[dougmccune]

> It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America that's making everyone assume the worst when interacting with people they don't know...

My take on this is that most US firms have outsourced first tier tech support to non-native English speakers who have fairly useless scripts they have to run through. You're dealing with a human (sometimes), but it's about the equivalent of dealing with a robot. It's hard to remember to have empathy when whatever you say is met with a standard, often nonsensical readout of the next thing in their script. So I think we've trained people to expect a horrible first tier experience.

That said, I've done a lot of B2B enterprise software support and have found exactly the same thing as you. Initial emails or calls will come in and the tone is aggressive and impatient. I think this stems from the assumption that the response will be useless (until maybe it gets escalated 3 times to someone actually useful). But when you respond as a capable human who legitimately is trying to help them out (and not just pass them on to someone else), suddenly the tone totally changes and you have wonderful interactions. People are incredibly appreciative. Nobody is used to a support person actually solving their problem. Hell, they're not even used to someone replying to them at all most of the time. The bar is on the floor. So when you exceed that bar and actually help someone quickly and efficiently, they turn into super fans.

[strbean]

> It's hard to remember to have empathy when whatever you say is met with a standard, often nonsensical readout of the next thing in their script.

Personally, I have greater empathy for people in those roles. Working support must suck, but being first line support in a call center truly sounds like hell. I'm usually pretty good about not letting my frustration with the company/product/support process spill over and cause me to mistreat ground-level workers.

Maybe there is a cultural/linguistic phenomenon at play here, where Western/English-speaking cultures rely more heavily on synecdoche, so we just view the support person purely as an extension of the company/product causing us problems?

[Trasmatta]

> Working support must suck, but being first line support in a call center truly sounds like hell

I've worked support, it truly is hell. I reserve most of my empathy for the front line support staff. When things are shit, it's almost never the first line support staff's fault, so it's not fair to take my frustrations out on them.

[touisteur]

I worked as 'the software guy' on a big customer infra project where I'd be 1/4th of my time on customer sites reproducing problems, narrowing their cause, asking users to show me how they broke it, testing exhaustively and exhaustingly new releases or quickfixes w/ specific complaining person at customers' site, writing detailed descriptions of new versions, relentlessly opening tickets as a customer advocate but also triaging my time and tickets. The rest of my time would be fixing some, pushing colleagues to fix others, documenting, reproducing, proposing changes to avoid whole classes of problems... And implementing features (either asked by customer and I had time, or new feature idea that we'd fit in customer's budget twice - once as a prototype/PoC and once as a qualified feature).

It was one of the best experiences in my life and 'software' in that system was quite the gamut. I loved over anything being the voice of the customer, bringing back some reality in an org that can be quite bureaucratic, myopic to real needs and forgetful of problems.

It also was the time I spent the most political capital and when I discovered I was appreciated but to a point and that you can be right and lose, and that some people feel the customer is 'the other team' and you play 'for them'. Quite eye opening about what happens when words (customer obsession) meet KPIs or actual incentives...

[salawat]

Welcome to office politics. Where the metrics are what matter, and getting done what you set out to do takes the back seat.

[jodrellblank]

I think companies deliberately and abusively do this, use front line support staff as human shields from their customers. This isolates the people inside from the consequences of their decisions and the front line will take the brunt of it.

[salawat]

Interestingly, I've chased down an issue before where a company was pulling back from realizing it's primary goal... Because it resulted in too many angry support calls from people who didn't understand the problem space fully.

Bit of an eye opener that.

[jfrunyon]

I've worked support, it truly isn't hell*. Show the user that you care about their issue and can help them resolve it; project confidence; empathize. That's all you have to do. Unfortunately, none of that is possible with a language and culture barrier in the way, not to mention a script or KPI's full of useless information you have to collect.

* Also unfortunately, most companies' hiring mentality for support is "warm butts in seats", and to top it off, oftentimes they prohibit their support from providing any kind of resolution to various genuine issues. In which case it definitely is hell, and the fact that people continue in these positions rather than jumping ship at the first opportunity only enables these businesses.

[Trasmatta]

> Show the user that you care about their issue and can help them resolve it; project confidence; empathize

I did all of this, was good at my job, and there wasn't a language or cultural barrier. It was still hell.

[hnzix]

It also depends if you're supporting org users or The General Public. Org user support can be quite rewarding. Dealing with the unwashed masses however...

[dheera]

I think also the process to get support is part of what causes the loss of patience.

For example being forced to listen to a 2-minute recording, then they ask you to punch in your account number, so you do that, and then the first thing the representative asks you is for your account number. Like WTF I just entered it, it should be popping up on your screen. And then they try transfer you to someone, and then that goes to a voicemail, so you hang up and then try the whole thing again 5 more times.

[void_mint]

> I think also the process to get support is part of what causes the loss of patience.

This exactly. In my city, Comcast's phone support is nothing more than "Did you restart your modem? We'll send out a tech", which can take days.

[el_dev_hell]

> Working support must suck, but being first line support in a call center truly sounds like hell

I spent my first 3 years in tech working in phone support (a few different Australia companies). I was young and dumb and thought any tech job would be awesome (tech was my passion/love, after all).

It was absolute hell.

