[betocmn]

I grew up in Brazil, where customer service was bad-to-terrible in 90% of the companies I had to deal with.

When I moved to Australia, I thought it would be a lot better. It wasn't much different.

When I joined a wine subscription startup in 2016 as the technical co-founder, I wasn't just building the recommendation engine. I was also helping to pack the boxes at the warehouse.

We all got fascinated with Tony's book "Delivering Happiness" [1]. As I packed boxes, I listened to the audiobook several times. Then I read it later on again.

I'm still surprised how bad customer service is in most companies. Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now.

A few years later and our customers are obsessed not just about the wine we recommend. They also write love letters about how happy they are to deal with our customer service team. I'm still writing code on the other side, but it makes my day to see that part of the business working so well.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6828896-delivering-happi...

[tjr225]

> Don't talk to me like a robot. Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues knowing that you will have higher LTV in the long term if you invest the time and resources to make me happy now.

This is an easy thing to say as a customer or a customer success oriented person.

I am leaving a support role just now. I am actually taking a pay cut to do so. Almost all of my customers speak to me in a rude tone.

I have no incentive to pretend to have an interest in their issues. I don’t think the issue is with customer support, but general attitudes among IT professionals.

On top of this, customer success is treated as a second class to engineering even if our problems are harder and more stressful. Imagine finding a bug and being blamed for the bug not being fixed while at the same time engineering is mad at you for wanting it fixed. Gross.

Anyway- support; never again.

[deepGem]

I work closely with support teams and it's one of the toughest jobs in tech. I say toughest because it is stressful and the payoff for that stress isn't that high.

I still don't understand why companies treat support as a second class function to engineering. Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way. I also find that support teams operate mostly on linear growth, meaning it is still a human scale problem. I don't see technology in the IVR/ticketing space innovating at the same rate as other areas.

IMO, the best alleviation for support is to avoid that customer call in the first place. Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call. It's a super hard problem to solve.

Needs something like StackOverflow for every problem domain, delivered over voice.

[pbourke]

> Incentivize customers not to pick up the phone and call

How companies should do this: provide self-serve options for most things. Make the status of a long-running transaction transparent. Fix issues that cause people to call in the first place.

How companies actually do this:

IVR>You can find self service options on our

Customer> 0

IVR> .. site to check your ...

Customer> 0

IVR> ... transfer funds and ...

Customer> 000000...

[deepGem]

Precisely. I get that a large portion of the population just wants to pick up the phone and call but that can be totally avoided with so many messaging outlets today.

On the one extreme you can offer voice based support - Just blurt out your question to the phone, system does speech -> text and answers your question. Super super hard.

Interim at least you can offer support on Whatsapp/Facebook where someone can actually ask a question and get answered - a much better version of the chat bots that exist today.

[selykg]

> Engineering should in fact clamor to support to better understand customer issues and get them fixed and out of the way.

The fundamental problem is coders want to code. At least in my experience. Many are poor to terrible at talking to customers and have little desire to learn. If it isn't related to code they don't care. It's someone else's problem.

A few developers, the good ones I've worked with, know how to talk to customers and how to talk to support team members to help them.

I work in a support role now and I have worked in a development role in the past. I know both sides of it fairly well.

Finding good developers isn't trivial, but finding good developers that can communicate and work as a team, that's really hard.

[deepGem]

Agreed, I don't imply that developers should talk to customers but they should at least work with support team in a more cohesive manner.

I have seen the flip side also where the developers are very accessible, support pushes every minor issue over to engineering. This is like super rare though.

[michaelhoffman]

Microsoft at least used to send engineers over to answer support phone calls occasionally and it provided a level of insight into users they wouldn't get otherwise.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030816-00/?p=42...

Even Bill Gates did this:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091123-00/?p=15...

[piokoch]

Very true, there is a very good blog post by Joel Spolsky on that: a good support person will spot recurring technical and report that to devs. Some offshore "consultant" support or badly paid "call center person" does not give a crap about product quality; more, such support has no incentives to provide any meaningful feedback, as the more support incidents gets reported, the more money they earn.

