Customer Support · Advanced
Angry Customer, Real Answer
Respond to hostility by resolving, not by soothing
When to use it
Hostile or sarcastic messages, public complaints, the customer who threatens to leave. Use it when the urge is to soothe and you would rather fix.
A customer is angry. Their message: {{customer_message}} What is true: {{context}} What I can do: {{resolution}} Rules: - Do not mirror the emotion, do not name their emotion back at them ("I hear that you're frustrated") - Answer the substantive complaint first, in the first sentence - Concede every point where they are right, explicitly - Correct any factual error calmly and once - If they were abusive, set one plain boundary without threatening - Short sentences. Under 130 words.
Try it: fill the variables
Example
Inputs
- {{customer_message}} What the customer wrote
- This is the THIRD time your 'automatic' backup failed. I'm paying for a service that doesn't work. Either fix it or I'm gone, and I'll tell everyone why.
- {{context}} Background the model needs
- Two failures were ours (storage quota bug, fixed 2 Oct). Today's failure: their disk is full, the backup log says so.
- {{resolution}} What you can actually offer
- Run a manual backup for them now, free extra storage for 3 months, alert when disk is above 90%.
Output
You're right that two of those failures were ours: a storage bug we fixed on 2 October. That should never have reached you twice. Today's failure has a different cause: your disk was full, so there was no room to write the backup. Our error message didn't make that clear, which is also on us. I've started a manual backup now and will confirm when it finishes. I've added three months of extra storage at no cost, and set an alert that warns you at 90% disk use. If any backup fails again, reply to this email and it comes straight to me.
Why it works
Answering the substance in the first sentence signals that you took the complaint seriously, which calms more than any empathy phrase. Conceding where they are right and correcting errors only once keeps the reply credible without turning it into an argument, and the short sentences stop the model from over-explaining.
More from this pack
- Reply to a TicketA straight answer to a support message, no service-desk theatre
- Say No Without Losing the CustomerRefuse a request clearly and offer the nearest real thing
- Apology for a Real FailureOwn a mistake without corporate fog
- Bug Report From a Vague TicketTurn a frustrated message into something engineering can act on
From the Global Prompt Library (TextDeck Community License 1.0), version 53723a8. GitHub
Three keys. Every prompt.
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