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.
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 ;)
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...
