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Comment by atoav

8 months ago

As someone who worked in support as a youngling:

If you behave unpleasant enough I'll go out of my way to make sure your behavior does not pay off. I will note your abrasive behavior in the ticket or might even mark your mail as spam. On telephone our line will suddenly experience technical difficulties. And throughout I will remain as friendly and patient as ever.

I will warn superiors about you, so once you escalate they already have a colorful 3D image of your wonderful personality in mind. Whether that 100% is in your favor, you can guess.

Play asshole games? Win asshole prices.

Behave like a decent person with empathy instead, press the right buttons and I might even skip some of the company rules for you. Many people in support do not give a single damn if they lose their job over you and you might just be worth it.

These are not sfter-the-fact shower thoughts, these are actually lived experiences from the trenches and I know how other people in those roles think.

Persistence pays off, being an asshole not so much

9 comments

atoav

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hkon  8 months ago

If you are helping, why would they be assholes?

  • atoav  8 months ago

    Never worked in customer support huh? Sometimes the first thing you ever hear from a person is them cursing at you. Some people don't even greet you and act downright uncivilized, yelling, aggressive, assuming you not magically only know their problem without them telling you, no you also somehow caused it, on purpose, because you're evil. They haven't even given you a passing chance of helping them.

    As someone who grew up in the EU I believe that human dignity is an fundamental right, and that treating a person in a support role with basic manners is in the spirit of that right.

    • hkon  8 months ago

      I see, but this is unfortunately the rational behavior in many cases, as being nice will get you a sorry and a goodbye.

      I have worked in places where customers expected some kind of service provided and the nastier behavior got rewarded the most.

      While for some this behavior come naturally, I think there is also an element of conditioning to this behavior.

      Also, people are not calling because evertyhing is great. Some level of frustration and anger must be expected in such a job. But my impressions is most companies don't train their workers to handle such scenarios.

  • lolinder  8 months ago

    You've clearly never worked customer support. A very disproportionate number of people who call in to customer support are totally and utterly unreasonable. That's why it's such a pain to interact with customer support as a reasonable human: The systems aren't designed for you, they're designed for the abusers who represent something like 20% of the phone calls and 80% of the work.

    • whstl  8 months ago

      From my side it feels like customer support systems are designed purely to trap customers in the system so they are unable to cancel.

      In my last day in South America I spent about two hours cancelling my cable and even though I was very soft spoken and super patient (I was playing Mario Kart on mute so not really uncomfortable), but the customer support person actually CRIED to me because she would “miss her quota” if I cancelled.

      I had no means of paying anymore (I cancelled my bank account the day before and was about to move to another country) so there was nothing I couldn’t really help her, so I fail to see how I deserve the treatment from the company.

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