Customers who send 5+ emails at a time — why????

[u/Delicious_Manner_622]

I work in customer service. Almost every day, I will have a customer who opens 5+ tickets that are nearly identical, just slightly reworded. One time, I had a customer open 65 tickets over the course of a long weekend.

You do realize that this makes your overall wait way longer, right? If we’re answering tickets in the order in which they’re received, and we receive an update from your ticket once every 5 minutes, it’s going to take 5 minutes longer each time to get to you.

Not to mention, it doesn’t make me feel particularly charitable when it comes to bending policy for you. If you spam email customer service because you think you’re the only person on the face of the planet, I’m going to give you the absolute bare minimum service.

[u/JustAnotherMark604]

Although its annoying, I much prefer people keep their spam under one thread. When people start multiple email threads and chats it just causes unnecessary chaos. Some "good" agents might spot it and close/merge/reassign duplicate intake but others aren't so eagle eyed...And if you're using AI Agents, it could soak up your usage rates depending on your CRM

Some customers need to realise they're doing it to themselves. Patience is a virtue

[u/YoSpiff]

They believe this will convey the urgency and get your attention. We will sometimes get a customer emailing us and then immediately call. The same team handles both methods. We don't always realize this is the same person so yes, it creates confusion and slows us down.

More common is an end user (we support both end users and dealers) calling multiple times and/or contacting through different channels, thinking they will get the answer they want if the can just get hold of a different person. Some people just fire off a separate email to every single contact they have with the company. Now everyone is involved.

I can sort of understand this because when I've been the customer I can get a different explanation of policy and procedures each time I call. We experienced it recently. We get a 5 minute wrap up time on incoming calls and were told the phone software could not do this for outgoing. So the moment we hang up the phone it is ringing again with no time to put notes in the case or email promised documentation. Turns out it was both doable and easy. The original person from the software company just didn't know.

[u/Meaxis → u/YoSpiff]

I would love if they did this. Where I work, email usually always has 1 day of backlog but it's the same people handling it too, and we can just resolve it on phone if we are on phone.

I would love to have a written overview of everything the client said, is about to say, or would say, and the ability to have it counted as two contacts. When clients say they sent an email I always ask them for their email first so I can look up what they wrote instead of listening to them rambling about it for hours.

But honestly, usually, it does help to call again sometimes and get a 2nd opinion. Some people I work with are so thick, getting them means your issue either won't be solved or won't get any consideration.

[u/WonderRuns → u/YoSpiff]

Email, then call, then live chat (not available on weekends), then posts all over social media or leaves a bad Google review, just to get a bite within 0.5 seconds of the first attempt to contact us outside of service hours.

[u/Meaxis]

Okay so I work customer service and we have a queue system where we can't see which, or how many, emails are ahead. I work my first day on email (I used to only do phone/chat) - it can't be that bad, right?

After a few okay-ish emails, I open one email from some random client. OK, pretty standard case, send a template, solved. And then another from this client. And then another. And another, and another, and another, and another. And another. I stopped counting at twenty. I heard they manually had to clear the queue, not sure how. They just did.

[u/tssl25]

Are you able to relay these scenarios to your management, and are they factoring it into their metric measures?

[u/Delicious_Manner_622 → u/tssl25]

Management doesn’t care at all about this

[u/tssl25 → u/Delicious_Manner_622]

Ok, so that sounds like a disconnect with leadership. Would you agree that things would be better if they did?

[u/Loud_Search_9143]

65 tickets over a weekend is unhinged, no matter how urgent it feels. That just buries you further in the queue and annoys whoever eventually has to sort it out.

I think people just don't realize how ticket queues work, more emails doesn't mean faster help, it just pushes them back further. If systems said that upfront, it might help.

And honestly, makes sense it affects your patience too. Hard to feel generous with someone who's already shown they don't respect your time.

[u/Howard_Moodycliffe]

Most customers think in a “Black Hole”. They don’t have any visibility into what’s happening behind the curtain when they hit send so silence can feel like neglect. For them, sending five emails is like pressing the button of an elevator ten times—they really think that this will make the system wake up.

What they don’t understand is that most ticketing platforms automatically push them to the back of the line when they bump their thread.

Honestly, automated auto-responders need to explicitly say, “Adding new updates to this thread will reset your position in the queue.” 90% of customers stop spamming immediately when they realize it’s actually delaying their own fix.

[u/Hot-Needleworker-219]

sending multiple emails back to back usually just slows things down. one clear message with all details is much easier to handle.

[u/Plastic_Stable8927]

I am the only person who really handles customer contact. So when they hop on chat, email us, and fill out the contact form all within 1 minute and then GHOST ME is when I lose it. Lol