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> 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 t

> 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.
- thrower123 5y ago
  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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  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?
strbean 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    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...
treeman79 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
azalemeth 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  I've made a note of this. I'm sure I am not the only one.
jedimastert 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. 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.
jv22222 5y ago
> 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.

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.

thrower123 5y ago
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 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
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?

strbean 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  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...

treeman79 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.

azalemeth 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
I've made a note of this. I'm sure I am not the only one.

jedimastert 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. 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.

jv22222 5y ago

> 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.