Making the most of Customer Care forms!

As the old saying goes (after being somewhat cleansed for a family blog), “stuff happens”. We hope that you’ll never need to call on our Customer Care folks for help (and the truth is the vast majority of users never will), but if stuff happens to you, and you need help, we want the process to go smoothly.

However when you consider that any one of our hundreds of millions of users could be operating with a different combination of behaviors, products, and configuarations (computer, operating system, browser, version, etc.), it’s sometimes complicated to solve.

That’s why we use forms. If you’ve reached out for help with Mail recently you have probably already noticed that all submissions have to be done through web forms. If you find yourself in search of help with Messenger, Groups, or other Yahoo! products, you’ll find the same thing there too. Any attempts to submit directly to a Customer Care email address will result in instructions for using the forms. So if you’ve saved an email address for Customer Care, it’s not going to be an option.

There are a number of reasons why forms make the most sense, but I’ll just go over the two biggies. First, and foremost, we need information from you if we are going to identify your issue. As I’ve mentioned (more than a few times) on this blog, reporting that something “isn’t working” doesn’t give us much to work with. This means our agent will have to email you first to get more info before any attempts can really be made to help. The forms help ensure that our agents have the necessary information right from the start, and should help them identify the problem faster.

The other major benefit is getting the message to the right team as fast as possible. We’ve got a lot of different groups that specialize in a lot of different things, so it’s much harder to get to the right place if you are trying to email directly. Filling out the details in the forms help our systems put it in the right hands, right away.

So please keep these things in mind when you are filling out those Customer Care forms. More detail up front helps prevent requests for that detail down the line.

Ryan Knight
Community Manager
Yahoo! Mail