

Here’s what I’ll cover.

1. A few beginning tips.
2. Feedback is from a microphone.
3. Apologies don’t count.
4. Know when to use the word inconvenience – never.
5. You don’t really read request emails.
6. I don’t think you know what appreciate means.
7. Be more sincere with your closing.
8. A better email.

This will be the first ever Support Ops series, which I’m excited about!  If you spot any other tweaks you’d make to the email, let me know and I’ll work them in.