Scott Halet

One should treat email responses no differently than phone or in person responses. The way we treat the customer should be the way in which we would want to be treated. Always, no matter the response format, treat the customer empathetically in a timely manner (key to all types of interaction is "in a timely fashion") listen to their needs, paraphrase what they are looking for and provide solutions where possible. Check to make sure that you have taken care of everything that is needed and always thank them for reaching out to you. The whole interaction begins with the customer and ends with the customer, you are merely the representative of your company making sure that everything is taken care of.

As with any customer ineteraction, listen to their concerns, restate their issue, empathize and apologize for the delay, and try and take care of the issue yourself, if you can. If you can't let them know that you will escalate their issue and that you will keep them in the loop every step of the way.

Once you have listened to the customer and determined what the actual issue is, set clear and manageable expectations. Always keeping the customer apprised of the status.

Remain calm, and just sit back and let them vent. Their anger may have nothing to do with you or your business, but rather outside factors, could even be from past experiences from other support calls that they have made. Once they got everything said, than empathy is key. Put yourself in their shoes as I am sure that we all have had similar experiences ourselves.

Mastering tools may be important, but in order to become promoted in Customer Experience softskills are more important, active listening, empathy and building rapport with the customer. Having the technologies is wonderful and I feel anyone can be trained to use them expertly, but honing in on what the customer is saying takes precedence.

The main goal of any analyst is to get to the root of the issue and with helpdesk it is really important to focus on active listening, really listening to what the customer's issue is then drilling down into the conversation to find out what the specific issue is. Too many times a helpdesk analyst goes down the wrong "rabbit hole" because they heard one thing, while the customer said something entirely different. Once you have figured out what the issue is, then it's basic investigative tools, research, reproduce, and resolve.