🤬 Turning customer support abuse into valuable feedback

We’re all familiar with messages and conversations that are full of complaints (or maybe it’s just me…) and we have given our fair share of complaints out too. Here is one that I received from one of our users, read how I manage to turn it around and extract valuable feedback from the email exchange.

We use Intercom to talk to and learn about our users!

Would you find this annoying?

Here is the message that we send out to users that we define as “casual” and are in-danger of churning.

The aim of this is to learn why this might be the case.

How would you have responded?

This is the response that we got back from one of our users. This person appeared to be particularly annoyed for many different reasons — so rather than ignoring the message and allowing him to vent, I decided to write back.

I wanted A̶l̶i̶s̶t̶a̶i̶r̶ Alastair to know that we are a team who cares about our users and that we (try to) understand the stresses of being unemployed! I also added a little humour to defuse the situation.

I’m glad Alastair responded, I think that by acknowledging what he did wrong here, it provides a powerful lesson about communication online that he should remember for a while.

I reiterated the importance of being careful when communicating with people and potential employers in the context of job applications.

I also wanted to revisit some of the original criticisms that he had about our app and communication with users. His points were mentioned in anger, but they do come from real concerns.

This is where I managed to get a good insight into what he thought about the process of finding work — probably the most valuable I’ve heard from a jobseeker so far!

He manages to give multiple perspectives from his own experience and from helping others. It’s a well written email too!

I’ve received a few of these types of responses before from users, but not as many as I expected. I think it is really important to both educate the respondent about what the consequences of their actions could be and use this as an opportunity for the user to experience the type of customer support we provide.

How would you have responded?