Comment by helloworld15 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by helloworld15 | Hacker News Reader

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Hey, thank you for the feedback, I'm the author of this thread but I'm actually the customer, not the support rep.

I get behind every single point of your list. I felt like he just didn't care, and when I proceeded to point out I was disappointed and thought it was terrible of them to just slam the door in my face like that, I received an endless series of condescending remarks which made even angrier and caused my reactions.

I'm somewhat surprised by some of the answers in the thread but I did want other people's opinions in order to figure out where the real balance is.

I guess I still feel like I'm the one who's right, especially being the paying customer, but from everyone's feedback I should have kept the tone down.

I admit I really don't work well with condescension.

Oh I see, I wrote thinking you are on the support side.

I think you as a customer acted rationally and with honesty. Most customers, when hearing such an initial reply, do not bother responding at all (probably gone forever as a customer). And the worse thing is, support/devs think that, with no further response from the customer, they are doing a great job.

I myself am a customer-dev to at least two websites (been working with them for the last 5+ years). These sites have made at least a large share on their niche market, but their support is terrible. Business-wise, they think they can afford to lose a customer, so their 'default' support mode is to brush customers off (or leave support requests hanging). I believe many businesses are like this.

About the condescension, many devs are like that, treating support as 'inferior' to development and not equally important (cost center vs profit center mentality). When in fact, it's a profit opportunity. The customer's requirements are very specific, and from the correspondence, I can see that the customer understands that not all customers would request for such a feature, and probably would be willing to pay a premium for a custom-made solution. Most people here are devs, so they sympathize more with the support side (personally, I work on both domains).

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