Answering The Same Question Over and Over Again
Being asked the same question time and time again is an exercise in support operations, and a moment to think about your own nihilism. If you're in a position for people to ask you questions for your job, you're going to get the same question a lot of times. You can try lots of things to stem the tide:
- A printed sign in an obvious location
- A list of Frequently Asked Questions
- An article that answers the question directly when it's searched
- An automated response in the chat
But no matter how many barriers you build in to answer the question before it is asked, it will still get asked. So why create the sign, or the knowledge base article, or the response macro at all if people won't read it? Well, because "people" are not as monolithic as they can feel sometimes. For every method of providing a question before it's asked, you're going to peel off a chunk of the askers. It might not feel like much, but every little bit will make a difference. (Hopefully you're collecting view statistics on that page, so you can see how effective any deflection is.)
AND, don't let the thought-terminating cliche of "they won't read it" keep you from doing that proactive customer education. It's easy to sink into despair about wave after wave of mindless questions, but giving up before you even try to head off the same question over and over again is worse than not trying. Even if you think it won't reduce the number of times you get asked the same question, it's still worth making the sign, writing the knowledge base article, or adding the tool tip. You can then reference it (pointing, linking) any time the question is asked, thus gently encouraging the customers to use self-help options. Customers can bookmark the link in case they are unsure of the answer, and look back at it any time. And having the answer to The Question That Gets Asked Over and Over written down in a definitive form helps train new members of your support team, and it helps keep the entire support team on the same page so they know precisely what the answer should be.
Even with good self-guided knowledge in place, you might still get The Question asked Over and Over until your brain melts out of your ears. Take a minute, however, and consider that even though you, the Customer Support Representative, have been asked this question 1500 times today, there's a decent chance it's the first time this person has asked. Yep, you've got to draw from that well of empathy you're constantly working to replenish (you are constantly working to rejuvenate your empathy, right?), and treat this person like the first person who has asked. But don't just let it go, use this as a small moment to educate the customer--acknowledge that this is a question that comes up a lot, and point them to how to find answers to similar questions in the future.
FINALLY, if a question is being asked of support over and over, there's something wrong. Support can answer that question until they're blue in the face, and they will. The reason the question is being asked is likely because something went wrong in the Product Design and Engineering phase of this situation. Support should work with those teams upstream to figure out how to set things up so that the question doesn't need to be asked in the first place. If support is stuck answering a question over and over again, the ultimate solution is to fix the product or system or process so the question never needs to be asked in the first place. This is where it's useful to have data about how much time and effort support spends answering this question.
As it turns out, the best way to handle the same question over and over is with:
- Documentation & Metrics
- Empathy
- A way to not have the problem in the first place
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