I love answering support e-mails. Yes, you heard me correctly.

Before I started working with Paste, my experiences with support had been frustrating. One particularly infuriating instance comes to mind…

Two years ago, my cell phone was having major malfunctions, and the actual store representative told me I’d have to call their main support line for help.

Seriously?

So I called support and listened to an automated woman talk for half an hour about all the other services available… none of which I cared about. Not even a little bit. I just wanted to know what was wrong with my phone and how to fix it. When I finally got to talk to a real person, she was such a low level customer service rep that she couldn’t help, either. She told me to send in my phone (seriously?!?!) and she’d have their technical engineers take a look at it.

Oh, and apparently they thought I would just live in social reclusion for a couple weeks because they didn’t offer a replacement while they tore mine apart. The worst part- nobody seemed to care. A major part of my life was being taken away from me because of their faulty programming, and I didn’t get so much as a simple apology. I didn’t even bother sending my phone in- I switched carriers instead. Easiest decision I ever made.

Because of that, and some other bad experiences, I generally held the impression that people who worked in support couldn’t really help you.

Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to do a little support of my own, and thank goodness for all my bad experiences.

I think you have to look at every support e-mail as a big deal. All of them, equally big deals. Because no matter how minor the issue, or how easy it is to fix or explain on your end, the person on the other end of the e-mail is still frustrated enough to let you know about it- and that’s what really matters. The importance of a simple thing like starting out the response with “I’m really sorry you’re having trouble!” and providing more explanation than the user asked for are not lost on me. Not to mention always offering a solution of some kind.

Not only is each e-mail a big deal, but you have to assume that the person using your app is using it as a somewhat major part of their daily lives- like my phone. Without it, they’re not as effective as they were before, and that’s your fault. I think you have to treat their problem like it’s the most important thing you’ll address that day.

So I love answering support questions. Each e-mail is a chance to make someone happy- and I’ll take that opportunity a hundred times a day.