You lose half your workday answering the same questions over and over

You don't have too many customers

That may be how it feels, but something quite different is going on. If you look closely at what really fills your inbox, you see the same questions again and again. They're just wearing a slightly different disguise each time. You'll spot questions like:

• Where is my order?
• Can I still change my order?
• How long is the warranty on that?
• Are you open on Saturdays?
• How do I return this?

All simple questions you can answer quickly, so you sit down to it. They're cleared away in no time. After all, you want to deliver good service. But the larger your customer base grows, the more you achieve the opposite.

And it costs you money

An employee in Belgium costs roughly 28 euros an hour. Suppose you take 10 minutes per email, then the questions above already eat up 50 minutes. That's 23 euros right there. It might seem manageable, but it's also 100 euros a week and 4,800 euros a year.

Now suppose you have a team of three people on top of that, then you're paying 13,000 euros a year just to answer those simple emails. And that's only the direct cost. The real cost isn't immediately visible. Because while you're answering questions, you have no time to bring in new customers or to finally fix that one process so the frustrations around it stop coming back.

On top of those repetitive questions, you also had three emails you couldn't answer yourself. So you forwarded them to the right colleagues. That's the other part of the problem, because it shows your mailbox has become a traffic hub that everything passes through. That makes you a bottleneck within your own company. Because what happens if you're not there tomorrow?

Good service attracts more questions

Anyone who has spent a while in a 'support role' has noticed this paradox. The more reachable you are, the more questions you get. A well-staffed support desk practically invites people to email more often. Those customers have learned that they get answers to their questions even in the evening. As a result, the threshold to keep asking becomes very low.

Mind you, that doesn't mean you shouldn't deliver good customer support — you absolutely should. But it is a sign that you urgently need to do it differently, because the current way is good for no one. Not for you, because you never get any peace. Not for your customers, because they want to be properly helped.

The better approach

Put answers in one central place that everyone can reach. A single well-written FAQ page on your website can prevent a large share of your questions. The time you invest in it keeps paying for itself for years afterwards. So you don't need to become less reachable! You need to give your customer the right tools to make their question completely unnecessary.

And when the question is genuinely unique, or when the customer is truly frustrated, or when something has gone wrong, that's when you step in. Then you have the time to give it your full attention. Believe me, your customer feels that, and it makes a world of difference to customer satisfaction.

So it really can be different

Imagine: tomorrow morning you open your laptop. Ten emails instead of fifty. One of them is a customer with a real problem who needs your help. One is a colleague with a question you actually have to think about. The other eight are worth reading.

That's not a pipe dream. That's simply your workday the way it was meant to be, before the inbox took over. To me, that's the moment work becomes enjoyable again. And that's what we do it for!