The support code.

How support should work.

Most of this isn't new. 37signals works this way. So do a few other small companies. The rest I learned by getting it wrong in my own products.

Sign up, and this is the support I'll give you. It's also what SuppyHQ helps you give your customers.

1. 01
   Take it seriously.

   If you treat the complaint as nothing, the customer pushes to show it's something. If you treat it as serious from the start, they get to be reasonable.

2. 02
   It's our fault.

   Customer wrote in? You weren't clear enough, or something didn't work right. Their frustration is theirs to feel. The system failure is yours to fix. Don't confuse the two.

3. 03
   The customer is heard, not always right.

   Their experience is real. Their proposed fix isn't policy. Validate the feeling, separate the task, hold the line.

4. 04
   Default no.

   “We'll keep that in mind” beats “yes, coming soon” when soon is a lie. A clean no respects everyone's time. The courage to disappoint is part of the job.

5. 05
   Horizontal, not vertical.

   Same level as the buyer. No “Dear valued customer.” No corporate plural shielding. Equal-to-equal. The moment you tier yourself above them, you've lost.

6. 06
   “I” for the reply, not “we” for the blame.

   Sign your name. First person. Own the conversation. But name the cause: a deploy yesterday introduced this, the billing job had a bug, I missed your email on Friday. The corporate we apologize is a hiding place.

7. 07
   One apology, then the fix.

   Five apologies isn't humility. It's a bid for approval. Stop performing.

8. 08
   No canned macros pretending to be hand-typed.

   People can tell. Templates are fine. Just don't dress them up as letters from a friend.

9. 09
   Pause before replying to anger.

   Take a breath. Don't type from the heat. Give the message a minute before you answer.

10. 10
    Then enough.

    When the question is answered, stop typing. Don't pad. Don't upsell. Don't add a fourth paragraph.

11. 11
    Fix upstream.

    The best support ticket is the one not filed. Don't grow a team to answer a question your UI should answer itself. Most repeat tickets are a UI bug wearing a costume.

12. 12
    Strip the form.

    Kill the required dropdowns, the tell us why you're cancelling theatre, the four-step contact flow. One field. One button. A real reply.

13. 13
    Refund without drama.

    If they ask, give it. The cost of arguing is always higher than the cost of the refund.

14. 14
    The builder answers.

    No layer between the person who made the thing and the person who bought it. No outsourced team. No chatbot wearing a name tag. Whoever shipped it speaks to whoever hit the bug.

15. 15
    Write the doc the second time you answer it.

    First time, fine. Second time, the docs or the product failed. Fix it before the third.

16. 16
    Office hours, not 24/7.

    A burned-out team can't serve. Sustainable beats heroic, every quarter.

17. 17
    Close the loop.

    When a customer-reported bug ships, email that customer. Almost nobody does. It's the cleanest version of work as contribution.

18. 18
    Don't chase the SLA metric.

    Set a one-minute target and quality falls apart. Speed without thought is theatre. Most cases get answered in under an hour anyway, when you're calm and the form is short.

19. 19
    No NPS games. No CSAT pressure. No closure quotas.

    They corrupt the work. The moment you're chasing a score, you're chasing approval, and the customer becomes a means to it. Measure quality of resolution, not speed of closure.

20. 20
    Public postmortems for outages.

    Full transparency, including what failed and why. Trust compounds faster than any uptime guarantee.