[jen_h]

Great advice, I live by this stuff, so it's neat to see it codified. ;)

One thing I would add - always strive to respond within 24 hours, but do NOT respond in seconds/minutes.

Five minutes after sending, users are often still frustrated and a good number won't read your response before firing back as their adrenaline is still up (also, they think you're a robot because you're too fast and robots can't possibly have the right answer!)--it'll take twice as many emails to solve the problem.

[benohear]

I disagree, at least from the perspective of a customer. One hosting company I like to work with used to answer competently within anything from 10 minutes to an hour and this turned me into an evangelist. The prompt answers also made me a lot more tolerant when the response wasn't correct and allowed another iteration without waiting for another "within 24 hours".

[jen_h]

Depends on the use case. If someone's having a dire emergency (or something that's hit a serious block), I answer them immediately.

However, if they, say, can't find a button on an interface, telling them where the button is in 30 seconds or less will yield an immediate firing back: "I already tried that, that doesn't work!!" 60% of the time.

Waiting 15 minutes to even up to four hours to answer the email will yield "Awesome, that works, thanks and thanks for answering so quickly!" most of the time, in my testing.

In fact, each and every time I deal with a difficult customer, when I go back and look at the thread, der, I answered them in under 5 minutes. I like to answer fast, but I have very much found that it hurts rather than helps so very often.

Gotta wait for some of that frustration to dissipate so that they're calm and able to read and follow instructions again. Frustration does not aid reading comprehension - when you're frustrated, sometimes you don't even read the response before firing back! I myself have been pretty guilty of this as a customer.