41 customers total. This one person accounts for roughly 70% of my support volume. None of it is hostile - it is questions, ideas, screenshots, occasional bugs. Some of it is genuinely useful.
But I check my inbox at 11pm now because of one person paying $19. What is the move that is not 'be rude to a paying customer'?
Batch it, and tell them you are batching it. Most heavy emailers are not demanding, they are using your inbox as a thinking tool, and when you answer within four minutes at 11pm you have taught them that is the service. They will happily adjust to a daily rhythm because they were never asking for instant, they just got it.
The change is one sentence in a reply, not a confrontation.
The exact sentence that worked for me: 'I answer support in one batch each afternoon - if something is broken and blocking you, put BLOCKED in the subject and I will look sooner.' Two years, nobody has abused it, and about four people have told me they wish more companies did that.
Draw the line where the request stops being about your product. Questions and bug reports are support. 'Can you build me a custom export that matches our internal format' is scoped work, and the correct answer is a rate and an estimate, offered warmly. People are rarely offended by that and quite often say yes.
Fixed reply window, canned answers, docs links. Do not fire a paying customer over email volume until you have tried a schedule for a month.
Counterpoint worth holding on to: some people just email a lot and it is not a signal about anything. Mine wrote to me almost daily for a year, renewed twice, wrote two case studies unprompted and sent four customers my way. Cheapest marketing I ever had and I nearly managed him out of my inbox in month two.
@shadowing_sena · 3h ago
Every one of those emails is a docs page you have not written yet. Answer once properly, put it on a page, and from then on reply with two sentences plus the link. Six weeks of this person's questions is a fairly complete help centre that you got for free, written in the words a real user actually used rather than the words you would have chosen.
The volume also tends to drop on its own once they discover there is somewhere to look.
Reply
Report