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Comment by RyanMcGreal | Hacker News Reader

> Would you ever talk to your mother or your friend that way? If not, why is it ok to talk to a customer that way?

I would assume - hope! - that the relationships of company representatives to their customers is not the same as their relationships to their mothers and friends. I don't want companies with which I do business to pretend to some kind of familial or fraternal bond that doesn't really exist.

The language of phony familiarity ("Hey, Ryan!") seems to me to be even more weaselly than the language of business relationships (i.e. "Dear Valued Customer"), which is at least honest in its mercenary intent.

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I think "Valued Customer" is exceedingly, even bluntly, honest. I AM a valued customer - valued to an exact dollar amount.

In this case, the weasel word ends up saying the truth.

How about "Dear Mr. McGreal:"?

I think most companies can handle a mail merge.

"Dear Mr. McGreal" would be great - but I'd be worried if my mother or friends started addressing me that way. :)

My Mom would only resort to formal salutations when she noticed that some household device was now behaving somewhat, um, different.

Even that is a bit dishonest. I'm not 'dear' to my bank.

What should they say? (disregarding that prepending a salutation of "Dear" is a matter of English etiquette, and some customers may be offended if you do not include it.)

The Russians had this right, you could call anyone Comrade in almost any context and it was fine.

I think the more reasonable standard might be this: if you wouldn't use a phrase or word in communication with your own colleagues, don't use it when talking to customers. If I got an email from a coworker talking about "synergies" and "visioning", I would likely reply with a direct and blunt request that they STFU and use real words.

That being said, having worked for a company which prepared business training materials for online MBA programs, I can tell you that the use of weasel words is literally part of the curriculum for any biz-school-trained managers. It's up to us, the somewhat-business-savvy geeks, to gently steer them back in the direction of real communication. (At the same time, we should probably listen when they tell us that "EPIC DATABASE FAIL!" is not actually a good way to describe what happened in an outage report.)

However "The database failed." might be a good description.

I know I probably don't represent the average user and not to invalidate your point in any way, but I would find it incredibly novel and entertaining to see an outage report describing the issue as an "EPIC DATABASE FAIL!"

If taken that far, I agree. I think there is a good middle ground though where you don't sound phony - what about just addressing someone by their first name?

Depends on the culture. I guess in the US this is OK. In Germany most people opt for the equivalent of Mr Last-Name for customers.

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