191: The Perfect Support Email with Ethan Walfish

Charlotte Ward: 0:13

Hello and welcome to episode 191 of the Customer Support Leaders Podcast. I'm Charlotte Ward. This week we're talking about the perfect support email. So stay tuned for five leaders talking about that very topic. I would like to welcome to the podcast today Ethan Woolfish. Ethan, it's lovely to have you with me. Would you like to introduce yourself?

Ethan Walfish: 0:40

Hi. Thanks for having me, Charlotte. So I'm a customer support professional. I've been in customer success, customer support, and a brief in sales engineering over the past 10 years, mostly in uh B2B software companies. And over the past five years, I've really worked on uh starting and growing a support team and have really had to think a lot about sort of the end-to-end customer experience and have a lot of things that I'd love to share really about that experience.

Charlotte Ward: 1:05

Awesome. Awesome. Great. Well, it's lovely to have you. And uh today you've come to tell us about the perfect customer support email. Am I right?

Ethan Walfish: 1:14

Yeah, that's that's right. And I I love this topic. This is something I talk about with my team regularly, and it's something that when given the opportunity, I always like to talk about it. So I thought it was a really cool topic to be able to bring up here. Um and when I think about the perfect support email, and I'll jump right in, is I think there are six parts of it. And Charlotte, since the last time we talked, I actually decided that it is six discrete parts, not five. So I've added a number to it. And those six come out to acknowledge mentalignment, answer the question, answer the question that they need, answer the next question, provide documentation, and then retrospection. And this is one of the things that I started to put this together when I really started thinking about how to create a rubric for even really looking back at QA for tickets. And so I think maybe we can dive in a little bit to sort of those individual pieces and talk about them. We can we can just have a little back and forth on those.

Charlotte Ward: 2:10

Yeah, we'd love to.

Ethan Walfish: 2:11

I would love to. So the first part is acknowledgement alignment. And I think that's something that is one of the most important things and something that a lot of people will skip over in their emails. And this is really important because it's the opportunity to really create a human moment with uh your customer. And so there are several, you know, sometimes these are a little bit of throwaways, right? Sometimes they're things that are like thanks for writing in, you know, really appreciate the information you've provided. But what it does is it shows you, it shows the customer that you have read their email and are responding as a human. Sometimes it's hope you're having a great holiday, hope you had a great weekend, right? And these kinds of things that are that human touch. For situations that are maybe a little bit more frustrating for the customer, that alignment can be even more important. Hey, I know this is really frustrating. And it's something like, I had a really hard time with this too, right? Let me show you how I think about this. And these kinds of lines really make it so that you're sitting on the same side of the table with the customer, which is a really important element of support because if it's you and the customer against the problem, then you're really not at odds with that customer anymore, which is another way to remove some of that friction from some of the customer support experiences we have.

Charlotte Ward: 3:20

Yeah, I love that. Um, it reminds me a little of some of the theories I heard back in the day about taking customer support phone calls, which is our propensity, particularly when we're on the phone, to just say hi or hello and nothing else. And you almost kind of miss an opportunity to build a really early relationship with that customer and and how it just takes a few seconds. It's not very much, it's when you're on the phone, it's five or six words, you know. Um, and you just it's just those five or six words are just your moment to kind of hook into that relationship. And it kind of reminds me a little bit of that, I think.

Ethan Walfish: 3:57

Yeah, and I think that's a good, a good example too. And something, I mean, you even look at at um say even recruiter screenings, right? When you're doing interviewing, it's one of the most important elements of that is to make people comfortable. And you start by having that kind of introduction and sitting there and talking with someone really like a human before diving into let me go ahead and read a read off questions about your resume.

Charlotte Ward: 4:18

Absolutely. So then you said there were three answers we need to give to give. We have to answer the question, answer the question, give them the answer they need, I think, and answer the next question. So how are those three parts different?

Ethan Walfish: 4:33

So answer the question is is actually what did they actually ask of me? Because sometimes a customer asks something, but it's not necessarily the answer that they need. And it's important to acknowledge the question that they've asked and really address that, even if you think that's not quite the answer that they need, which is sort of leads into the next one, which is answer the question they need, which is sometimes they might say to you, um, how do I do this? But you realize that that's a really specific task that tells you that there's some other project that they're working on. So there might actually be actually this is the answer to that question. But I think the better approach for you is this.

Charlotte Ward: 5:08

Right?

Ethan Walfish: 5:08

And that's answer the question that they need is really thinking about what is the really the information that I think they actually need. And those two I think are kind of close. And previously I think about those as the same thing, but that's that's the one that I've just split into two separate pieces. I think that's actually two elements there.

Charlotte Ward: 5:25

And then you said answer the next question.

Ethan Walfish: 5:27

And that one's really about um case deflection, right? It's about case deflection, it's about email deflection, because if I can answer a customer in one email instead of two or three or four emails, I've just reduced the effort that I've had to go through and I've made it easier on the customer, more importantly. Really, that customer experience is that much better because I've been able to answer their question or really answer their their whole ticket in that much shorter amount of time. And sometimes that might be something like by the way, a common sticking point is this. This is something that I think you probably are going to want to know. Or something like we had a uh a prompt that we would send out with applications regularly, and it was about um uh Amazon confusing a chainsaw for a set of knives. And one of the things that I'd look for is people to tell me, what do I do with the item that I've received? What do I do with that item? Because if the customer has to ask that, that's really not an easy experience for them. But really, I gave bonus points to people that would say, like, and by the way, you can keep the item that we gave you. Right. That we sent you incorrectly.

