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I offer phone support for a niche accounting app (https://quailhq.com https://quailhq.com), and everything in this article rings 112% true to me -- but especial

by Doches 5y ago

I offer phone support for a niche accounting app (https://quailhq.com https://quailhq.com), and everything in this article rings 112% true to me -- but especially this: > ...all sorts of people call you, and I’ve really learned a lot by talking with users directly on the phone. Sometimes users call me because they want to report a bug, or they've forgotten their email address. Sometimes they want business advice (!), or they have a niche feature they want to request. > This may be a virtue of the Japanese, but, basically, everyone who calls is civil and polite. Hahahaha. Haha. Hah. Ahem. The biggest surprise to me when I started offering support (first email, and then later by phone) is how _aggressive_ people can be. My app has two classes of users -- one free, one paid -- and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. "YOUR SHITS BROKE FIX ASAP" is my favorite password reset request, etc. All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have something to do with it. Happily, once you break through that aggressive exterior and people realize you're just a person trying to help them out they almost invariably do a 180 and become helpful and polite, and we get whatever it was straightened out together. 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...

BoxOfRain 5y ago
>All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have something to do with it. I worked in a call centre for a summer in southern England dealing with deliveries for a high-end retailer, and I can say with 100% conviction the stereotype foreigners have of the reserved, mild upper-middle class English person has no basis in reality when you're a mere peasant on the phone to them! Some of the rudest, pettiest, most completely unnecessary conversations I've ever had happened that summer, their complete lack of perspective really made me rethink how I saw the world.
vmception 5y ago
There are basically no consequences when you are in a position to pay for something. You are either subsidized by a benefactor, have something else figured out (employment, recurring revenue), or are on a corporate account. Whereas the people that need things for free are overleveraged to the hilt where everything is indeed consequential.
- Doches 5y ago
  While I'm not disagreeing with you, that's not really the case here. If anything, my free users tend to be retired hobbyists while my paying users are running local, in-person retail businesses on usually razor-thin margins. They're not subsidized or entitled; they're working their asses off and barely making things work (which I can confirm, since they run their business on my software). And "overleveraged to the hilt" implies that they have access to finance, which is certainly not universally the case. I'm working on a Stripe Treasury integration, which for a fair few of my users will be their first dedicated bank account for their businesses.
shkkmo 5y ago
> 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... I think part of the direct issue with support is that people are very used to dealing with extremely poor support from a wide range of large companies and are primed for having their issues dismissed or being forced through largely irrelevant support scripts. That's why as soon as they realize that isn't what is happening, their attitude suddenly gets a lot better.
- reidjs 5y ago
  Many companies unintentionally incentivize that behavior because the more angry you sound the more likely you are to get bumped to a higher tier support agent.
  - HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
    It's the culture of "the customer is always right" and "the squealy wheel gets the grease". When acting entitled gets things done, and when management rewards that behavior from customers instead of shutting it down, it's not surprising that more people start doing it. I think this is a pretty pervasive attitude in our individualistic, quasi-meritocratic American society: we expect things to work right, we get frustrated when they don't, and we get doubly frustrated when the support line doesn't seem to be working either. Then, often, we seek compensation instead of being grateful.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
dougmccune 5y ago
> 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.
- MonkeyClub 5y ago
  > 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.
  - 5y ago
technological 5y ago
While working as L2/L3 support for a enterprise product, i notice that people were not that mean/angry as they sound in the email (Maybe it was a wrong interpretation of mine) when you actually call them. Even though calling customer sounds like lot of time waste but many issues were resolved quickly over the phone rather than email/ticketing system. I really enjoyed talking with various customers and understand their use case and usually used to go beyond and above to help them.
- dougmccune 5y ago
  Yes! This was a huge lesson I learned as well. You can spend days going back and forth over email with a customer trying to figure out wtf they're doing. They get irritated that you're not getting it, you get irritated that they're not explaining things right. All can be solved with a quick phone call or screen sharing. But younger folks new to support are often really hesitant to pick up the phone. Just pick up the phone!
  - Doches 5y ago
