Question handling
Sorting the messages that are not from customers
A chat widget is the most findable contact route on most websites, which is why it collects everybody who could not be bothered to look for the right address. A reporter with two hours, a supplier hoping to be stocked, a charity asking for a raffle prize, and somebody selling advertising all arrive in the same place as a customer with a missing order. None of them is in the right queue, and one of them cannot wait.
What they are really asking
Which person at your business they are supposed to be talking to, and how quickly that person answers.
- who handles press enquiries
- i am writing a piece and need a comment by today
- can we send you a product to review
- would you donate a raffle prize
- we would like to discuss a partnership
- who do i speak to about advertising with you
The material that answers it
An assistant is only as good as the document behind it, and for this question the document usually exists but is written in the wrong shape. What each one has to contain to be answerable:
| A named route for each kind of message that is not support | Press, partnerships and supplier approaches, community and charity requests, and everything commercial that is somebody selling to you. Four addresses is usually enough, and having them written down is what turns this intent from a shrug into a redirection. |
|---|---|
| What is already public and can be handed over on the spot | Your description of yourself in the wording you use elsewhere, logo files, imagery you are happy to see reproduced, the names and titles of the people who speak publicly, and anything you have already said on the record. Handing a journalist the published material immediately is the fastest useful thing in this whole intent. |
| Your position on donations, sponsorship and community requests | Whether you consider them, at what times of year, what you will not support, and how far ahead a request has to arrive. These come in constantly and are usually answered inconsistently by whoever picks them up, which is worse for the asker than a published no. |
| Your position on unsolicited approaches | Whether you look at supplier pitches, whether you buy advertising, whether there is a process or whether the answer is simply no. Writing this down is a kindness to the sender and a saving to whoever currently reads them, and it lets the assistant be direct without being rude in your name. |
How to handle it
Sort by who owns the reply, not by how the message opens
These messages disguise themselves as each other. A partnership proposal is often a sales pitch, a request for a comment is sometimes a request for a discount, and somebody offering to feature you may be selling the feature. The opening line is a poor guide.
What sorts reliably is the question of who at your business would have to answer. Write the material around those owners rather than around the words the sender uses, and the routing holds up even when a message is doing something unusual.
Give the journalist the route and the published material, and stop
This is the one message in the intent with a clock on it. A reporter working to a deadline needs the press address and, if you have one, the number that is answered, in the first reply. Anything else is time they do not have.
The assistant may hand over what is already public: how you describe yourself, who speaks for you, what you have said on the record before. It must not do the thing that looks most helpful, which is to summarise or characterise your business in fresh words. Anything it composes is a statement attributed to your company, and it will be printed as one.
If a deadline is stated, put it in the handover. A message marked as needed today gets treated differently from one that is not, and that difference is the whole value of the routing.
Answer the donation question honestly, including when the answer is no
Community and charity requests come from people who have already been ignored several times that week, and the ambiguous non answer is the worst outcome for them. If you do not support these, say so plainly and warmly and let them move on.
If you do, publish the conditions: the kind of cause, the notice you need, the form the request should take. That converts an unstructured message into something a person can decide on quickly, and it stops the same request arriving through four different channels.
Handle the seller without committing anything
Somebody pitching to you is not a customer and will not be treated as a lead by anybody in the business, but they are still a person and the reply is still in your voice. A short, direct redirection to the right address, or a clear statement that unsolicited approaches are not taken up, does the job.
What the assistant must not produce is encouragement. Anything reading as interest gets forwarded internally at their end as a warm response and comes back as a follow up sequence, and somebody at your business then has to be the one who says no properly.
When it stops being an answer
Any request for a comment, a quotation or a statement
Including the ones that do not look like it: a question about an incident, a request to confirm a number somebody has heard, an invitation to respond to something a competitor said. Everything in this category is on the record by default and belongs with whoever is authorised to speak for the business.
Route it fast and route it with the deadline attached. The failure here is not a wrong answer, it is a correct answer that arrives after publication.
Anything that would put your name next to somebody else's
A partnership, a sponsorship, an endorsement, a joint campaign, a request to use your logo. These are decisions about your reputation and they are made by people who look at who is asking. An assistant that sounds receptive has started something that has to be unwound by somebody senior.
How this one goes wrong
The deadline that expired in a support queue
A reporter uses the widget because it is the fastest looking route on the page, says they need something by the end of the day, and gets a courteous reply saying somebody will be in touch. The message goes to the address that receives everything, behind a delivery query and a password problem.
The piece runs without you. Depending on what it was about, that is either a missed mention or a line noting that your business did not respond, and the second one is durable in a way no support failure ever is. Nothing about this is hard to prevent: one named press route in the indexed material, a handover that carries the stated deadline, and a nominated address that somebody outside the support rota actually watches.
Questions
- Should the assistant answer a journalist's question directly?
- Only by pointing at material you have already published. Anything composed in the moment becomes a statement by your company to somebody who is writing it down, and that is exactly the situation your press route exists for.
- Is it worth publishing a no for donations and supplier pitches?
- Yes, for both sides. A clear published position ends the message in one exchange, spares the sender a week of waiting, and stops the same request cycling through every channel you have until somebody answers it inconsistently.
- How do these reach the right person if everything goes to one address?
- You nominate the address that receives handovers, so pointing this intent somewhere separate from customer support is a configuration choice worth making. Failing that, the assistant can at least state the correct route in the reply so the sender can use it themselves.
Keep reading
- Handling complaintsThe job is to route, not to resolve. Acknowledge without conceding, name the escalation route, and get it to a person fast.
- Handling asking for a personThe design question at the centre of a support assistant. Offer early, offer once, collect what a reply needs, promise a time you can keep.
- Handling service outagesThe assistant knows nothing about an incident unless your material says so. A status page it can read is the fix, and reassurance is the trap.
- Every question typeHandling patterns for the questions every support inbox gets.
Try it on your own material
Upload a document or point it at your site, paste one line of HTML, then ask it something only your business could answer.