Help/Recipes/Support and customer success
Answer a customer question
With sources you can check.
- For
- Support and customer success
- When
- A question arrives that someone on the team has answered before, or should have written down
- Takes
- About a minute of agent time
- You get
- A reply ready to send, the source behind every claim, and internal notes kept separate
A customer asks: "<their question>". Draft a reply from what we know in
onecell. Save it to <cell>.
1. Search onecell for product notes, docs, past answers and decisions on
this. If it's about how the product behaves and the code is here,
check the code too. Cite every source as cell · heading · passage, or
as a file path.
2. Draft "Support: <short question>" (dry run first):
- a reply ready to send: plain words, the direct answer first, then
what they can do instead if the answer is no
- a table of each claim in the reply and its source
- internal notes the customer shouldn't see: wording rules, known
issues, anything uncertain
Claim nothing you can't source. If the answer is unclear, say so in
the internal notes and draft a holding reply instead.
3. Reply with the link and whether this deserves a help article.What your agent does
Looks up what the team knows
Product notes, docs, earlier answers and decisions, and the code when the question is about behaviour.Answers first
The reply leads with the direct answer, then the way forward.Sources every claim
A table a teammate can check in seconds before sending.Keeps the internal separate
Known issues and wording rules go in notes the customer never sees.
What you get back
Open the full example →An answer for a made-up invoicing app, Tally: the reply, a source for each claim, and a detail the agent kept out of the reply on purpose.
Sample support answer: can I change an invoice after sending it?
Reply, ready to send
Sources
| Claim | Source |
|---|---|
| Unpaid invoices can be edited and re-sent | Product notes · Invoices · Editing |
| The old link shows the new version | Engineering · Decision: one link per invoice |
| Paid invoices are locked | Product notes · Invoices · Locking |
| Credit notes are linked to both invoices | Help article · Credit notes |
Internal notes
- Third question about this in a week. Worth a help article with a short video.
- Part payments count as a payment, so a part-paid invoice is locked too. Not mentioned in the reply to keep it short; add it if they ask.
Variations
Turn it into a help article
Add: “Then write it as a help article for the docs: a question as the title, the answer in two sentences, then steps.” Publish it once someone has checked it.
A bug report, not a question
Add: “If this is a bug, write a ticket in <backlog cell> with steps to reproduce, and link it from the internal notes.”
Many questions at once
Paste a batch of questions and ask for one reply each, plus a list of the ones onecell had no source for. Those are your missing docs.
Tips
- A claim without a source is a guess. Send the holding reply instead.
- Answers you send often belong in the docs, not in a support inbox.
- If the code and the docs disagree, the code wins, and the docs get a fix.