    I started doing this ("picking up the phone") and you are 100% right in that in can work absolute wonders. Folks who have grown increasingly frustrated at a back-and-forth email exchange are just insanely delighted when I skip forward several rounds of mutual frustration and just unexpectedly call them. "Hello, is this Marc? This is Trevor from Quail; email was taking too long, let's just figure this thing out together." is my go-to phrase, and I've lost count of how many customers I've converted from almost-churned into the best possible evangelists through the simple mantra of "just pick up the phone!" Absolutely solid advice.
- _benj 5y ago
  This was my experience too. I worked for a while in tech support for my university and while from time to time we'd get frustrated calls from professors that couldn't upload their grades or where frustrated by how things looked different, it was super satisfying finding ways to help solve their problems. It was kind of an unique situation because I was also a developer of the system that I was giving support for thus I really had inside knowledge and when things "looked different" I could tell them way they looked different and how it could benefit them in the new way they looked. I don't remember a single case in which after explaining the way people actually preferred the "old look". I see that time as a highlight in my professional experience (should emphasize on my resume now that I think about it!)
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
Here's an unfortunate lesson learned from a company that was in the untenable position of providing phone/tech support for debt collection software: the only way to get the people calling in to be less hostile was to include a clause in the contract that stipulated their license could be revoked if they repeatedly abused the support engineers.
spaetzleesser 5y ago
"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..." The US is a low trust society. You can feel it in all aspects of life. Companies are very controlling and feel the need to constantly monitor their employees, people assume the worst from strangers and are afraid to go to places they don't know. I myself am getting more and more worried when I talk to a doctor because I have seen it now several times how people got screwed over by doctors, hospitals and health insurance.
- hpkuarg 5y ago
  > The US is a low trust society. Not at all. Almost every commercial transaction at the retail level allows you to use a method of payment that does not guarantee that the seller will actually receive that money (credit cards). You order food for pickup, and the great majority of restaurants will let you walk in and pick a bag off an unattended table without any attempt to verify that you did in fact order what you're taking; and anecdotally, I've never had my order be taken by somebody else, accidentally or otherwise. The US is a high trust society.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
    >Almost every commercial transaction at the retail level allows you to use a method of payment that does not guarantee that the seller will actually receive that money (credit cards). That's not how credit cards work. At all. >You order food for pickup, and the great majority of restaurants will let you walk in and pick a bag off an unattended table without any attempt to verify that you did in fact order what you're taking I have literally never seen this once in my life. Where do you live where the "great majority" of restaurants operate this way?
    - samizdette 5y ago
      Chipotle and Starbucks do it with online orders. However, they do that because they are big enough corporations to replace anything wrongly taken for free.
munificent 5y ago
> It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America Everyone can fill in their pet theory here, but mine is that so much of being American these days is disempowering. Corporations have so much power that not only do they not care about us, but we can't even avoid using them. Get sick? Good luck fighting your giant health insurance provider or hospital conglomeration. Looking for an entry-level job? Navigate a Kafka-esque application system only to (if you're lucky) work for a miserable low-level manager who also has no power and transfers that anger onto you. Want to spend time with friends? Their preferred communication medium is now one of a couple of huge social media companies with horrific privacy policies and a history of emotionally damaging its users. Want to go to a show? Have fun buying overpriced tickets from one of the two or three ticket monopolies and then pay an exhorbitant, insulting "convenience" fee. So everyday, in many of our basic daily rituals, we are reminded of how little agency we have in our own lives and how much we both depend on and are subject to the whims of billionaires (who, meanwhile, are busy destroying the Earth).
- Tycho 5y ago
  > Get sick? While you wait for your appointment, research your condition using any of the free, high quality medical knowledge bases on the web, and/or connect with a community of other internet users with similar afflictions to get advice/perspective. > Looking for an entry-level job? Learn to code and become an in-demand knowledge worker. In the mean time, perhaps monetize your existing skills and assets by becoming an AirBnB host or Uber driver or delivery driver. > Want to spend time with friends? Use a widely available asynchronous messaging service to organize an outing, perhaps using a money-transfer app so that one person can take care of booking etc. If you can't meet in person, maybe you can have a video conference on one of the various free platforms, or just have an extended group chat with your friends. > Want to go to a show? Browse the web for a vast selection of shows you would never hear about otherwise. Not that these points negate your complaints, but I think you paint an unnecessarily miserable picture. I think that in itself is one of the big cultural problems of America and elsewhere.
  - infogulch 5y ago
