The whole point of this tool is to help relax the employee. The customer perception doesn’t matter here.

1. Customer is mad about problem 2. Support person does not know this and speaks as if the other side is happy and casual 3. Customer gets even more mad because they feel their problem isn't being taken seriously, leading to some sort of escalation

Customer perception does matter.

And how does the script-reading, process-following, zero-power custech employee change what they can do based on customer rage?

They aren't robots, they can put on a more genuine tone explaining to the customer that they can't do much, or escalate to someone more powerful without the customer having to argue with them to do it.

A family member had a banking problem last year (they got locked out of their account due to accidentally tripping account theft protection). Of course initially they weren't all that mad, it was their own fault. But customer support staff just had them running around in circles, gradually getting more and more infuriated until one support person finally empathized with their months of daily struggle and bothered to escalate them to someone who was able to force through a fix.

I had a similar experience with my university last year, the support employees were constantly tone deaf about the serious trouble they were causing me by asking me to drop all my other obligations immediately to deal with the consequences of their mistakes.

Every "sorry for the inconvenience" just rubbed salt into the wound because it just further emphasized that they didn't give a shit and that I had no recourse. Especially because the employees did have ways of making things better, by being proactive in providing information and making the accommodation adjustments that were within their power without my having to ask about them.

This sounds like a much broader and uglier problem in the system than empathy between custech and the customer - namely, empathy between the broader company and the customer. I am not convinced that the kinds of companies that will be using these services are the kind of company that even listens to their customer support agents, and would rather sell them out to the lowest bidder and the only reason they have any customer support agents at all is so they don't get in legal trouble because their automated system doesn't have all edge cases supported.

Yeah I suppose that's a fair point to make.

Thr

Perfect. We'll just build an AI to translate things into a "genuine" tone for the customer. All problems in society will be solved by adding a layer of AI indirection.

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I would think calm and casual support is probably the best way to deescalate.

Surely all of us have experienced having to talk to someone who is angry, and even if we can't do anything about it, adjusting the way we speak to show that we understand their anger?

Eg letting them (to an extent) rant about the trouble being caused to them, phrasing things to not come off as confrontational or blaming, anticipating things that might trigger another outburst (eg being asked to try restarting the router when they've already claimed to have called in several times and thus may have been asked to do so several times).