[flatline]

I was in a role to take customer calls for years, and did straight up support for a while early in my career. I found that if I took a genuine interest in their problems, and an interest in the individual, it turned a lot of bad attitudes around. Someone calls and is angry, frustrated with the thing we’ve made, it was my job to help them, not just fix the issue but feel happy with the product, too. That being said, there’s no helping some people, and some products may be too bad to rightfully support.

[eecc]

Ah true. Last thing I did before leaving a support role - in a company that regretted hiring support people in EU and was actively driving us out of the door - was indeed this.

This customer had become aware of the MTTR metric driven bouncing around with his tickets and was playing cat-mouse.

I got this lost-cause chore as a good-bye (sarcasm) gift and it took me 1h to study the problem (at that stage, a PIP offense) identify the issue and report the bug, respond to the customer with a well-written apology, confirming that they were correct and a bug tracker id to follow.

Customer was very pleased they were finally escalated to the adult in the room ;)

[danmaz74]

Care to elaborate on why regretting customer service in the EU?

[eecc]

Salary. It’s much cheaper to outsource a “cost center” to a country where employees have passable proficiency in English and costs of living that are significantly lower...

[CarbyAu]

For me the biggest issue was authority/power on the Service Desk.

The worse cases are when the Customer Rep gets a problem from a customer they have little power to resolve. When you are:

- logging tickets to a black hole of "higher tier" support with no communication back to you.

- "chasing them up for the customer" aka by putting notes in a ticket

...you feel powerless.

Then when the next call comes in from the customer you begin to think "Why am I even here. I can't do anything..."

Customer Support need to see their efforts make a difference, just like most people, in order to be motivated to do it again.

[Gracana]

As a customer, it's a painful experience when you realize the support people are in this position. I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful. At a certain point (around the third three hour phone call, in my experience) it feels like they're mocking you with their saccharine lies, and I begin to loathe the company they represent.

I suppose if I was an entrepreneurial type, I'd try to disrupt industries like that by creating a company that charges extra to provide service that doesn't make customers want to spit in your face. Surely there's a market for that...

[dfxm12]

I can't be mad at them, they're friendly and personable and they at least pretend to want to help, but it's obvious that they're unable to do anything useful.

I wonder if companies are relying on your empathy. They want you to realize this and just close tickets before they're resolved. Like the service desk's primary directive is to get customers off their employer's backs. If they happen to fix an issue along the way, that's a nice bonus.

For example, I've had to call Amazon 4 times recently over the same issue. I've been lied to each time that they fixed it. I was promised evidence that I was never given. I really don't know what to do about this...

[SeerKlein]

I think you're on to something. I've been working for as a contractor for a big health insurance company and that seems to be the impression for the purpose of my job: "Get the customer off the phone as soon as you can."

In more polite terms, "Try to escalate the ticket by 15 minutes if you haven't resolved the issue."

[croh]

Agree with you. Apart from rude customers, sometimes you face below problems (mostly process/org related)

- limited decision power. Many times even though you genuinely want to help customor you can't because of it.

- have to cover up others' lies like sales people etc

But still, I would recommend having support experience (atleast a month)to developers. It will change your attitude to solve problem. What really matters to customer is not fancy tech-stack or shiny interface but working service.

[SeerKlein]

Amen, I work in IT support and when I try to provide good customer service that is empathetic and customer-centric, which takes time, I get seen as worse than other agents who get the customer off the phone as soon as possible. After a while, I changed to be more "results-oriented", which does not help for customer focus.

[nkohari]

> even if our problems are harder and more stressful.

I suspect that you're going to catch some grief for this statement. :)

[ascendantlogic]

Any engineer that takes issue with that statement has never spent a day dealing with rude, angry customers and has no accurate frame of reference to draw up a response.

[user5994461]

I remember some time in support, most customers weren't rude. It's boring calls to register on the service, moving out to a new address, or confirming identity.

[wink]

If telephone support is the final option after email doesn't work, I feel entitled to be angry. That doesn't mean I have to be rude, but I let the call center person now that I am fucking angry if I wrote 2 emails/support tickets already and they haven't solved the problem.