    Frustrated trying to just do normal human things because you're blocked by corporations and are powerless against them? Have you tried Just Don't Do That (TM)? Instead of doing what you wanted, try doing something we allow you to do. Powered By Technology Systems (R) will help you maximize what little agency you still have left, namely, to sit in your residence and consume the internet. The real world is no longer hospitable for humans, so just don't do anything!
silisili 5y ago
> and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help I've found the same thing from people. But not in support, just in dealing with them. I move a lot, and inevitably end up giving a lot of things away. What I've found is that when I post offers for things for free, it attracted the absolute worst of people. People who would claim it and never show up, or claim it and tell me they could come get it in two weeks. And -tons- of people who say they'll take it and ask when I can deliver it. Then get offended when I tell them I'm not delivering it. I still remember vividly a dresser I was offering for free. A person said they'll take it, and asked when I could bring it over. When I told them no, they replied in all caps something along the lines of 'I HAVE A COROLLA HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO FIT IT IN THERE', like I was the dumb one. So now I just list everything for a pretty low price, then just tell them it's free when they arrive. It cut down on the amount of riffraff by about 90%.
- lowercased 5y ago
  Good idea. I gave away a large copy machine - industrial strength, large size - the kind where you can feed it in 400 pages and it will do loads of double sided copies and staple things in minutes. Nice, but it was old, and I had no need any longer. Put it on facebook market and had probably 40 messages in the first 2 minutes. I hadn't realized how easy/automated FB makes it to respond. And I felt like I was letting people down because I wasn't responding fast enough. Eventually one person came to my place to get it, but... they thought it was a printer, and they were looking for a printer, so they left. I kept getting loads of the same "still available?" messages, then "when can you deliver?" and "you want me to come pick it up?!" messages. Like... it's a $1500 (used today) copier. It was probably $7000 new. It has extensions to hold 10000 sheets at a time. It's serious. No, I'm not driving to your house with this this to see if you might want it. WTF is wrong with people? Many days later, someone connected. And... it was great, but I was so wary/tired of dealing with freeloaders and tirekickers that I was suspect with him too at first. But this guy ran a boys club a few towns away, and their last copier had broken, and they didn't have funds to repair it. This was such a windfall for them. He happily came over with a big enough truck, loaded it up, kept offering to pay me ("are you sure? this is a lot!") and was just so damn grateful that I hadn't given it away yet. I'm glad I waited a bit longer vs just paying a company to come and take it away.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
>and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. I've seen that whilst contracting and with software sales. I've come to the conclusion the bottom 10% of any market is a cesspit and I don't want any part of that either as a buyer or seller. I have a suspicion the top end is the same although I've had little experience of that.
xyzzy21 5y ago
The UNIVERSAL truth of sales (and support): • Give away for free and you WILL be treated like shit • Charge for the same (even a nominal fee) and people will value it This is known by many names: "Tragedy of the Commons", "Economics of Scarcity vs. Plenty", "Reciprocal Value", etc. But it's a UNIVERSAL result so certain you can plan for it to happen and plan to avoid it with complete certainty.
- jiggunjer 5y ago
  I thought tragedy of the commons was where decisions making sense on an individual basis end up being harmful when made en masse.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    It is. The tragedy of the commons is typically about how people not having to pay the full costs of their actions lead to negative results in total. So, for instance (and the naming action), a group of ranchers letting their animals all over-graze the same shared field. The other names also seemed not to describe the underlying question nor to describe each other. Reciprocal value is a way of describing transactions. Economics of Abundance vs. Economics of Scarcity are macroeconomic concepts relating to the money supply.
soneca 5y ago
My theory for that is that companies in the US have a culture of prioritizing support tickets by a product of “outrageousness” and reach. If you sound like your next step is to sue the company, they solve your issue before the ones that sounded understanding and forgiving. Same with reach, if your complaint reach HN front over or get traction on Twitter, it is solved first than those that just sent an email.
- leesalminen 5y ago
  That’s so funny, I did the exact opposite at my company. The nastier you are in ticket the slower we were to respond. Eventually word got out that if you’re polite you can get answers from the CEO. If you’re rude, you go to the back of the line and don’t have a chance of talking with anyone beyond tier 2. It took a couple years for everyone to “get it”, but it mostly works now. We only actually ever got 1 letter from someone’s family attorney (read: the customer’s sibling). We just sent a FU nasty gram back on letterhead from our huge multinational firm signed by a partner and we never heard from them again.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
void_mint 5y ago
