Struggling with mail support

Posted on:April 15 2017

I once blogged about the steadily degrading quality of support requests I get. Years ago, they would be like

I now tried to get this work myself for days, maybe you could help me with this?

And now they are usually

This is shit, WTF, give me a refund now!

But sometimes I also get requests with long, long confusing texts, where I am struggling to understand what the problem is and what the user actually wants from me. They usually also don't mention which software this is about (I'm developing quite a few products) and in not rare cases, the mail is marked as "important". I just received one of these again, where the text is barely readable, full of typing errors, half sentences and full of accusations. I'm not sure what to make of these. So I tried to answer it with this:

I'm not sure if I understood you correctly. Did you maybe write this text in another language and let it translate by a machine? If so, just write it in your language, I know quite a lot of foreign languages, it is easier to read then. (Followed by a list of guesses I made about the problem and software he may have, with potential solutions)

Because that's the only explanation I have for mails like these. But let's see, maybe there is another, better explanation. Now I'm waiting for the answer.

Comments:

Niko, dont worry about that people, you make great products, i love them, specially CopperCube, you are the best, keep it up and do not worry! :)

rolevix (Vitaliy

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2017-04-15 11:03:00

Stack Exchange had a similar problem at some point, I'm not sure if they still have it, though. Google Chrome would automatically translate Stack Overflow into the language of the user, who of course thought that it was in their native language, resulting in hilarious discussions in which one side argued that the site was in english and the other that it was not.

I don't remember what the conclusion was, but it might be good starting point to deal with these problems: https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/62939/how-to-make-users-aware-that-theyre-reading-translated-content

Bobby

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2017-04-15 16:19:00

Probably mild cases of Tourette, mixed with reduced short-term memory. Those poor people probably only rarely have conversations exceeding three words in length per response, "You cool?" "F**k, yo dawg." Therefore the adventurous quest of writing an email to support is pushing their limits or even going beyond, and mercy is with you when they manage to turn off CAPS LOCK every now and then.

It might also be a challenge to make them understand that refund policy usually doesn't cover mental inadequacy (though I haven't checked out yours in particular), and that they are potentially writing to the wrong support email address. But at least they are not asking about the completion of a table they ordered.

xaos

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2017-04-18 07:24:00