Hiring your first support person: a practical email exercise
Hire your first support person with a real exercise: a one-hour inbox test, what to score, how to review it fairly, and how to plan their first week.
On this page(9 sections)
For the first year, you answered every customer email yourself. You know the product, the odd cases and the customers who need extra care. Now you are handing that inbox to someone else, and a résumé or a friendly interview will tell you very little about how they write to an upset customer at 4 p.m. on a Friday.
The best predictor is the work itself. This guide gives you a one-hour email exercise you can run with any candidate, a way to score it fairly, and a plan for their first week. It assumes a small team with a shared inbox and one or two people handling most mail.
Why an exercise beats an interview
Interviews reward people who talk well. Support rewards people who write clearly, read carefully and stay calm. Those are different skills.
An exercise shows you:
- How they read. Do they answer the question the customer asked, or the question they expected?
- How they write. Is it clear, warm, short enough, free of filler?
- How they decide. What do they promise, what do they hand to you, what do they refuse?
- How they handle not knowing. Do they guess, or do they say what they will check?
It also shows candidates what the job is. A good candidate who does not enjoy the exercise has told you something useful about both of you.
Build the exercise from real mail
Use real emails, with names, numbers and anything private removed. Do not invent perfect cases. Real messages are messy: two questions in one, a vague subject, a customer who is partly wrong.
Pick five to six messages that cover different situations:
- A simple how-to question where the answer is in your help pages. This tests whether they point to the right place and still sound human.
- A bug report with little detail. This tests whether they ask for the right things without sending the customer through an interrogation.
- A billing question where the customer is upset. This tests tone and limits: what they may promise and what they should pass to you.
- A feature request you will not build. This tests honesty. A good reply says no kindly and clearly, without a false maybe.
- A message that is not a support question. A sales inquiry, a press request, spam. This tests judgment about where mail goes next.
- One that needs a decision from you. A refund edge case, for example. This tests whether they know to stop and ask.
Give them a short brief with the facts they need: a one-page summary of your product, your refund rules, your tone, and who decides what. Do not make them guess at policy. You are testing their writing and judgment, not their memory.
Use a safe copy of your mail setup if you can. A shared inbox where they can see threads, add private notes and draft replies without sending anything to real customers is ideal. If you do not have that, a document with the messages and a reply field works. Never let a candidate send mail to real customers during a test.
Set the rules
- One hour. Longer exercises filter for people with free evenings, not for the best candidates. Pay them for the time if the exercise runs past an hour.
- Open book. Real support work is open book. Let them read the help pages and use any tools they would use on the job.
- Say whether AI is allowed. If AI drafting is part of your workflow, allowing it and watching how they use it is informative. Do they paste a draft unread, or do they edit it into something that sounds like a person? For the principle behind this, see AI drafts, human sends, and reviewing AI-drafted replies for what a careful edit looks like.
- Same exercise for everyone. Otherwise you cannot compare people fairly.
- Tell them how it will be judged. Share the scoring headings in advance. Surprises measure nerves, not skill.
Score what matters
Use a short scorecard. Score each reply from 1 to 4 on a few headings, and write a sentence of evidence for each score. Scoring without evidence turns into gut feeling with numbers on it.
Accuracy. Did they get the facts right and stay inside policy? A wrong answer delivered nicely is worse than a plain correct one.
Clarity. Could the customer act on the reply without writing back? Is the first sentence useful? Are the steps in order?
Tone. Is it warm without being gushing, direct without being cold? Check the apology: one honest sentence beats three nervous ones. Our post on apology emails that rebuild trust shows what good looks like.
Judgment. Did they escalate the right things, and only those? Did they avoid promises they cannot keep?
Efficiency. Did they say it in a sensible length? A 300-word reply to a one-line question is a red flag, and so is a one-word reply to a long, upset message.
Process. Did they use private notes, tags or labels sensibly? Did they leave a clear note for the next person? This matters more once you are more than one person; see the shared inbox for a two-person startup.
Do not score typos harshly unless they are frequent or on key facts. Score what a customer would feel.
Review it with the candidate
After the hour, spend 20 minutes talking through two replies: the one you liked best and the one you liked least. Ask:
- "What were you thinking when you wrote this opening?"
- "What would you do differently with another ten minutes?"
- "Where did you feel unsure?"
How they respond to a gentle critique tells you what coaching them will be like. Someone who gets defensive about a small wording choice will find the job hard. Someone who says "good point, I would change that" is already doing the job.
Watch for these signals
Green: they ask a clarifying question before answering a vague bug report; they say what they will do and when; they flag a policy gap they noticed; they write in plain language.
Yellow: they copy your help-page text with no personal touch; they over-apologize; they hedge every sentence.
Red: they promise a refund or a feature on their own; they blame the customer; they answer a different question than the one asked; they cannot say what they would escalate.
One red flag does not decide it. A pattern does.
Make the first week count
A good hire still needs a plan. A rough outline:
- Day 1: read. Give them 20 to 30 of your best past threads, with a note on why each is good. Include one or two that went wrong. Add your triage rules and your tone notes.
- Day 2: shadow. They draft replies in the shared inbox, and you review before anything is sent. Short feedback on each, in the moment.
- Days 3 and 4: send with review. They send the easy mail themselves. You review a sample each day and discuss it.
- Day 5: handle a queue. They own the inbox for a few hours with you available. Afterward, review together.
Hand over the inbox gradually. The checklist in handing the inbox to your first hire covers access, shared addresses and what to keep for yourself. Build a small set of reusable replies together, so the new person's best answers are saved for the next one. If you plan to use AI drafting in the team, start with a small pilot rather than switching it on for everyone at once.
Things to settle before you post the job
- What they will own. Replying, tagging, and updating help pages? Refunds up to a limit? Writing down bugs?
- What they will not decide. Policy changes, large refunds, anything legal.
- Hours and coverage. Who answers when they are away? See covering the inbox during a vacation.
- Access. Give the least access that lets them do the job. Review it every few months; who saw what explains how to audit it.
- How you will measure the first month. Reply time, customer satisfaction on a handful of conversations, fewer repeat questions. Pick two or three numbers, not ten.
A short version
If you only have ten minutes before you meet a candidate, do this: take three real customer emails, give the candidate a page of context, ask for replies in thirty minutes, and read them for accuracy, clarity and tone. You will learn more in that half hour than in a long conversation, and the candidate will learn what the job is like before they say yes.
Start with Koltrix
Your domain, one inbox, and an API that sends.
A team inbox where AI sorts and drafts (nothing is sent without your click), plus the transactional API and SMTP relay your product sends with. 7 days free, no card.
