For support teams
The first ten replies of the day sound like a person. By the fortieth you are reaching for phrases rather than sentences — and the customer reading yours has no idea they are the fortieth. To them it is the only one.
Not because they are rude — because they are hedged, and a reader who is already annoyed hears hedging as evasion. The replacements are not softer. They are more direct, which is what actually calms somebody down.
Instead of
We apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused
Try
I am sorry — this should not have happened, and I can see why it was frustrating.
Any, may, have caused. Three hedges in one sentence. It reads as a company declining to admit something went wrong.
Instead of
Your ticket has been escalated
Try
I have passed this to our engineering team and I will come back to you on Thursday with an update either way.
Passive voice hides who is doing it and when. "Either way" is the part that actually reassures, because it commits you to the awkward update too.
Instead of
Unfortunately this is not something we currently support
Try
We cannot do that today. Here is the closest thing that works, and I have added your name to the request.
"Unfortunately" and "currently" are softeners that make a no feel evasive. A plain no with an alternative is easier to receive than a padded one.
Macros exist because the same question arrives four hundred times and writing it fresh each time is not a good use of anybody. The trouble is that a macro is written for an average customer, and no actual customer is average — so it arrives almost right, which reads worse than arriving obviously canned.
The cheap fix: paste the macro in, add one sentence about this person's situation, and run the whole thing through Fluency. It smooths the seam between the canned part and the written part, which is the join a customer actually notices.
Takes about eight seconds and it is the difference between a reply that was sent to you and a reply that was sent.
Everybody writes it occasionally. The customer has been unfair, you have been polite four times already, and the fifth reply comes out with an edge on it that you can feel and cannot quite see.
Ask the agent: “Is there an edge to this? Quote the specific words.” The second half is the important part — a general answer is no use, and the specific words are usually two or three you did not notice choosing.
Then fix those and send it. Rewriting the whole thing usually produces something worse, because the rest of it was fine.
If the answer itself is bad news, no amount of phrasing rescues it. A customer who wanted a refund and is not getting one will not be won round by a better sentence, and trying tends to make it worse — the more carefully worded the no, the more it reads as managed.
Short, plain, and a real reason beats polished every time on the ones that genuinely hurt.