Help Scout

How To Write an Auto-Reply Email (with examples): How often is the first response your customers get from support an old, unloved automated response that was probably last edited when Charlie‘s finger was still recovering from a bite? Mercer Smith has collected 6 examples of effective auto-reply emails from verbose to simple, from companies like Zapier, Appcues, and Goldbelly. Some key lessons: - Inform them that you've received their email and are looking into it. - Let them know the hours during which your team works. - Help them understand how long they can expect to wait. - Provide other ways of contacting you, if you have them (chat, phone, carrier pigeon). - Personalize the content with information that you are likely to have about the customer, and provide fallbacks that make sense and sound natural. - Assist them in troubleshooting their issues on their own if they'd like to by sending links to documentation and other resources. - Give tips about additional information they can send along that may make it easier to solve their inquiry. For more: https://bit.ly/3OzrWH6

#ProTip from Help Scout customer support pros: When you’re creating new tags and custom fields, make sure your whole team is on the same page! Discuss as a team to prevent confusion (i.e. duplicate meanings, embarrassing typos) later. As one example, our support team uses a standard naming convention when we create a new tag for conversations related to a status event: status-year-month-day. This keeps tagging clear and consistent, even during stressful times in the queue. For more on how you and your team can get the most of of tags and custom fields, check out this deep dive by Kristi Ernst Thompson: https://bit.ly/4argWGV

Here’s a question coming in hot from the Support Team Mailbag: “Do you have any examples of how different support teams manage their queues and structure their inboxes? I’d love to see what other folks are doing!” Great question! There are a lot of ways to set up your mailbox and manage your queue. Some support teams make use of assignments to give ownership of each conversation to a specific person. However, at Help Scout we take a slightly different approach. If you’d like to get a peek into our queue, check out Sarah-Mei E.'s response on the blog: https://bit.ly/3WNh6nc

“Canned” replies have a (deservedly) bad reputation — but crushing individuality into a single corporate voice is not their only use. (Don’t do that.) There are many situations in which having a well-crafted explanation of a tricky point is helpful for the support team to use, edit, and build on. Former teammate Elyse Mankin shares one example: “Saved replies are helpful for the in-between time when we're validating whether or not information is needed in Docs.“ If something hasn’t earned a permanent place in your knowledge base yet, a saved reply is the perfect place for it to live, be improved on, and eventually moved over. For more tips: https://bit.ly/45d7iqn

When you subscribe for email notifications for new episodes of The Supportive Podcast (https://bit.ly/3UnqFIt), you also receive some bonus content in each new episode announcement. In the email for this month’s episode (about how support teams can better work with product managers), subscribers also heard from: Irene Liakos Phil Gilmore Sara G. Phil Oye They each answered the question: “What’s one thing you’d tell support leaders to help them get their ideas/fixes/features onto product roadmaps?” Here’s what Sara said: "Bring the data and use it to tell me a story about impact. We want to know who will be affected by this change, how they will be affected, and what impact that change will have on the business goals the PM is trying to achieve."

As a support team who supports a support app for support people, we get asked a lot about how we, well... do support. Our teammate Sarah-Mei E. breaks down some of the ways the support team at Help Scout supports our customers. Using Help Scout. Who also do support. With Help Scout. Check it out: https://bit.ly/3WNh6nc

The Supportive Weekly newsletter (from Mathew Patterson) is about #customersupport, and yet it has been described by readers as: "funny, thought-provoking", "consistent and completely joyous", "fresh, useful, and fun!", "hilarious and insightful", and perhaps most importantly "short enough for me to quickly read through". If your email inbox is a place you'd rather not visit, but you're still interested in delivering exceptional online service, why not read The Supportive Weekly right here in the calm oasis that definitely is LinkedIn! In this edition, Mat explores the benefits of live teaching for support pros.

With technology that’s user-friendly and meets teams goals, it *is* possible to beat the rule of thumb that it takes 3-12 months to fully onboard employees. Read how Switcher, Inc. improved their employee onboarding time from 6+ months to only ONE day — with Help Scout. 🔗 https://bit.ly/46W3nPr

Tom Spence is the new principal product manager at Zalando, having recently left a similar role at Spotify. We asked him to reflect on his interactions with customer support teams, and what they could do to have the greatest impact on the product roadmap. Here’s what he said: “Product Management is about understanding user problems and solving them. Releasing a feature that is intended to solve a problem should therefore reduce those initial problem reports, *without* increasing others. So to understand what’s happening for customers, there really needs to be a constant information flow coming from the frontline support teams on the trends they are seeing — not just for new issues, but existing ones too. Are more reports coming in than usual about something? Has something stopped being reported that was previously reported? Are users complaining (more, or less) about the absence of something? All of these qualitative metrics are useful to product managers, and even more useful if they come with added insight from support about what the user is trying to do (which users often won’t initially reveal in their complaints and requests).” #productmanagers, do you agree?

One of the most powerful forms of advertising for any business is word of mouth. In fact, 88% of respondents to a 2021 Nielsen survey revealed that they trust recommendations from people they know above all other forms of advertising. But figuring out how to turn customers into the kind of brand advocates who want to tell all of their friends about your product or service can be tricky. If you’re looking to launch a brand advocacy program for your business, here are some tips to get you started: https://bit.ly/4crvGqi