[tikiman163]

The suggestion is the customer pays $20 so they don't try and go straight to the ombudsman with ever little issue. The company doesn't and shouldn't pay the customer under any circumstance.

In technical support, one of the largest problems you have to deal with is all of the idiots that don't know how to use the product and won't look up the documentation or learn the product on their own. These people spam the shit out of support all day for the most basic shit. Seriously, I was working support at an anti-virus company and 85% of the calls into the paid business tier support were requests for us to do installs or basic application configuration for them. I know that not everybody knows how to configure a firewall, but "where do I download the install file for x" is literally Google-able.

The idea of an ombudsman is ultimately a bad one in this case because the problem isn't with the product or the support or the documentation. The problem is people Always think their issue is special and the most capable person should help them. Our support tier was paid, so more often than not we did what they asked, but the free customers would just get routed to a sales rep because free customers are even dumber and more entitled than the paying ones.

This whole situation is farcicle to me. Yet another free customer blew a minor issue out of proportion and had to apologize when it turned out the system hadn't failed him, he was just a free loading mooch all along.