The case for a slower inbox

For a long time our support inbox worked like a smoke alarm. A message came in, someone heard it, and whoever was closest dropped what they were doing to answer. Our median first reply was eleven minutes, and we were proud of it.

We were also tired, and our product was not getting much better.

What we changed

In the spring we tried an experiment. The inbox would be read three times a day, at nine, at one and at four. One person per window, on a rota. Outside those windows nobody looked, unless the status page showed an outage.

We told our customers in the footer of every reply: we read mail three times a day, so expect an answer within a few hours. Nobody complained about the sentence itself. A few people thanked us for saying it.

What happened

The median first reply went from eleven minutes to a little under two hours. That was the cost, and it was smaller than we feared.

The gains were harder to measure but easy to feel:

• Better answers. Reading twelve messages at once shows you patterns. Three people asking about the same setting is a design problem, not three support tickets.
• Fewer follow-ups. Replies written with time to think answered the next question too.
• Longer stretches of work. The people building the product got whole mornings back. Two features that had been “almost done” for months shipped in June.

What we kept fast

Not everything can wait. Anything that mentions a failed payment, a locked account or a clinic that cannot see its schedule is flagged by a filter and goes to whoever is on call. That is about one message in twenty.

Would I recommend it?

For a small team, yes. Speed of reply is one thing customers value, but it is rarely the main thing. They mostly want to be answered properly, once. A slower inbox gave us room to do that.