> 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... I would probably compare it moreso to just the abysmal state of quality of support, even for expensive or important services. Call your health insurance provider and try to get something changed/fixed in a reasonable fashion and you'll be met with red tape/nonsense/phone tag. I am a person that usually starts out angry on any customer support line, only because of the shenanigans it takes to get someone on the phone in the first place.
mLuby 5y ago
This is the American approach right here: "You have to closing all the time. Be aggressive, learn how to push. And there is no such thing as a no-sale call. Either you sell the client some stock, or he sells you on a reason he can't. Either way, a sale is made. Now be relentless." -Boiler Room https://youtu.be/2frX1E0deb0?t=113 https://youtu.be/2frX1E0deb0?t=113
- Doches 5y ago
  No, this is the Yankee approach! No red-blooded Southerner, raised on cornbread and unflinching politeness, could engage in such relentless pushiness without dying of shame along the way. (alternatively, said red-blooded Southerner might just shoot you out of spite. There are...drawbacks.)
  - mLuby 5y ago
    Good distinction to make.
  - wyager 5y ago
    There's a good reason southerners have a historical reputation for being polite. If you weren't, someone might just challenge you to a duel. I'm not convinced the shift away from that state of affairs was a net social benefit.
    - mLuby 5y ago
      Honor-based cultures come with their own set of problems. > The concept of honour appears to have declined in importance in the modern West; conscience has replaced it in the individual context, and the rule of law (with the rights and duties defined therein) has taken over in a social context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honour
      - wyager 5y ago
        The critical weakness of honor is that it’s vulnerable to defectors, which can emerge and thrive in a society where A) the cost of ostracism is small B) there are groups of people with incompatible cultural bases. Cosmopolitanism is incompatible with honor- or trust-based systems.
nightpool 5y ago
> "the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. "YOUR SHITS BROKE FIX ASAP" is my favorite password reset request" I wonder if part of the issue is that paid users feel more confident in getting their concerns taken seriously, while free users feel (perhaps unconsciously) like they have to exaggerate the problem and shout to be heard? I can see that as a very natural learned behavior for modern users.
- Doches 5y ago
  I hadn't thought of that as "natural learned behavior" but I think you're definitely on to something there. I'm not sure when, but sometime in the last decade I internalized the lesson that the best way to get through an automated phone system is to scream profanities or mash buttons on my phone until I'm redirected to an actual human: a mode of social interaction that I would be _mortified_ to engage in in literally any other situation. But I must have learned to do that because it gets results, or at least gets me to the humans faster. I guess what frustrates me as a human on the other end of that interaction is the assumption that you need to raise exaggerated hell to even reach my notice. I want to help! But folks are conditioned to expect the opposite, I guess.
tdeck 5y ago
It's definitely not limited to the U.S. though. I recently got this email from a new irate user of my side project, trying to use an international card that Square wouldn't accept: > HELP URGENT > TRYING TO ADD A CREDIT CARD BUT YOUR STUPID WEBSITE ARENT ACCEPTING MY CREDIT CARD. They still had 13 days to enter a credit card, so this wasn't exactly "urgent". I think it's that people want to convey how frustrated they are so that you'll prioritize the issue, and it comes across as aggression. What I've learned from being on the other end is that this approach sometimes backfires. I feel a strong urge to put off responding to such rants because it's draining to deal with these customers, while customers who respond positively to help or advice make a sole proprietor want to help them more.
MrGilbert 5y ago
> 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... It's the same in Germany. > Happily, once you break through that aggressive exterior and people realize you're just a person trying to help them out they almost invariably do a 180 and become helpful and polite, and we get whatever it was straightened out together. Yep, indeed. Especially once they realize it's the developer they are writing with, not a support agent. I always have mixed feeling about it, because I don't deserve to be better treated than the frontline workers of our company. So maybe it's a western thing after all?
svachalek 5y ago
The free vs paid thing is so true. Just see app store reviews. No one expects so much as someone who didn't and won't pay a thing for what they are demanding. It's a whole different mindset.
cloudwizard 5y ago
Part of the problem is that many American companies deliberately give you the run around to stop you from cancelling service. Spaces, a Regus company, is the worst. You have to submit your issues to accounting in TX but they won't talk to you. You talk to Support which can't actually help you. They threatened to call the Police when I complained in person. It took months but I caught them in a lie and threatened charges. A full refund immediately.
bcrosby95 5y ago
> 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... Note that it isn't new. My wife worked customer support for an online website from 2002 to 2007. Her experiences were the same as yours.
mbarbar 5y ago
I'm wondering, how do you ensure the people who have called you have indeed paid for phone support? Do you just assume callers have since the support number is not published anywhere? Or do you ask for a username/account number or something like that? I've never used phone support for something that isn't targeted to all-consumers-but-none-in-particular.