[noisy_boy]

I have been in dev, qa and support roles. When I write code today, I always keep in mind what steps I can take to help folks in support troubleshoot any issues with it. Having clear and informative logs, comments including wiki links for more details etc. I have a lot of empathy for support now. Once you have to baby sit an error-prone daily batch or deal with issues from users who think you aren't much use - things that basically screw up your day - you never forget.

[tjr225]

Yes, probably. I empathize with our engineers. I just wish someone would empathize with me :)

[quelltext]

Having experience in both roles (and some more, all on the technical end), I don't think so. Of course, it's not a simple harder/easier question and it doesn't apply to everyone but if you are good at supporting customers you naturally care about stuff and the customer's issues. You file an internal ticket, have to keep watching it but in many cases there's just no progress or even a response. Ultimately when there's a real bug you are just being an (internal) customer requiring support. The support quality of a company is not only determined by the right customer support employees or vendors but how good the internal support and escalation paths are.

As an internal engineer, when an internal ticket comes in I'm going to track down the issue, may realize it's a known thing that requires a lot of planning to resolve, loop in my manager, etc. but ultimately it usually ends with "we don't have time to address this right now and it doesn't affect enough users". If you're lucky there's a workaround that can be shared.

Now, I don't like that. I'd rather fix the issue for the user but I already have committed deadlines and team goals and it's rather easy to just go with a "sorry, we may revisit in Q1 or Q2 next year".

The support agent still has to a) deal with the customer's anger and b) cannot be honest with them, i.e. needs to wrap the situation in a blanket of corporate speak so as not to shed a bad light on internal teams / the company. At the end of the day they are just powerless and have to take on the responsibility in front of the user, whereas the engineer may feel unsatisfied not being allowed to spend time on it, but ultimately is far enough removed from the user to be actually affected by the situation. Granted, personally I always try my best to get a fix out but a lot of engineers would rather work on their projects and the managers want that too.

FWIW, when I did customer support I always reminded myself that nothing is personal. When I'm at the opposite end (a customer) I also don't get mad at the individual I'm dealing with unless they are not trying to understand or help at all.

[InfiniteRand]

I work in a senior support role and I am constantly telling my juniors not to take things personally.

Funny thing is I used to take things personally and it did occasionally lead to me going the extra mile to save the situation, but it is just so emotionally exhausting, to the point where I do not think it is humanly possible to maintain that level of service (I suppose some one might be able to, but I have not met anyone like that).

A part of me misses that do-or-die personal commitment to the customer, but for the most part I enjoy not going insane

[zem]

as an engineer, i typically face complaints i have the power to fix. it would be a lot more stressful to spend all day fielding complaints i had no power to fix.

[danielheath]

Not from anyone who has done both jobs, I suspect.

[vandahm]

I used to be a software engineer at a nonprofit that handled a lot of customer care requests. I wanted to see what frustrated our users, and I also wanted insight into how we could better support the customer care team. So I talked to the volunteer coordinator, took a day of PTO, and worked a shift in customer care. (Because I did it as volunteer work on PTO, my boss and project manager couldn't tell me not to do it.)

Reader, working in customer care blows. It sucks hardcore. From my engineering work, I actually knew what the cause of the problems were and understood the timeline for fixing them -- information that real customer care reps rarely have available to them, but even that wasn't enough to appease some people. Even when people weren't rude, just the never-ending barrage of complaints and problems that I had to fix wore me down. And I only worked one shift, and then went back to engineering the next day.

People who can do this day after day, retain their composure, and somehow not burn out from the nature of the work are awesome, and they have my respect. Their jobs are absolutely more difficult than mine.

[steve_adams_86]

I really believe customer service this effective is worth its weight in gold.

I worked on a SaaS product that was essentially a booking engine. Vacations, rentals, tours, b&bs; etc. Their product was complete shit and it was so stressful to work on. Nearly a decade of terrible choices and the wrong technologies stacked up like a card house.

The only thing that kept the customers there was the insanely talented and competent customer service. They knew the app inside and out and were able to smooth out the insane number of rough edges for new and old customers alike. When gifts were sent to the company, they were typically sent to customer service.

