The situation
You’re on the Nexus Tech Service Desk. A client from a small accounting firm calls:
“Our whole office can’t send email and we’ve got a deadline today. This is costing us money — what are you actually doing about it?”
They’re polite but clearly stressed.
Your role
You’re the support officer taking the call. Resolve what you can, keep the client informed, and follow the complaint-handling approach if needed.
A good approach
- Acknowledge the impact. “I understand — email being down on a deadline day is a big deal. I’ll help you get this sorted as quickly as possible.”
- Take ownership. Give your name and a ticket number so they know who’s helping and how to follow up.
- Diagnose calmly. Ask focused questions: Is it everyone or one person? Any error message? When did it start? Check whether it’s a known outage.
- Act and explain. Take the next step (e.g. restart the mail connector, escalate to a systems administrator) and tell the client what you’re doing and roughly how long it will take.
- Set expectations and follow up. Agree when you’ll update them — and then actually do it, even if there’s no change yet.
Watch out for
- Don’t take the frustration personally or match their stress.
- Don’t over-promise a fix time you can’t guarantee.
- Don’t go silent — regular updates reduce frustration even when the fix takes time.
Reflect
- What would you write in the ticket so a colleague could pick it up?
- How would you close the loop once email is restored?