[atoav]

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

[hkon]

If you are helping, why would they be assholes?

[atoav]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[atoav]

Easily adressible by law. In the EU canceling must be possible by at least the same means as signing up, so if you can sign up via click, you need to be able to cancel via click.

[tough]

Seems to me the problem here is how the company mistreats their employees and customers yea

America's paid by superPAC donor's laws seem to permit this, sadly

[hkon]

Having lived it seems to me that nice people never get anything.

[ryoshu]

Depends. Started in CS and I would go out of my way to help nice people. Assholes were dealt with nicely but I’d follow the rules to the T. That was before CS was hamstrung.