A web hosting company can not keep a customer base happy with sloppy support habits. Think of your reply back to a web hosting customer as a sandwich. You start out with the slice of bread introducing yourself, you have the goodies inside which represent your reply and you have the second piece of bread to finish things off. If you learn how to build your sandwich reply, then you can handle support situations in a much faster way than the web host down the block is doing it, making your web hosting company just a little ‘bit better.
Introduce Yourself
First impressions are important, so you never want to jump right into the reply without letting people know who you are. In the first part of your reply, you need to state who you are, what company you are working for and thank the customer for doing business with you.
Here is a perfect example:
Hello Bob,
Thank you for hosting your site with the Web Hosting Show. My name is Mitch, and I will be helping you with the problems you detailed for us in your help desk ticket you sent earlier today.
In those two sentences, I was able to greet the customer, tell them who I am, what company I am working for and generally start the customer/client conversation on a happier foot. Also note that I used the client’s name too. This is very important. If you know the customer’s name, make sure you use it to start the message. This makes for a much more customized reply to the client. They feel like they are talking to a real person, and not just reading some pre-defined message you send out for these types of situations.
Meat and Potatoes of Support
Next, you will want to give the proverbial meat and potatoes of the reply. You want to make sure you give the impression that you understand the problem, clarify the issue (if needed) and then give suggestions for fixes they can do or thing you need for them to do.
Now this is highly flexible depending on the situation at hand. Just make sure you read and re-read your reply before you send it back to the customer. Make sure this makes sense to not only you, but to somebody who might be less knowledgeable on the topic than you are.
Wrapping Up Communications
At the end of a reply to a customer, you want to hit some of the basics you touched upon in the introduction. You want to thank the customer for doing business with your company, and you want to leave the proverbial door open, just in case they have any other problems.
Here is another example:
Thank you for your time today Bob, and I hope this helps to solve the problems you were having. If there is anything else we can do for you, please feel free to contact us again, anytime.
See what I did there? I called the client by his name again, thanked him for his time and told him if he needed anything else, then to please let us know and we’d be happy to help out.
The golden rule comes into play in any customer/support team contact. You do not just want to get them the answer. The golden rule says, “treat others as you would like to be treated”. You must put yourself in that person’s shoes and think, what kind of reply would you like to see if the shoe was on the other foot?
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