by Doches 5y ago

BoxOfRain 5y ago

>All of my users are American (or Australian), which might have something to do with it. I worked in a call centre for a summer in southern England dealing with deliveries for a high-end retailer, and I can say with 100% conviction the stereotype foreigners have of the reserved, mild upper-middle class English person has no basis in reality when you're a mere peasant on the phone to them! Some of the rudest, pettiest, most completely unnecessary conversations I've ever had happened that summer, their complete lack of perspective really made me rethink how I saw the world.

vmception 5y ago

There are basically no consequences when you are in a position to pay for something. You are either subsidized by a benefactor, have something else figured out (employment, recurring revenue), or are on a corporate account. Whereas the people that need things for free are overleveraged to the hilt where everything is indeed consequential.

Doches 5y ago
While I'm not disagreeing with you, that's not really the case here. If anything, my free users tend to be retired hobbyists while my paying users are running local, in-person retail businesses on usually razor-thin margins. They're not subsidized or entitled; they're working their asses off and barely making things work (which I can confirm, since they run their business on my software). And "overleveraged to the hilt" implies that they have access to finance, which is certainly not universally the case. I'm working on a Stripe Treasury integration, which for a fair few of my users will be their first dedicated bank account for their businesses.

shkkmo 5y ago

> 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... I think part of the direct issue with support is that people are very used to dealing with extremely poor support from a wide range of large companies and are primed for having their issues dismissed or being forced through largely irrelevant support scripts. That's why as soon as they realize that isn't what is happening, their attitude suddenly gets a lot better.

reidjs 5y ago
Many companies unintentionally incentivize that behavior because the more angry you sound the more likely you are to get bumped to a higher tier support agent.
- HomeDeLaPot 5y ago
  It's the culture of "the customer is always right" and "the squealy wheel gets the grease". When acting entitled gets things done, and when management rewards that behavior from customers instead of shutting it down, it's not surprising that more people start doing it. I think this is a pretty pervasive attitude in our individualistic, quasi-meritocratic American society: we expect things to work right, we get frustrated when they don't, and we get doubly frustrated when the support line doesn't seem to be working either. Then, often, we seek compensation instead of being grateful.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

dougmccune 5y ago

> 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.

MonkeyClub 5y ago
> 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.
- 5y ago

technological 5y ago

While working as L2/L3 support for a enterprise product, i notice that people were not that mean/angry as they sound in the email (Maybe it was a wrong interpretation of mine) when you actually call them. Even though calling customer sounds like lot of time waste but many issues were resolved quickly over the phone rather than email/ticketing system. I really enjoyed talking with various customers and understand their use case and usually used to go beyond and above to help them.

dougmccune 5y ago
Yes! This was a huge lesson I learned as well. You can spend days going back and forth over email with a customer trying to figure out wtf they're doing. They get irritated that you're not getting it, you get irritated that they're not explaining things right. All can be solved with a quick phone call or screen sharing. But younger folks new to support are often really hesitant to pick up the phone. Just pick up the phone!
- Doches 5y ago
  I started doing this ("picking up the phone") and you are 100% right in that in can work absolute wonders. Folks who have grown increasingly frustrated at a back-and-forth email exchange are just insanely delighted when I skip forward several rounds of mutual frustration and just unexpectedly call them. "Hello, is this Marc? This is Trevor from Quail; email was taking too long, let's just figure this thing out together." is my go-to phrase, and I've lost count of how many customers I've converted from almost-churned into the best possible evangelists through the simple mantra of "just pick up the phone!" Absolutely solid advice.
_benj 5y ago
This was my experience too. I worked for a while in tech support for my university and while from time to time we'd get frustrated calls from professors that couldn't upload their grades or where frustrated by how things looked different, it was super satisfying finding ways to help solve their problems. It was kind of an unique situation because I was also a developer of the system that I was giving support for thus I really had inside knowledge and when things "looked different" I could tell them way they looked different and how it could benefit them in the new way they looked. I don't remember a single case in which after explaining the way people actually preferred the "old look". I see that time as a highlight in my professional experience (should emphasize on my resume now that I think about it!)

AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

Here's an unfortunate lesson learned from a company that was in the untenable position of providing phone/tech support for debt collection software: the only way to get the people calling in to be less hostile was to include a clause in the contract that stipulated their license could be revoked if they repeatedly abused the support engineers.

spaetzleesser 5y ago

"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..." The US is a low trust society. You can feel it in all aspects of life. Companies are very controlling and feel the need to constantly monitor their employees, people assume the worst from strangers and are afraid to go to places they don't know. I myself am getting more and more worried when I talk to a doctor because I have seen it now several times how people got screwed over by doctors, hospitals and health insurance.

hpkuarg 5y ago
> The US is a low trust society. Not at all. Almost every commercial transaction at the retail level allows you to use a method of payment that does not guarantee that the seller will actually receive that money (credit cards). You order food for pickup, and the great majority of restaurants will let you walk in and pick a bag off an unattended table without any attempt to verify that you did in fact order what you're taking; and anecdotally, I've never had my order be taken by somebody else, accidentally or otherwise. The US is a high trust society.
- jaywalk 5y ago
  >Almost every commercial transaction at the retail level allows you to use a method of payment that does not guarantee that the seller will actually receive that money (credit cards). That's not how credit cards work. At all. >You order food for pickup, and the great majority of restaurants will let you walk in and pick a bag off an unattended table without any attempt to verify that you did in fact order what you're taking I have literally never seen this once in my life. Where do you live where the "great majority" of restaurants operate this way?
  - samizdette 5y ago
    Chipotle and Starbucks do it with online orders. However, they do that because they are big enough corporations to replace anything wrongly taken for free.

munificent 5y ago

> It's almost like there's something cultural happening in America Everyone can fill in their pet theory here, but mine is that so much of being American these days is disempowering. Corporations have so much power that not only do they not care about us, but we can't even avoid using them. Get sick? Good luck fighting your giant health insurance provider or hospital conglomeration. Looking for an entry-level job? Navigate a Kafka-esque application system only to (if you're lucky) work for a miserable low-level manager who also has no power and transfers that anger onto you. Want to spend time with friends? Their preferred communication medium is now one of a couple of huge social media companies with horrific privacy policies and a history of emotionally damaging its users. Want to go to a show? Have fun buying overpriced tickets from one of the two or three ticket monopolies and then pay an exhorbitant, insulting "convenience" fee. So everyday, in many of our basic daily rituals, we are reminded of how little agency we have in our own lives and how much we both depend on and are subject to the whims of billionaires (who, meanwhile, are busy destroying the Earth).

Tycho 5y ago
> Get sick? While you wait for your appointment, research your condition using any of the free, high quality medical knowledge bases on the web, and/or connect with a community of other internet users with similar afflictions to get advice/perspective. > Looking for an entry-level job? Learn to code and become an in-demand knowledge worker. In the mean time, perhaps monetize your existing skills and assets by becoming an AirBnB host or Uber driver or delivery driver. > Want to spend time with friends? Use a widely available asynchronous messaging service to organize an outing, perhaps using a money-transfer app so that one person can take care of booking etc. If you can't meet in person, maybe you can have a video conference on one of the various free platforms, or just have an extended group chat with your friends. > Want to go to a show? Browse the web for a vast selection of shows you would never hear about otherwise. Not that these points negate your complaints, but I think you paint an unnecessarily miserable picture. I think that in itself is one of the big cultural problems of America and elsewhere.
- infogulch 5y ago
  Frustrated trying to just do normal human things because you're blocked by corporations and are powerless against them? Have you tried Just Don't Do That (TM)? Instead of doing what you wanted, try doing something we allow you to do. Powered By Technology Systems (R) will help you maximize what little agency you still have left, namely, to sit in your residence and consume the internet. The real world is no longer hospitable for humans, so just don't do anything!

