Write your holiday answers before the questions arrive (The Small Shop Weekly, Oct 20)
The holiday window is close, and the cheapest prep is writing down what you already answer. Shopify reports an average 79% support-ticket spike in the first week of December, so the inbox you handle today is not the one you will have then.
This week's issue has five jobs for a small store or a small SaaS or service team. Each one fits into an afternoon or less.
Write down the ten questions you answer most before December hits
Block 45 minutes today. Scroll back through the last month of email and chat, tally the messages that repeat, and put the ten most common questions in one document. Any shared doc works, and you need no software for this.
A small store will probably find some of these near the top:
- Where is my order?
- How long does shipping take?
- Can I change my address?
- How do I return this?
- Do you ship to my country?
Every repeated question is also a future help-page topic. Next to each one, write the answer once, in your own voice, with the exact detail a customer needs: a date, a link, a next step. From then on you paste instead of retyping.
Do this now because December-you will be tired and curt, and a tired reply is where kindness slips. Some answers will change with the season, like shipping cutoffs. Mark those with a star and update them once in November.
If you want customers to find these answers without writing in at all, the dictionary entry on self-service support explains how that approach works.
Settle your returns policy in October so January is calmer
Returns can drive another support surge in January. Decide the policy before gifts are bought, not while a customer is waiting on your reply.
A plain returns policy answers these points:
- How long the return window lasts
- Who pays return shipping
- What condition the item must be in
- How and when refunds are issued
- What happens with sale items
- Exactly how to start a return (one line, with a link or an address)
Picture a customer writing on January 3 to ask whether a gift can be returned without a receipt. If your policy page already says yes or no, your reply is one short paragraph and a link. If it doesn't, you get several rounds of replies to settle a question you could have settled in October. That is an illustration, not a real customer story, but most owners will recognize the shape of it.
Generosity has a ceiling set by your margins, so offer only what they can bear. The right window also depends on what you sell. Made-to-order items and stock items rarely deserve the same terms, so write the policy for your product, not for a template.
Reply fast and kindly, and make it a habit
Say a customer writes on a Tuesday to ask whether a gift will arrive before a party on the 20th. A reply the same day with a straight answer and a next step, even if it is "I'm checking with the carrier and will write back by tomorrow", is what this section is about. Silence is the thing to avoid.
Start with a simple acknowledgement rule. Reply the same business day even if the full answer takes longer, and tell the customer you are looking into it instead of going silent. Pick your own target based on how many people reply and when they are online. The number matters less than keeping it. The dictionary entry on first response time defines the metric, which helps you decide what to measure.
Then fix how replies begin. Open with the customer's problem in their own words, not with your policy. Here is an illustrative rewrite, described rather than scripted:
- Before: a reply that opens by pointing to the policy and states flatly that returns are not accepted after 30 days.
- After: a reply that thanks the customer, says you are sorry the size didn't work out, explains that the 30-day window has passed so a refund isn't possible, and offers store credit as an alternative with an offer to set it up.
The second version says what you can do, and it takes slightly longer to write. Keep a few of these rewrites in your answers document so you don't have to find the warm tone from scratch at 9 pm.
Pick tools by the job they do, and set them up before the rush
A one-to-three person store needs a short list of tools sorted by job: shipping labels and tracking, returns, reviews, and answering customers. Add a tool only if a task already costs you time every week, and skip anything you would be configuring in the second week of December, when you will have the least patience for it.
Here is a hypothetical. A three-person store sits down in late October and gives each job one owner and one pick. One person chooses how labels and tracking emails get sent. Another settles on a returns form. The third decides where customer messages will live, so chat and email stop sitting in separate tabs. Each pick gets the same test: can it be set up on a Tuesday afternoon without an admin and without calling anyone? A tool that fails goes on the January list instead of the November one.
A tool that claims to cover many jobs should be tested on each job separately. A solo owner with a quiet inbox can live with a patchwork, but a team of three needs to see every message in one place.
Founders learn the most from the messages they would rather not answer
This one is for the small SaaS and service readers. Repeated questions often point at something unclear in the product, the pricing page or onboarding, so the real fix usually sits upstream of the reply.
While the team is one to five people, reading raw customer messages shows you things a summary can hide. Keep a running note of every message that confuses or irritates you. On Friday, read the whole note and sort it into three piles: fix the page, fix the product, or a nice message worth keeping.
Save this roundup, and forward it to another owner who is staring at the same December inbox. You will find more practical pieces like it on the blog.
Chatisto is customer support software for small teams.