The questions you never hear
Your inbox only records the questions people were willing to write down. Most people never write. Here is how to hear the ones who stayed silent.
By The Cluable team
Your support inbox looks like a record of what customers want to know. It is not. It is a record of what a particular kind of customer was willing to open an email client for.
That is a narrow slice. Behind every message you receive stands a larger group of people who wondered the same thing, weighed the effort of asking, and decided against it. They read your pricing page with one unanswered doubt. They hovered at the checkout with a question about returns. Then they moved on, and no system anywhere recorded that they existed.
An inbox is a survey of your most patient customers. Everyone in a hurry is missing from it.
Asking is more expensive than it looks
Nobody thinks of writing to support as work, until it is their turn to do it. Find the contact page. Explain the situation. Guess whether the reply will come in an hour or a day. Keep the errand open in your head the whole time.
For a real problem, people pay that cost. For a small question, they mostly do not. "Can I cancel whenever I want." "Does it work with the tools I already use." "How long does delivery take." A question that takes a few seconds to think can take ten minutes to write down properly, and the people asking it are usually in the middle of a decision, one open tab away from a competitor. So the question goes unasked, and the decision gets made without you.
The frustrating part is that the answer usually exists. You wrote it months ago. It is sitting on a page the person never opened, a few clicks from where they were standing.
Make asking cost nothing
You cannot make people write emails about small things. What you can do is make asking so cheap that the small things get asked.
That is the real job of a chat box on the page. Typing eight words into it costs nothing, and the answer arrives while the person is still looking at the thing they were deciding about. Cluable answers from the public pages you have already written and shows where each answer came from, so the person can check it themselves.
When asking gets that cheap, the silent questions start to surface. People raise the doubts they would never have emailed about, and most get settled on the spot, from your own pages, without ever touching your inbox. What reaches your team is the smaller set that actually needs a person.
Hearing what was never asked
Some questions the bot cannot answer, because the answer is not written anywhere on your site yet. Cluable keeps track of those and sends you a plain weekly note: here is what visitors asked that your pages could not answer.
Read that note and you are hearing something no inbox ever carried, the questions of people who would not have written in. Most of the fixes are small. A sentence on the pricing page. A paragraph in the FAQ. Write it once, and the bot picks it up when it next reads the page, and the next person who wonders gets an answer instead of a reason to leave.
Your customers have been asking these questions all along. They were just asking them silently, to themselves, on the way out. Now you finally get to hear them.