silisili 5y ago

> and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help I've found the same thing from people. But not in support, just in dealing with them. I move a lot, and inevitably end up giving a lot of things away. What I've found is that when I post offers for things for free, it attracted the absolute worst of people. People who would claim it and never show up, or claim it and tell me they could come get it in two weeks. And -tons- of people who say they'll take it and ask when I can deliver it. Then get offended when I tell them I'm not delivering it. I still remember vividly a dresser I was offering for free. A person said they'll take it, and asked when I could bring it over. When I told them no, they replied in all caps something along the lines of 'I HAVE A COROLLA HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO FIT IT IN THERE', like I was the dumb one. So now I just list everything for a pretty low price, then just tell them it's free when they arrive. It cut down on the amount of riffraff by about 90%.

lowercased 5y ago
Good idea. I gave away a large copy machine - industrial strength, large size - the kind where you can feed it in 400 pages and it will do loads of double sided copies and staple things in minutes. Nice, but it was old, and I had no need any longer. Put it on facebook market and had probably 40 messages in the first 2 minutes. I hadn't realized how easy/automated FB makes it to respond. And I felt like I was letting people down because I wasn't responding fast enough. Eventually one person came to my place to get it, but... they thought it was a printer, and they were looking for a printer, so they left. I kept getting loads of the same "still available?" messages, then "when can you deliver?" and "you want me to come pick it up?!" messages. Like... it's a $1500 (used today) copier. It was probably $7000 new. It has extensions to hold 10000 sheets at a time. It's serious. No, I'm not driving to your house with this this to see if you might want it. WTF is wrong with people? Many days later, someone connected. And... it was great, but I was so wary/tired of dealing with freeloaders and tirekickers that I was suspect with him too at first. But this guy ran a boys club a few towns away, and their last copier had broken, and they didn't have funds to repair it. This was such a windfall for them. He happily came over with a big enough truck, loaded it up, kept offering to pay me ("are you sure? this is a lot!") and was just so damn grateful that I hadn't given it away yet. I'm glad I waited a bit longer vs just paying a company to come and take it away.

tonyedgecombe 5y ago

>and the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. I've seen that whilst contracting and with software sales. I've come to the conclusion the bottom 10% of any market is a cesspit and I don't want any part of that either as a buyer or seller. I have a suspicion the top end is the same although I've had little experience of that.

xyzzy21 5y ago

The UNIVERSAL truth of sales (and support): • Give away for free and you WILL be treated like shit • Charge for the same (even a nominal fee) and people will value it This is known by many names: "Tragedy of the Commons", "Economics of Scarcity vs. Plenty", "Reciprocal Value", etc. But it's a UNIVERSAL result so certain you can plan for it to happen and plan to avoid it with complete certainty.

jiggunjer 5y ago
I thought tragedy of the commons was where decisions making sense on an individual basis end up being harmful when made en masse.
- HWR_14 5y ago
  It is. The tragedy of the commons is typically about how people not having to pay the full costs of their actions lead to negative results in total. So, for instance (and the naming action), a group of ranchers letting their animals all over-graze the same shared field. The other names also seemed not to describe the underlying question nor to describe each other. Reciprocal value is a way of describing transactions. Economics of Abundance vs. Economics of Scarcity are macroeconomic concepts relating to the money supply.

soneca 5y ago

My theory for that is that companies in the US have a culture of prioritizing support tickets by a product of “outrageousness” and reach. If you sound like your next step is to sue the company, they solve your issue before the ones that sounded understanding and forgiving. Same with reach, if your complaint reach HN front over or get traction on Twitter, it is solved first than those that just sent an email.

leesalminen 5y ago
That’s so funny, I did the exact opposite at my company. The nastier you are in ticket the slower we were to respond. Eventually word got out that if you’re polite you can get answers from the CEO. If you’re rude, you go to the back of the line and don’t have a chance of talking with anyone beyond tier 2. It took a couple years for everyone to “get it”, but it mostly works now. We only actually ever got 1 letter from someone’s family attorney (read: the customer’s sibling). We just sent a FU nasty gram back on letterhead from our huge multinational firm signed by a partner and we never heard from them again.

deleted 5y ago

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void_mint 5y ago

> 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... I would probably compare it moreso to just the abysmal state of quality of support, even for expensive or important services. Call your health insurance provider and try to get something changed/fixed in a reasonable fashion and you'll be met with red tape/nonsense/phone tag. I am a person that usually starts out angry on any customer support line, only because of the shenanigans it takes to get someone on the phone in the first place.

