My pricing page says we reply within 24 hours, which is true Monday to Thursday and a lie on Friday evenings. Twelve tickets a week, I answer them all myself, and I work a job until six. I am deciding between changing it to one business day, putting nothing at all, or leaving it and feeling guilty. What do you have on your site and does it match what you actually do?
Measure before you promise. I exported six months of my own replies and calculated first response time properly.
Median: about four hours.
Ninetieth percentile: thirty one hours.
Worst: three days, and it was a Friday night ticket during a weekend away.
So my honest promise is one business day, not 24 hours, and the difference between those two phrasings is the entire weekend. Publish something near your ninetieth percentile and you will almost never break it, and the median will keep delighting people who expected worse.
Promise business days, define your business days on the same page, and put your timezone next to them. Three sentences of specificity removes almost all the disappointment.
Disagreeing with publishing a number at all. A number on a pricing page is a commitment you will be held to on your worst week, and it buys you approximately nothing at the point of sale, because nobody has ever chosen a twenty pound tool because of the support SLA on the marketing site. What people actually want is an acknowledgement and an honest estimate in the reply itself. Say nothing on the site, over-deliver in the inbox.
Fair. Then have the number in a document you send when asked, rather than nailed to the front page where every trial user holds you to it.
True for self serve, false the moment you sell to a company with a procurement process. The first thing their form asks for is a response time commitment, and no number on the site means an awkward email at exactly the wrong stage of the deal.
I promised two hours to win a customer who was worth about forty pounds a month. For the next year I checked email in restaurants. When I eventually changed it to one business day, exactly nobody complained and one person replied saying they had always assumed that anyway. The promise was a story I was telling myself about being professional.
For the business side of this: I have one paragraph in a support document that says target first response next business day, business days defined, no guarantee of resolution time, and a note that critical outages are handled outside those hours on a best effort basis. That has passed several procurement reviews without anyone blinking. What kills deals is having nothing written down, not having a modest number written down.
@ask_first_ari · 5mo ago · 3 replies
Mine says most emails get an answer the same working day, always within two. That is deliberately worded to describe the typical case and promise the bad case, and I picked those two numbers by looking at what I had actually been doing for the previous three months rather than what I hoped to do.
The thing that changed customer reaction more than the number was an autoresponder that says when they will hear back, including a line about weekends. People are not upset by waiting, they are upset by not knowing whether the email arrived.
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@spreadsheet_tabs · 5mo ago
The autoresponder point is underrated. Mine includes a link to the three articles that answer the most common questions and a meaningful fraction of tickets close themselves before I read them.
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@solo_supper · 5mo ago
Describe the typical case, promise the bad case. That is the whole answer and I have been doing it backwards.
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