“Support response” email

Score… 🥁 2/10

Today there’s a totally new type of email teardown coming your way.

It’s an email response from a customer support agent.

I picked it out because it highlights a rampant issue that plagues the world of commercial emails:

Badly behaved templates 😈

I’m not anti templates. I’ve written hundreds. They can be a very useful tool to streamline your ops and raise the quality bar of the comms you’re putting out.

But they come with their own set of quirks to watch out for, including…

• when to use “I” vs “we” (hint, there’s a simple rule you can follow to take away the guesswork)
• what order the information goes in (and the challenge of using chronological descriptions)
• missing context (and why templates sometimes have the opposite of their intended effect).

The backstory:

I’ve been paying for a monthly subscription service for over two years. Yesterday I found out I could be added to a group account, meaning I could cancel my individual account. Wahoo! Savings! Surprise surprise, the website made this incredibly hard, so in the end I cancelled the payments with PayPal and emailed the company to ask for confirmation.

However. Instead of confirmation, I got confusion.

In fact, the whole email gave me the heebie jeebies.

If I had to guess… I’d say the company’s templates were written by the marketing department, then implemented by a technical team, and have never been looked at in context.

What’s your theory? Read on and see what you think.

(Sender anonymised to “Xxxx” out of courtesy. Think you know who? Guess away!)

— — — — — Forwarded message — — — — —

Subject line: “RE: Cancel Xxxx? [ ref:… ]”

“Hi Corissa,

Thanks for reaching out. We understand that you’d like to confirm if your Xxxx subscription was cancelled. Not to worry, we’re here to help.”

Who is “we”?! This is a manual email response, sent by a real person. Sure, support teams use pre-written answers to build replies to common questions (it would be mad not to) but the idea is not to make them FEEL like templates. You’re a human bothering to write to another human, one to one, in an age of automation! A rare treat! Let’s not hide behind wees! Not least because it makes you sound like you’re, well, actually hiding something…

“We’ve located a Xxxx account linked to email address <email>.”

No idea why I’m being told this as it’s something I already know, but OK. And yep. The “we” continues to freak me out. It freaks me out throughout the email, so I’ll just get that point out of the way here.

“Firstly, we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused because it’s never our intention to make things difficult for you.”

Why would you locating my email address cause me inconvenience? Okay okay, I’m being facetious, but this sentence is clearly in the wrong place. Looks to me like another templating booboo.

“We can confirm that there is no Xxxx individual plan linked to the above mentioned email address. However if you’re being charged for an individual account, we can definitely have it cancelled for you.”

Argh confuuuused. Is there a problem or isn’t there? Why would I be being charged if there’s no plan in place?? The answer desperately needs more context about how such a contradiction could even happen at all.

I have a hunch that this chunk didn’t come from the original template, it was written by hand. Or maybe it was copy-pasted from another template. Either way, it’s fallen inside one of the big danger zones with templates: they have a habit of making complicated situations feel deceptively easy to fix.

“We’ll just need the Invoice ID. You can find this on the transaction in your PayPal account (it has 10 digits and starts “P0”).”

Asking me for payment details? Now I find myself wondering if the email might be a phishing attempt. Would I be feeling less suspicious here if the last paragraph hadn’t flopped? Maybe, though of course I can’t prove that.

“Once we get that info, we can dig deeper. We’re eager to assist, so we’ll keep our eyes peeled for your response. If you have any other questions, be sure to include them in your reply.”

Ding ding ding… it’s the Overwriting Alarm™! Support agents have other priorities than finessing their language. When you add too much branding sheen to templates like this, you raise red flags about who’s really writing what.

“Your friend at Xxxx,

<Name>
Xxxx Customer Support”

Uh oh. In light of the rest of the email, the word “friend” explodes in my face, custard pie style. So you’ve been keeping me at arm’s length with “we” and yet all at once we’re pals? This shift in tone fundamentally does not work.

— — — — — End — — — — —

Conclusion:

Email Teardown Club score = 2/10

It’s not a 0/10 because (truth be told) I’m still chuffed about (hopefully) saving a few quid. But I’m none the wiser. I didn’t reply. If I get charged again, I’ll get in touch again.

As for the rule of thumb I mentioned at the start?

Here it is, followed by an edit to the first paragraph in the email:

In customer support templates, when you’re referring to the person who’s doing the helping in that specific moment, use “I”. When you’re referring to the company at large, use “we”.

BEFORE
“Thanks for reaching out. We understand that you’d like to confirm if your Xxxx subscription was cancelled. Not to worry, we’re here to help.”

AFTER
“Thanks for reaching out. I understand that you’d like to confirm if your Xxxx subscription was cancelled. Not to worry, we’re here to help.”

A microscopic adjustment… just one word… that changes the feel of the interaction by bringing the writer into the conversation.

All hail the power of templates. (The well-behaved kind.)

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*Side note* These teardowns are just my gut reactions as a real life customer, mashed together with my copywriter background, to explore what good and bad messaging looks like outside the sender’s ivory tower. I’m only one person, and I might not be representative. Agree or disagree? Tell me in the comments!

Cheerio,
Corissa

P.S. If you need a hand with your messaging strategy, I can help. I also have a few slots of 121 writing coaching up for grabs. Find out more 👉 corissanunn.com