If you’ve worked in support for a while, maybe you’ve heard something like this: “Can’t you do it just this once?” Usually, it’s around a product feature that you don’t have or something that the customer perceives as being straightforward an easy to do. Usually, these things are not straightforward and easy to do, but even if they were, doing something for a customer that they can’t do for themselves is a surefire way to get more emails or chats back from that same customer in the future asking for your team to do it again.

While it can be difficult to say “no,” sometimes it’s important for the good of the whole. Take, for example, this story from Gregory at Help Scout:

I can give you a very candid story of when this really mattered to me: I was checking in to a very tiny beach hotel with a few of my friends, one of whom had a severe allergy to cats. I vividly remember watching this older couple at the desk while we were checking in, pleading with the employee to let their cat stay (the policy was “No Pets”).

[...]

If the front desk employee had given way to their request, he would have (unknowingly) made our group upset, trading one potentially unhappy customer for an even bigger problem.

I remember being really impressed with how he handled the situation:

“Mr. and Mrs. ______, as much as I like fulfilling our customers’ requests, I’m afraid that the ‘No Pets’ policy we have in place is too important, as it deals with the safety and comfort of other customers. Can I perhaps call around for locations where your cat might be able to stay?”

A stellar response to a pretty wacky request.

Greg’s example and the front desk employee’s response is so good because it really emphasizes the why behind the policy, rather than the no that is being given to the customer. Here’s how you can do that for yourself:

Hey there,

Thanks so much for emailing about this and for your great question. I can totally see how you would want me to make an exception here, as it seems like this is really important to your workflow. While I do see the value in it, we don’t currently have anything like that built into our system. I’m going to talk to our engineering team to see if this is something that we can offer in the future, but in the meantime, can I recommend [workaround xyz].

Let me know if that works for you, or if I might have missed the mark.

This can be used both for chat and for email. If sending via chat, this would likely be broken up into a few separate messages. If sending via email, it can be sent as-is with the workarounds specific to your company typed in.