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Is Your Customer Angry? Here’s How to Write a Calming Email

Sometimes using just the right words makes all the difference

Customer success professionals have a hard job. With the rise in need for ensuring companies retain their customers, the job of the customer success manager (CSM)becomes more and more critical. 2020 threw in frightening technicolor that retaining customers is the only thing that matters in a business, which forced an already-in-motion shift from hard-driving new business wins to customer retention and expansion.

A good CSM acts as the quarterback for the customer. She is the voice and advocate for the customer internally, driving product adoption and outcomes. She’s elevating product feedback internally and being a relentless cheerleader for all things customer happiness. All that and she has to handle being on the front lines with customers, who like all of us are humans full of thoughts, feelings, and grumbles. Of course, with any technology things go wrong.

Your customers are going to get angry. Sometimes, like with Robinhood’s recent decision to restrict trading on their site, a lot of customers are angry at the same time. More often with SaaS companies, a few customers will be impacted by an issue, bug, or are just generally dissatisfied. In a role at a previous company, we took on a project to determine what had the biggest impact on customer happiness as it related to things going wrong. Turns out, lots of technical support tickets opened, or flurries of emails sent and received wasn’t the main indicator of if a customer was going to churn.

What was a big indicator was the way in which the issue was handled. The phenomenon also holds when it comes to politicians responding to natural disasters, the ones who respond quickly and show up are viewed more favorably than those who sit back or board a flight to Cancun. In other words, it’s not the disaster that makes or breaks the relationship, but the disaster response.

I’ve received many many angry customer emails in my day. When it happens to you as a CSM (and it will happen), here are a few tips on how to craft a response to introduce calm back into the relationship.

1. Take ownership (and let your customer know if it’s their fault). Customers are humans, and therefore will be far more trusting if you’re willing to fall on the sword. So fall on the sword. If the issue is something that is actually the customer’s fault — tell them that. I know, it seems scary, but a CSM-customer relationship is just like any other. It requires both parties to be accountable, even though one party is paying the other. For example, a customer who is using your product in an unsupported way might get a note that says, “I know it’s frustrating that you’re experiencing slow response times with the API, but I wanted to remind you that the API is actually meant to be used in instances of fewer than 1,000 devices and since your calls are much higher in volume than that, it’s slowing down.” All the better if you have documentation to back up your claims.
2. Let them know what actually went wrong. Now is not the time to be vague, or to be too detailed. Your customers want to know the why, but be mindful of who your contact is. Like many situations with customers, know their use case and role within their company. You don’t need to explain deep technical issues to your business contact. You do need to tell them what it was in the simplest terms possible. Now is a good time to think, “what is the best way to say this in a way that cannot be misunderstood.”
3. What are you going to do about it? Or, what do they need to do about it? After an issue, and outage or a bug, let the customer know when they expect a resolution and what the resolution will be. Again, going back to point two, you want to find a balance between being too vague and giving too much detail. If you don’t yet have a path forward to a resolution, let them know you’re working on it. Most importantly, set a clear expectation on when they’ll hear back from you. Resolution or not, it’s important to tell the customer that you’ll follow up daily, or weekly, whatever cadence is appropriate. Then stick to the agreed upon cadence. If a fix requires customer action (the worst), be very clear on what they need to do and how long it should take them to do it.
4. Wrap up should reiterate what you outlined + the benefit sandwich. Something like, “Thanks for your patience as we work through this. The API overload is a known vulnerability when too many calls are being made at once. The good news is if you batch your calls in smaller numbers, the API should respond appropriately. In the meantime, I’ve escalated to our product team to understand if there are planned improvements for the feature and will follow up early next week.”

If you’re able to ensure your customer feels heard, and explain issues in a clear way that cannot be misunderstood, it works in your favor regardless of the issue. There is nothing more anxiety-inducing as a CSM to get an angry customer email because most of the time, you’re not going to be the person who solves the problem, but rather the person who communicates and sets expectations, which is critically important.

Your credibility is bolstered when you’re able to help a customer navigate through an outage or a mission critical bug. Plus these are the situations that make CSMs both soft enough to relate to customers, and tough as nails to drive internal teams toward a resolution.

Sometimes customers are angry about things that aren’t technical issues, like not caring for updated pricing, disliking a new product feature (or losing a feature they really liked), or even missing goals set out for the partnership. Regardless of what comes up, structuring your responses with ownership, clearly identifying the problem, outlined action steps for resolution, and setting expectations for follow ups and you’ll be able to lower the temperature on even the most feisty customer interactions.

Last quick tip: if it’s really bad, ask for a call with your customer. People are usually far less aggressive voice-to-voice than over email and it’ll give you an even better chance to connect.