Everyone in CS was paid terribly. It really bothered me. The software team was doing a Bad Job and getting paid well for it, and CS was really saving everyone’s asses. Since then I look at the customer support team a lot differently.

[all_blue_chucks]

How do you measure your customer support staff performance? Many companies fire employees for having "low numbers" but since they can't measure tone, they end up driving their reps to optimize for other factors.

[lozaning]

When I used to work support in global escalations for a big multinational, my manager, nor his, ever knew what to do with me.

I maintained a 100% flawless NPS/satisfaction survey rating the entire time, but my mean call time was also nearly triple that of everyone else.

I helped far fewer people, but the ones that I did help I frequently ended up actually educating, resulting in nearly no repeat calls.

Management could never come up with a purely zendesk based overall performance metric I wasn't near the bottom of. I never much cared because at least weekly a customer that I helped would try to convince me to quit and come work for them as a private consultant, making it incredibly hard for my manager to convince me I should change anything at all about what I was doing.

I left after 3 years and shortly after the whole thing got outsourced to an Alorica call center. So I guess management did figure it out, they'd rather have 4 people who's only qualification is the ability to fog a mirror, giving out near worthless support very quickly, than pay for 1 person like me.

[user5994461]

I'm curious how come you didn't move to a customer if customers were offering to hire you every week?

[xemdetia]

Having been in a similar position usually being on the 'inside' with access to code/tools/etc was more interesting than being some consultant who didn't have sufficient access and was saddled with the job responsibility of actually using the product for it's intended goal in an ordinary business setting. Playing troubleshooter for the real hard problems that nobody expected or thought about and delivering a solution in one in a hundred calls can be more rewarding than just turning the crank on a business system.

[jrowley]

Some companies actively solicit feedback after interactions with customer support, about the interaction. Those surveys link back directly to the agent. More generally there's also NPS.

[foxdev]

I always give those the maximum number of stars/smiles/whatever and put the interaction in the best possible light no matter what. I always assume problems at the front line start somewhere further back.

[vandahm]

I do the same. The people I blame for bad service are always outside my reach.

[SeerKlein]

This is what irked and continues to irk me about working in a customer support position. When I was going above and beyond for customers, customers would go out of their way to let my boss and others know that I was their hero. However, what did that get me? A shallow, perfunctory reply that "the [redacted] department was lucky to have me" and to keep doing great work! When I'd meet with my boss or get feedback, they'd basically shit on my numbers.

As a consequence, I eventually gave in and decided to improve my numbers to see how "well" i could do. I was able to cut down my times to about a third of a normal agent, but that also resulted in me being more robotic and much less of a human to the customers.

[Dramatize]

Also in Australia. That's exactly the same strategy I used growing the initial version of 99 Bikes ecommerce store. CDBaby was also a big influence.

[SyneRyder]

+1 for the CD Baby reference. Derek's book Anything You Want is maybe my all-time favorite business book. I still remind myself to "Treat every customer like Mick Jagger" when replying to customer emails.

[jacquesm]

That site looks great.

[cafard]

In his In Love with Daylight: A Memoir of Recovery, Wilfrid Sheed wrote that a guaranteed route to success for any company would be to put its intelligent people on the phones and hide the morons in management where they can do only limited damage. I wish I could remember the context.

[saagarjha]

I thought the morons were already in management. That’s why they don’t invest in customer support, right?

[backtoyoujim]

Compensation goes a long way to making customer service agents care. So does equity.

[mjayhn]

Yeah my one call center experience involved cameras over everyones desk and the cruelest management team I've ever experienced that watched you like a hawk.

[gowld]

> Just pretend you're messaging a co-worker in plain-friendly-English. And be genuinely interested in solving my issues

This is what caused service reps to waste everyone's time with elaborate fake displays of empathy and forced unwanted small talk. I'd prefer an efficient robot.

[untog]

Everyone is different. What you’d prefer is not what others would prefer. Hopefully a customer service agent is going to be able to pick up on someone who dislikes small talk and just get the job done.

[danielheath]

If I’m calling CS for a problem a robot could fix, engineering have really screwed up.