Charlotte Ward: 6:28

That's it. Yeah. It's it's ticket deflection, it's also it's also reducing friction as well, isn't it?

Ethan Walfish: 6:34

Yeah, it it is. And I think I think that's a really important element that we can really think about. And it's not just, you know, ticket deflection is often think thought about in different ways, but I think this is almost email deflection, right? How do you reduce the number of threads on one of those conversations?

Charlotte Ward: 6:48

Yeah, definitely, definitely. And that feeds nicely into the next bit you gave me, which was documentation.

Ethan Walfish: 6:54

Yeah, and I think that for most, you know, services, applications, right, there's almost always some supporting documentation, right? You want that customer to be able to self-serve. You want to set good habits for them in the future, right? That shows them that there is documentation available for them to look into and to read further. And that documentation can frequently go into greater depth than you can within your email. My email might be 200 words, 300 words, but that documentation could be many pages. It could lead them down a rat hole or or or maybe like a really fantastic journey through the documentation of features that are available to them.

Charlotte Ward: 7:31

Um, yeah, and uh you slightly touched on a point there, which I'm a big fan of, which is kind of training your customers. Training your customers to develop good habits, go and do their own research first to some degree. I mean, I don't want to stop our customers talking to us, but I would like to not have to answer the same question that's in the opening four pages of document every single day of the week. So actually training your customers to develop good habits is is particularly when you have customers who you talk to regularly, is a is a great thing to do. And and this is a great moment to do that, isn't it? I think.

Ethan Walfish: 8:07

Yeah, and that's exactly it, is is show them that there is documentation to help them with some of these things, and and hopefully they'll know that in the future they can start there before reaching out to the support team. You know, we never want to put uh a barrier between us and our customers, but it is something that we want them to have the best service. And even if we answer a ticket within 15 minutes, it's better if they can answer it their own in one.

Charlotte Ward: 8:31

Very true, very true. It's certainly more efficient and cheaper for the company if they can do that. True, true. Um, and the final part you gave me retrospection. I think I made these notes correct. You said it all really super fast at the start, I suppose. But I think I hit retrospection at the last.

Ethan Walfish: 8:50

Yeah, so retrospection is the last piece that I think about. And that's another one of the ones that I would frequently give bonus points to someone too on that that written that written uh piece, which is um what do I do with the information that I've learned from this customer and this ticket? Do I submit a request to update some enablement? Is there some saved text within this email that I've written that we should record forever? Is there a bug that I need to file? Is there an enhancement that I can file because something's confusing? And taking that moment, and there's not always action to be taken on these, but especially when you're a growing company, when you're really growing your support team, when you're growing your services, and you want to think about how do we make sure this scales as we get bigger, how do we continue to drive forward our customer base and make sure that we're reducing the friction as much as possible, really taking the opportunity to make sure that along the way we're always improving and we're always thinking about what we can do better to have avoided this ticket, to make this ticket a better experience, to make this easier for the customer, to make the feature easier, right? And and it's one of the great opportunities about support is being able to feed that feedback to all the rest of the parts of the companies. It's one of the things I really love about support.

Charlotte Ward: 10:00

Yeah, absolutely. Um, so it's an entirely internal moment. It's retrospection and kind of introspection in a way, and it's organizational introspection, isn't it? It's everything you just said, it's an opportunity to improve product, it's an opportunity to improve process or documentation or actually any any of a myriad of things internally.

Ethan Walfish: 10:21

Yeah, and sometimes it can be really nice to even let a customer know. Hey, by the way, I filed an enhancement request for this. You're right. This is really confusing. Like I never would have found this if you hadn't told me. And and those are kinds of situations that come up sometimes, and you go, this definitely looks like a bug, so I know that we've given you a workaround, but I would like to make this better for you in the future. So I filed this off to the team and hopefully we'll be able to get it fixed out. And those kinds of lines go a long way. We get those things that mention are mentioned in in CSAT ratings regularly.

Charlotte Ward: 10:50

Yeah, I actually think that despite everything I just said about retrospection being an entirely internal effort, I think it's really important to feed just those single lines back out that show you that you've completed that uh kind of arc of investigation and uh right the way around to a sort of a form of resolution at this point, even if resolution is only uh having an eye on product improvement or or whatever, that that that you've completed full circle on this ticket. It shows a kind of completeness and a thought for the customer that it it bookends the experience for them, doesn't it, in a in a way that just saying, thanks, doesn't.

Ethan Walfish: 11:31

Yeah, and I hope so. And I really think that you know, when we think about sort of all of these six elements, if you can include all of these within your email, that really to me is the perfect support email because that gives the best experience. You've answered the customer, you've aligned with the customer, you've answered the customer question, you've answered, you've given them the information that you think that they need, you've tried to prevent them from needing to ask you additional information, you've given them a place to find more information themselves, and then you've told them any follow-up actions that you've taken on your side based on their feedback, which really makes that customer feel heard.

Charlotte Ward: 12:08

That's it for today. Go to customersupportleaders.com forward slash one nine one for the show notes. Then I'll see you next time.