While it’s never something you hope for and it’s possible you’ve done everything in your power to avoid it, it’s inevitable that someday a company crisis will come for you and your support team. There are a few different types of crisis that you are likely to experience:

• DDOS
• Product outage
• Super-buggy product release
• Data breach
• Pricing change that is wildly unpopular
• Recall of a physical product
• Publicity issue for your company

Responding to a customer in crisis is very similar to dealing with an angry customer. You acknowledge their concerns, usually by speaking more specifically to the crisis; you align with them and let them know that you understand why they are nervous, and then you assure them that a resolution will be coming soon.

For anything related to a web-based product, the first step would be to create a saved reply that your customer support team could use to quickly respond to the high volume of tickets that might be coming through. That could mean for a DDOS attack, product outage, buggy product release, data breach or a pricing change. For most of those, beyond the pricing change, it would also be good to update your status page to reflect the issue. Here’s an example response that would work for these issues:

Hey there,

Thanks very much for emailing about this — I’m sorry to hear that you are having trouble. This is actually a known issue and something that our engineering team is working on right now. If you’d like to follow along with up to date progress, you can do so here at our status page[link]. That’s going to be the best place to see what’s happening and what progress we’ve made.

I know it can be frustrating when you aren’t able to use a product as you would like to, and we’re hopeful to get everything back into shipshape as soon as we can. Please let me know if anything additional, beyond what you’ve reported, starts showing up for you.

Thanks!

While this is for an outage or something that would affect people being able to use an application, it can be shifted to work for people frustrated with a pricing change or publicity issue for the company. For example:

Hey there,

Thanks very much for emailing about this — I’m sorry to hear that this has affected you so much. This is something we’ve actually been thinking about a lot, and wrote up a blog post about here[link]. I hope this helps you to understand some of our motivations behind this choice.

I know it can be frustrating when you expect a company to behave one way and it shifts to another. It can feel like a loss of trust, and that’s definitely not what we’re aiming for. Please let me know if I can answer any questions for you personally that might help you feel better or make this easier.

Thanks!

With these types of responses, it’s always good to acknowledge that the company has put your customer out. They didn’t make any choices to bring them into the situation where they currently stand — it truly is all on the company and not doing well enough to plan, communicate, or prepare themselves. Responding with that in mind and acknowledging it will help assure the customer that you still have them in mind and still have their back. Without that, you may even lose a customer.

Because crises are usually high-volume for your support inbox, using saved replies is key. If you can use a workflow or macro that automatically applies a tag to the ticket as well, that can be a really helpful way to track the impact of the outage or issue as you move forward. Having data around how many tickets a botched product launch causes, for example, may push your product team towards making a cleaner, more well-established process than they had before. Take all difficult things as learning opportunities before you let them frustrate you, and you’ll be much better off for it.