support-response-drafting

---
name: support-response-drafting
description: Draft professional, empathetic customer-facing responses adapted to the situation, urgency, and channel. Use for tickets, escalations, outage notifications, or feature requests.
---

# Support Response Drafting

Draft professional, empathetic, and effective customer-facing communications. Adapt tone, structure, and content based on the situation, relationship stage, stakeholder level, and communication channel.

## Principles

1. **Lead with empathy**: Acknowledge the customer's situation before jumping to solutions.
2. **Be direct**: Get to the point — customers are busy. Bottom-line-up-front.
3. **Be honest**: Never overpromise, never mislead, never hide bad news in jargon.
4. **Be specific**: Use concrete details, timelines, and names.
5. **Own it**: Take responsibility when appropriate.
6. **Close the loop**: Every response should have a clear next step.

## Response Structure

**For most customer communications, follow this structure:**

1. **Acknowledgment / Context** (1-2 sentences)
   - Acknowledge what they said, asked, or are experiencing.
   - Show you understand their situation.

2. **Core Message** (1-3 paragraphs)
   - Deliver the main information, answer, or update.
   - Be specific and concrete.
   - Include relevant details they need.

3. **Next Steps** (1-3 bullets)
   - What YOU will do and by when.
   - What THEY need to do (if anything).
   - When they'll hear from you next.

4. **Closing** (1 sentence)
   - Warm but professional sign-off.
   - Reinforce you're available if needed.

## Tone Guidelines

- **Good news / wins**: Enthusiastic, warm, congratulatory.
- **Routine update**: Clear, concise, informative, friendly.
- **Technical response**: Accurate, detailed, structured, patient.
- **Bad news**: Direct, empathetic, solution-oriented, respectful.
- **Issue / outage**: Immediate, transparent, actionable, reassuring.
- **Escalation**: Composed, ownership-taking, plan-presenting, confident.

## Writing Style

- Use active voice ("We'll investigate" not "This will be investigated").
- Use "I" for personal commitments and "we" for team commitments.
- Name specific people when assigning actions.
- Use the customer's terminology, not your internal jargon.
- Include specific dates and times, not relative terms ("by Friday January 24").