Side Esclation

October 01, 2015

It’s interesting how your interesting how your relationship with customers can be. I’m happy to say I have a friendly professional relationship with 99% of my companies customers.

Yesterday morning I received a ticket from a customer regarding email delivery problems - I’ve worked with this customer before, many times after getting off the phone it’s a feeling of relief. I was able to gather up logs of their email history and sent them off asking for more detail on what emails weren’t being delivered. No response back. With escalation points at my company cc’d, I opened ZenDesk this morning to see:

What is the status of this?

I quickly realized I wasn’t going win on this one. I decided to try a simple tactic I heard on the Support Ops Podcast once: Ask a colleague to take over the issue. Maybe someone else’s personal tone and / or demeanor will match up better with the customer.

While I might have more experience in this type of issue it not only exposes a coworker to troubleshooting something new, I can already see from the ZenDesk interaction that it’s going much smoother.. And I’m only a Slack message away to help with any questions on the issue.

Not only am I not as stressed out, the customer is happier. A win-win.