I've been journaling several times per week for my entire adult life. Re-reading the entries during that 3 year period is depressing. My feelings towards other humans was truly distorted (I saw strangers as awful even outside of work). I spent every afternoon in a daze of depression and anger.

In my experience, companies treat support staff pretty poorly as well. And the pay sucks.

The mental toll of handling constant abuse from 8-6 every day was insane in retrospect.

After spending a few years as a dev, I wish I could teleport back to my first week in support and punch myself in the jaw. Working at a grocery store and applying for dev jobs would have been a much better strategy.

[joebob42]

I feel bad for them, and I try to be nice because it's really $COMPANY_NAME I'm mad at, but they're so completely useless and you have to talk to them anyways. It's hard sometimes with the person actively wasting your time, even if it isn't really their fault per se.

I think there's also a bit of a perverse incentive: making it clear that I'm mad / fed up / about to blow my top tends to get me escalated faster.

I've ultimately settled on being pretty clearly angry, without yelling or cursing or blaming them or anything, which is the best compromise I've found between not being too much of a dick, and not having to listen to their entire useless script.

[lc9er]

> I have greater empathy for people in those roles. Working support must suck, but being first line support in a call center truly sounds like hell.

Same here. The company has put them in a no win situation. However, it also leaves me pissed off as a consumer, as the experience seems designed to make you frustrated and give up.

[MonkeyClub]

> My take on this is that most US firms have outsourced first tier tech support to non-native English speakers who have fairly useless scripts they have to run through. You're dealing with a human (sometimes), but it's about the equivalent of dealing with a robot.

Tier 1 is of course script-based, it's simply an efficient approach to troubleshooting without forgetting any angles.

The issue is when the tier 1 agent is on three or four support chats at once, or when they have KPIs for average email/chat/call handling time, going over which docks their pay.

Multiple concurrent interactions are particularly bad, and there's little opportunity to do anything more than just go through rote script steps, and resolve or escalate quickly before moving to the next one. The end result usually is that the customer gets subpar support without any actual human dimension, and the agent somes to preemptively hate the customer.

[thrower123]

Yes. Battery-cage poultry farms are about as humane as most outsourced call centers. It's not uncommon to have support desks trying to deal with 500+ requests a day with just a single handful of agents. The agents have KPIs, the outsourcing company that they work for has brutal and rigorously enforced contractual SLAs to the first-party company that they are providing service to.

It's a very dark and depressing sector to build software for.

[christophergs]

Very true. This is one of the amazing things about Stripe support. They are the only large company where the first person you talk to actually has a clue

[ollien]

One thing I've been impressed by is that Chewy has no phone tree. It's direct dial to a human who actually can help with most issues. Apparently their reps commonly get mistaken for phone trees out of instinct.

[abuehrle]

Interesting. I've had the opposite experience. Stripe is my favorite company, and I look to them constantly as inspiration for how to do things in my business, but their support is comically bad -- wrong, clueless, and, in some cases, actively misleading.

The developer chat room is awesome and helpful. Maybe that's what you're talking about?

[azalemeth]

> The bar is on the floor. So when you exceed that bar and actually help someone quickly and efficiently, they turn into super fans.

I had this exact experience from the other side with Seagate the other day -- completely unexpected and out of the blue. I'd had a few drives on a raid fail. I spoke via a chat app with a support agent who listened to me, understood my zfs configuration and accepted the "smart status: failing now" as grounds to RMA.

When I then was late actually doing so (because I was an in-patient in hospital and a colleague replaced the drive), they gave me a prepaid ups label as a get well soon card. I note that their competitors are doing things like calling different drives "WD red" and "WD blue", with very different drives inside and reaching to the bottom.

Net result? The next 40 TiB raid will probably have iron wolf drives in it. I didn't expect to come away from an interaction like that with a vague feeling of brand loyalty, but actually by not fucking it up and letting me speak to someone who knew what zfs and smartctl was as first-line support I found myself massively impressed by it, quite unexpectedly so. Business that are xkcd/509 compliant deserve more.

[a9h74j]

I've made a note of this. I'm sure I am not the only one.

[jedimastert]

> My take on this is that most US firms have outsourced first tier tech support to non-native English speakers who have fairly useless scripts they have to run through.

I would believe this, but I have first hand experience working front and back in a Harbor Freight. I'm sure the percentage is lower, but the amount of people who are perfectly willing you be absolutely god awful to you in person to your face is ASTOUNDING. Not to mention it was a discount tool store, so GOD HELP YOU if you were a woman.

[treeman79]

People forget they are dealing with a human being even in person.

Having worked retail you ARE the company. Not a person. Someone doesn’t like the company, it’s okay for them to treat you like dirt.

Obviously not everyone, or even a majority. But bright that I’m glad to stay away from it.

I’ve also seen Vice Presidents at companies train managers to scream at vendors. It’s just part of doing business for them.

[salawat]

Sometimes, vendors need a scathing word or two. If I'm paying an astronomical amount for your service, I do not expect to have to pull down your dev tools, and fix things for you.

That was a rough year, admittedly. Never raised my voice, but made it abundantly clear it was not Quality.

[jv22222]

> So when you exceed that bar and actually help someone quickly and efficiently, they turn into super fans.

Agreed, it's a great way to win customers for life.