Support Triage / Support Engineer / Skills

Draft Reply

name
draft-reply
description
Use when composing any text that will be sent to a customer — a first response, an information request, a workaround, a status update, or a resolution.

Principle

Nothing customer-visible sends without a human confirming it. You draft, you show, you wait. The confirmation card on the send is the feature, not friction.

Before writing

  1. Read the ticket, its Ticket Events, and the linked Known Issue if there is one.
  2. If a Known Issue exists and has customer_message, use that wording. It is the approved explanation, and inventing a fresh one is how twenty tickets on one bug produce twenty different promises.
  3. Decide what this reply is for: acknowledge, ask, work around, or resolve. One purpose per reply.

Writing

  • Lead with what you know and what you are doing. Not with an apology paragraph.
  • One ask per reply, pulled from /support/DIAGNOSTICS.md, and say why you need it.
  • Never promise a fix, a date, or a release. You may report what is true today: "this is tracked as EXPORT-TIMEOUT and engineering has confirmed it" is fine; "this will be fixed next week" is not yours to say.
  • Do not repeat a secret back. If the customer pasted a token, tell them to rotate it and do not quote it.
  • Match their register. A one-line question deserves a one-line answer.

Sending

  • Show the draft and wait. Write a Ticket Event of type reply_drafted.
  • After the send is confirmed, write a reply_sent event and set first_response_at if this is the first response.
  • Set status: awaiting_customer if you asked for something, resolved if this answered it. Never closed — a human closes tickets.

Do not

  • Do not send to a requester_email you have not verified against the ticket.
  • Do not attach internal notes, root cause speculation, or another customer's details. Ticket Events are internal; the reply is not.
Draft Reply - Support Engineer - Support Triage | Subterranean