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§§ Table of Contents − − − − − − − − −
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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3.

When you have to transfer
a customer to someone else

When the customer’s question or issue is beyond your ability to handle and you need to send them to someone else within your company, it can be pretty difficult and painful. You have already worked hard to gain the customer’s trust and they might even be wary of the company if the conversation has gotten to the point where it needs to be transferred or escalated. So, it’s important to tread carefully, and reassure the customer that you are doing what is best for them, and not just passing them off. If you are using chat, one way to do this could be to write:

That’s a great question! I don’t think that I’m the best to handle that, so I’m going to send your conversation along to my colleague here. I think they’ll be able to assist you with this issue much more quickly than I would. They’ll respond shortly.

Doesn’t that sound so friendly in comparison to “I’m just gonna transfer you to the marketing department. They’ll get back to you as soon as possible.” or any of the other typical responses that people use when transferring?

Chatra allows several agents to chat with the same customer at the same time, making transfers even easier. Your customers won’t have to wait until the transfer is completed to keep chatting, and other agents can follow along and jump into the conversation when a customer starts asking questions that they can answer. Give it a try, your customers will be impressed with the extra attention!
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In support emails, it’s a bit more important to set appropriate expectations because it can take other teams significantly longer to respond to emails than the support team does. So, if you are passing a ticket from support to, say, engineering, the regular response time SLA that your support team upholds might not be the same as what engineering is able to commit to. This is especially true if the reason that you are sending the ticket to another team is domain knowledge or something that the support team can’t handle — it’s probably slightly more technical or requires a specialist to do it, which usually takes more work. Here’s an appropriate response that you could send via email:

Hi there,

Thanks so much for your patience here. I’ve done a little bit of digging, and it seems like I might not be the best person to answer this question. I’m going to send our conversation along to one of my colleagues on the engineering team so that they can take a look, and they’ll get back to you as soon as they can. It may take a little bit longer for them to respond than you’ve gotten used to with support, but that’s because they’re digging in deep with specialty skills to get your answer resolved.

Thanks!

This lets them know that you are passing the ticket along and that they can expect a response but it might not be immediate.

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2.
When you don’t know
the answer
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4.
When a customer requests
a feature or product
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