mLuby 5y ago

This is the American approach right here: "You have to closing all the time. Be aggressive, learn how to push. And there is no such thing as a no-sale call. Either you sell the client some stock, or he sells you on a reason he can't. Either way, a sale is made. Now be relentless." -Boiler Room https://youtu.be/2frX1E0deb0?t=113 https://youtu.be/2frX1E0deb0?t=113

Doches 5y ago
No, this is the Yankee approach! No red-blooded Southerner, raised on cornbread and unflinching politeness, could engage in such relentless pushiness without dying of shame along the way. (alternatively, said red-blooded Southerner might just shoot you out of spite. There are...drawbacks.)
- mLuby 5y ago
  Good distinction to make.
- wyager 5y ago
  There's a good reason southerners have a historical reputation for being polite. If you weren't, someone might just challenge you to a duel. I'm not convinced the shift away from that state of affairs was a net social benefit.
  - mLuby 5y ago
    Honor-based cultures come with their own set of problems. > The concept of honour appears to have declined in importance in the modern West; conscience has replaced it in the individual context, and the rule of law (with the rights and duties defined therein) has taken over in a social context. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honour
    - wyager 5y ago
      The critical weakness of honor is that it’s vulnerable to defectors, which can emerge and thrive in a society where A) the cost of ostracism is small B) there are groups of people with incompatible cultural bases. Cosmopolitanism is incompatible with honor- or trust-based systems.

nightpool 5y ago

> "the paying users are almost invariably polite and efficient while the free users can be really quite...hard to help. "YOUR SHITS BROKE FIX ASAP" is my favorite password reset request" I wonder if part of the issue is that paid users feel more confident in getting their concerns taken seriously, while free users feel (perhaps unconsciously) like they have to exaggerate the problem and shout to be heard? I can see that as a very natural learned behavior for modern users.

Doches 5y ago
I hadn't thought of that as "natural learned behavior" but I think you're definitely on to something there. I'm not sure when, but sometime in the last decade I internalized the lesson that the best way to get through an automated phone system is to scream profanities or mash buttons on my phone until I'm redirected to an actual human: a mode of social interaction that I would be _mortified_ to engage in in literally any other situation. But I must have learned to do that because it gets results, or at least gets me to the humans faster. I guess what frustrates me as a human on the other end of that interaction is the assumption that you need to raise exaggerated hell to even reach my notice. I want to help! But folks are conditioned to expect the opposite, I guess.

tdeck 5y ago

It's definitely not limited to the U.S. though. I recently got this email from a new irate user of my side project, trying to use an international card that Square wouldn't accept: > HELP URGENT > TRYING TO ADD A CREDIT CARD BUT YOUR STUPID WEBSITE ARENT ACCEPTING MY CREDIT CARD. They still had 13 days to enter a credit card, so this wasn't exactly "urgent". I think it's that people want to convey how frustrated they are so that you'll prioritize the issue, and it comes across as aggression. What I've learned from being on the other end is that this approach sometimes backfires. I feel a strong urge to put off responding to such rants because it's draining to deal with these customers, while customers who respond positively to help or advice make a sole proprietor want to help them more.

MrGilbert 5y ago

> 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... It's the same in Germany. > Happily, once you break through that aggressive exterior and people realize you're just a person trying to help them out they almost invariably do a 180 and become helpful and polite, and we get whatever it was straightened out together. Yep, indeed. Especially once they realize it's the developer they are writing with, not a support agent. I always have mixed feeling about it, because I don't deserve to be better treated than the frontline workers of our company. So maybe it's a western thing after all?

svachalek 5y ago

The free vs paid thing is so true. Just see app store reviews. No one expects so much as someone who didn't and won't pay a thing for what they are demanding. It's a whole different mindset.

cloudwizard 5y ago

Part of the problem is that many American companies deliberately give you the run around to stop you from cancelling service. Spaces, a Regus company, is the worst. You have to submit your issues to accounting in TX but they won't talk to you. You talk to Support which can't actually help you. They threatened to call the Police when I complained in person. It took months but I caught them in a lie and threatened charges. A full refund immediately.

bcrosby95 5y ago

> 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... Note that it isn't new. My wife worked customer support for an online website from 2002 to 2007. Her experiences were the same as yours.

mbarbar 5y ago

I'm wondering, how do you ensure the people who have called you have indeed paid for phone support? Do you just assume callers have since the support number is not published anywhere? Or do you ask for a username/account number or something like that? I've never used phone support for something that isn't targeted to all-consumers-but-none-in-particular.