How do I handle my online customer service?

[Zendesk] Why customer service Systems or Agents(?) are unable to handle two separate questions in one single e-mail?

• Update (May, 2015): Interesting insight, how you can make bad customer service to somewhat work a little, if you are the customer (that is, not only about 2 questions in a single email, but oftentimes I have to resort to this practice even if I asked only one question per email): I found that if I at first describe the question in good detail, then at first shot I obviously get back some general response, nothing to do with my question at all; then I reply back a simple sentence like "You did not understand my question" "Please read it again (like a human being; not a customer service robot)" - yeah, I know; sorry about that, but what can I do? On 2nd try, I also get back irrelevant answer; I reply back similarly; again. At around the 3rd reply, magic happens: service agent actually reads and interprets the very same original question now like a thinking and compassionate human being (not according to her program, as an agent), and replies it promptly - as she would be perfectly able to do so even at the first try. I don't know why, but I guess just this is how things work. Please see my related question as well: ===== I clearly state two question in a single email in separate paragraphs stating it is two questions in one e-mail. Many times the customer service agent replies one of the issue correctly, and then it is done, s/he did his or her job, my other question simply gets completely ignored. I didn't run any statistics on this but a very common experience. I don't know, maybe the human brain freezes at two question in the same inquiry or am I the victim of some bad - very bad - company policies regarding hot to handle customer service issues? The big mystery. Update: I just asked a company in a single mail two separate questions and obviously they did not recognize one, although in general the company has good e-mail customer service just because I asked two questions and they handled it under one ticket number the whole situation became a complete mess as I wanted to resend parts of our conversation under a blank e-mail so they can give it a new ticket number, but somewhere I included the old ticket number so it tricked their system. The company used Zendesk. Bottom line or conclusion: customers need extra education not to send two questions in one e-mail (as with normal human communication) when dealing with customer service but rather every inquiry as a separate e-mail, at least when dealing with Zendesk on the other end (you can never know). Customers need to think more in terms like computer algorithms, not like human beings. ;) On the rare occasion it really feels like I am talking to a human at the other end, sometimes they can even understand I have more than one question, as I said, this company was also not bad but two questions in one e-mail was just too much for them to handle.

• Answer:

  I'm a SaaS adopter and raised support tickets in many occasions. I find this problem happening often. On the other hand, I also worked as an 'email support agent' for 3 months for a reputed online photo printing service where I had to 'close' 110 tickets every single day. That's a daily target. Bad Policies 1. 8 working hours and over 100 tickets to close. I leave the math to you. 2. There isn't an incentive for quality, especially if the company you are dealing with is in B2C and has over tens of thousands of customers. 3. Support reps are not allowed to think. We got all the shortcuts (canned messages), answer templates, ready-made FAQs sheet where we just had to search, copy & paste. Lack of Empathy Most of the support reps do not show an empathy with the customer's problem. So if you write with two questions, they pick the easiest and quickest to answer and close it hoping you would never get back on the rest or create a 'new' ticket for the the other question. We Ignore In startups, support guys do not have a clue why the issue you mentioned in the support tickets occurred in the first place. With the hope that it must have got fixed now, we deliberately ignore the 2nd question. This happens with bug issues, issues which the rep failed to replicate, issues the developer confirmed that never occurred, feature requests which we do not know to add in a roadmap or not, ETA related questions, issues we do not want to reveal or acknowledge, questions related to where the company's physical location is, is it real 24/7 support, what's in the next version etc. The bad reps lie. The good ones either ignore or acknowledge and apologize. This again has to do with the company policies. We overlook With the limited time a rep can spend on a ticket, it's important that the questions are properly formatted. Numbering/bullet points definitely help. I do not think this has much to do with the support systems in place.