When you don’t know the answer

Ultimate Guide to Difficult
Conversations

1. Introduction 2. When you don’t know the answer 3. When you have to transfer a customer to someone else 4. When a customer requests a feature or product 5. When a customer asks you for a favor that you cannot do 6. When there’s something wrong with the delivered product 7. When you close the conversation 8. When a customer is angry 9. When a customer is unwilling to pay 10. When a crisis occurs 11. When you have a frequently complaining customer 12. When customers complain on social media 13. When you have legal issues 14. When you have to deliver bad news 15. When you have an abusive customer 16. When customers cross boundaries 17. When the customer speaks a different language 18. When a customer asks a vague question 19. When customers ask when something is going to be available 20. When you or your fellow agents made a mistake 21. When a customer wants to speak with a manager 22. When you can’t resolve the issue right away 23. When you need to let a customer know that it was their mistake 24. When a customer reaches you by mistake 25. When a customer asks how your product is different from others 26. When a customer is worried about how secure your service is 27. When a customer says that they forgot their password 28. When you want to point a customer to your documentation 29. When a customer violated your terms of service 30. When a customer is not tech-savvy 31. When a customer is right, but your policy is not 32. When a customer sounds like a bigot 33. You’ve got this!

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When you don’t know
the answer

There are plenty of scenarios when this might come up in your day-to-day work. It’s almost impossible to know everything about a product unless you’ve worked with it for many years, so it’s likely you’ll come across a question from a customer that you don’t know the answer to. Rather than giving the customer an ill-researched, incorrect answer, do a little due diligence first.

If you’re interacting with the customer via chat, a response along the lines of:

— How many users does the Enterprise plan support?
— I’m not sure if we have a maximum limit on that plan, but give me just a moment and I’ll find out.

Your customer will appreciate you being straightforward and honest, as well as setting expectations around being silent for a few minutes. If you hadn’t said that and had just gone hunting for the answer, they might have assumed that you’d just left and end up leaving the chat without an answer.

If you are answering this question via email, you have a little more time to get a good response. In this case, go and do some searching in your documentation. If you aren’t able to find your answer there, then go and talk to your colleagues and see if any of them know the answer. Once you’ve finally gotten an answer, either on your own team, or on another team within your company, make sure that you document it internally and externally if you were not able to find a doc, and then respond to the customer giving them the answer to their question.

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Introduction

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When you have to transfer
a customer to someone else

When you don’t knowthe answer

When you don’t know
the answer