The first week: getting somebody useful on a customer inbox

Day one is reading, not answering. Fifty real conversations teach the tone, the products and the actual questions faster than any manual - and the manual is usually out of date anyway.

The first week, day by day

1. Day one: read. Fifty conversations from the last month, including the ones that went badly. Write down every question they could not have answered.
2. Day two: answer the easy ones, checked. They draft, somebody reads before it sends. Slow and worth it.
3. Day three: answer alone, reviewed after. The check moves from before to after.
4. Day four: the difficult ones, watching. Sit with somebody handling a complaint. This is where tone is actually learned.
5. Day five: alone, with a named person to ask. The named part matters - "ask anyone" means asking nobody.

The twenty answers

Most inboxes are dominated by twenty questions. Find yours by counting, not by guessing, and write the answers down properly. It is the highest-return document a support team has, and it doubles as the source for auto-replies.

Tell them what they may decide

Habits worth catching early

• Answering before reading the history. Costly and hard to unlearn.
• Promising without a time. "Soon" is how complaints start.
• Copy-paste for specific questions. Reads as not listening.
• Going quiet while investigating. Teach the holding message on day two.

What to measure in month one

Not speed. Look at reopens and escalations: both say whether the answers are actually working, and both improve as knowledge does. Pushing a new person on response time produces fast, wrong answers, which are the most expensive kind.