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While the last part of apologizing for the "incompetent" employee is definitely too much, the supervisor escalation is a pretty good move actually. I worked in customer support too and often times, people just want to let off some steam. We learned to not take it too personal, play each others' supervisor (with the permission of the actual supervisor, who didn't take calls) and went on to even do this strategy proactively ("well, that sounds pretty bad indeed. let me connect you to our supervisor").

Worked like a charm.

It is not OK to "let off some steam" by verbally attacking a stranger. In retail stores, if someone's yelling at a front-line worker, they're likely to get thrown out of the store.

These managers need to show some backbone and consequences to angry assholes with poor impulse control, and throw them off the service if they treat the staff poorly.

in the early days of my company i had to yell back at a few customers - they were highly competent, technical people, who seem to deal with anxiety/loss of control by yelling at someone they perceive to be beneath them. scumbags.

i remember one time i was getting berated, and i straight up told the guy "do you want me to listen to you yell at me, or do you want me to try to fix the problem? it's your call." right then and there he realized he was dealing with an adult, and not a child, and changed his tune real quick. reality check.

i've lost a bit of business because i and my team weren't supplicants. but those customers were the worst of the worst - nobody on earth would want to deal with their shit. they tend to be the kind of person who thinks in order to run a company you have to be a dickhead.

i've also just hung up on people, and have instructed all of my employees to immediately hang up if anyone ever gets out of line.

i wish more of that happened in normal lines of business.

I do this with my ecomm business as well. It doesn't happen often, but I have no issue parting ways with verbally abusive customers.

I try not to have a short trigger, but for example, the second or third chewing out for something UPS did, and that I gave a full refund for. At that point it's easy to push back.

It's refreshing to see someone push back on bad behavior. You're making your business better by allocating your skills to the customers who deserve it.

Thanks! I can see, though, how it would be hard to scale up to a bigger business. Since it's just me a few others, we can rely on trust and common sense. It's somewhat easy to tell when you're being yelled at because of some unrelated thing that has the customer upset...And, so give them a little more room. Other times, it seems more clear it's just an entitled prick. I don't know how you would make guidelines or training on how to scale that.

Or maybe I'm making bad judgement calls sometimes? In any case, life is too short to take excessive crap just to make a living.

>they were highly competent, technical people, who seem to deal with anxiety/loss of control by yelling at someone they perceive to be beneath them.

Sounds like HN. I'm actually surprised anecdotes haven't popped up where people describe why they're justified in treating people like trash.

It's such a breath of fresh air to see someone saying this :) I'm not sure how any company can promote morale by allowing customers to take out their unrelated frustrations on employees.

I worked with a guy once who bragged about how much free stuff he got just for being an asshole to CSRs at different companies. I had the displeasure of listening to one of his calls once and I was shocked at just how badly he treated people.

He treated his girlfriend the same way, too, and I'm surprised she didn't dump him for it.

> He treated his girlfriend the same way, too, and I'm surprised she didn't dump him for it.

many women, like many men, actually want to be abused.

> they tend to be the kind of person who thinks in order to run a company you have to be a dickhead.

Often they are also the kinds of people who will cost you long-term: in legal fees and so on.

What if the front-line CSR were empowered to solve the problem in the first place? Then no one would have to be "thrown under the bus."

"solve the problems" varies wildly from call to call, one could be that they haven't paid their bill and got cut off (but it's your fault obviously), it could be a physical fault with something that requires a return or engineer site visit, or any one of a million things.

99% of the time the person answering the call is there as a buffer, cheap fodder infront of the more expensive people who can do things. You either have a very expensive resource manning the phones and working inefficiently with long wait times or you have the meat shield filtering for you.

I've been on both sides of this (meat shield and technical fixer) it's driven by about 30 layers of management so it's always a mess, the alternative is the Google/Valve model where there is zero support.

(Yes i know support is good on paid Google products. It's not on the free ones)

Quite often the CSR does have the power to fix the problem, but the customer is more interested in yelling at someone.

You mean spend engineering resources to help employees? That's not profitable! /s

They often are, and would if they weren't wasting so much time being screamed at.

One thing I learned is that you more and more have to act as an a-hole when dealing with customer service. Otherwise they just brush you off, even if you're have a completely valid complaint or problem. Probably because of the mindset that all complaining customers are part of that 5 percent.

I'm not happy with that evolution, but that's the reality that we're living in. Now when I'm dealing with customer service I start with being myself, nice and reasonable, but as soon that I notice that they're trying to brush me off, I switch to full assertive mode. I will not yell or berate the employee, I know most of the time they are just following standard scripts or procedures, but being really persistent and not letting go is more and more the only way to get a fair treatment.

That's really unfortunate, but I guess it's the logical conclusion of outsourcing to the cheapest call centers, viewing customer service as a cost only or paying customer support employees minimum wages. It forces genuine nice people to act a certain way they wouldn't normally do and don't feel comfortable with. For me personally, I know it's just an act, it's not personal, but it takes more energy than it should be. And it helps to have worked in customer service before to put things in perspective.

> Customer calls in angry about a legitimate problem they're having, but their anger is 2-3 orders of magnitude larger than the actual severity of the problem.

I have to say, navigating customer service phone trees seems like performing a ritual designed to magnify anger. About a minute and a half into picking between various vague options, some of which dead-end at reading me a FAQ that is already available on the webpage I got the number from, I've used up all my patience quota for that particular issue.

Not saying that's what was happening with your customers, but it certainly may skew your sample.

It seems to me that this culture is a consequence of capitalism. The richest and most powerful are always the customers, but never employees.

On the other hand, in communist easter-bloc countries, the opposite culture existed. Employees didn't care much about customers, the jobs were provided by the government. It was also terrible.. corrupt and probably worse.

I think moderation is needed, but I am not sure how such culture can be sustained.

This exists in capitalist countries as well. Especially in government run processes.

The customer service people at , for example, a courthouse, or government vehicle registration service. They know they can't be fired. They also know there is no competitor you can go to. So, the balance of power is inverted.

Is the DMV really that bad these days? In the four states I've registered a vehicle--Washington, Oregon, Texas, Illinois--it's been fine. No complaints.

Nearly every time I've ever been to the DMV it's been a pleasant process.

One time I got caught in bureaucratic hell. I had recently bought a house and took my closing documents in to get my address changed. The clerk informed me that all the closing documents represent "one document" since they all come from a single source (the closing) even though they came from several different agencies. I had to go to my bank, change my address there (using the closing documents as proof), have them print an statement that I now live at my new address, and take that back to the DMV as a "second document."

I'm not sure if that clerk was being a prick, over-zealously applying the rules, or acting in a capacious matter. Or if he was following clear direction from above about closing documents. So I'm not sure if I need to blame him or not.

But every other interaction I've had with the DMV has been smooth and pleasant. Quite frankly, my interactions with the IRS have been smooth and pleasant, even when I legitimately screwed up my taxes and had to get that sorted-out.

The experience varies, depending on the office. It feels like they have little leverage to do anything about individual agents that have crap attitudes.

Most companies don't care once they have your money and you are outside of the return period but inside of the warranty.

In my experience being nice to customer reps costs you hours vs. being a polite but a bit short and very direct with them.

If it takes too long (this usually happens around the 60th minute) I tend to escalate to asking to terminate my contract right then and there.

Sometimes I do, but most often it suddenly is possible to fix the problem or to make some reasonable accomodation.