[ChildOfChaos]

I disagree.

I work in IT support and get tickets sent to me. I review the ticket when it's sent to me as soon as I see it to determine if I need to make myself available straight away or not. If I don't and it's for something minor, I often leave it open for some time, because these tickets already have estimated dates on them and I still get back to the client within that time, however in doing so at least 50% of these tickets resolve themselves or the client forgot they even logged one in the first place.

If it was more urgent than it seemed at first, the cilent will chase up and then I will get back to them straight away.

You say my time is not more valuable than there's, but my time at the role is purely on helping others, so responding to someone straight away or not has nothing to do with me deciding if my time is more valuable than there's, it's me deciding which client deserves my attention the most at this moment.

There is no 'my' time when I working in a support job because all my time is already on helping others.

[wildrhythms]

Agreed- I worked in IT for 4 years, and the biggest takeaway for me was learning how to "placate" requesters while reprioritizing issues: there is a balance between a cold shoulder, and outright hand-holding.

I find initially responding something like, "Hi ___, thanks for reporting this. I'm taking a look at this first thing tomorrow. Can you let me know when you first noticed this happening, and anything you've tried so far?" It takes 30 seconds to respond with something like this, but it saves hours of time later, and usually issue resolves itself. Soft skills in IT go a long way.

[aaronschroeder]

I think following a process to triage and resolve issues within expected timeframes is different than just not responding at all. In these examples hopefully somebody already responded to the client and set expectations, right?

A product support team is one of the most important sales engines for a business. If clients rave about your support, they will sell your product for you. Hard to do that if the attitude and approach is "do nothing" and wait for issues to hopefully resolve themselves.