> the customer is always right

This is a useful perspective to take if you're in sales. For a support engineer, not so much. When I did Tier 1 for credit cards, the mantra everywhere invoked was instead:

"The customer is not always right, but is always deserving of respect."

Which has always struck me as a much more balanced and sensible attitude to take, when the objective is to solve a problem.

Sometimes that problem is between the keyboard and the chair. It happens. But it's still a problem that merits solving, rather than being a jackass about, because it's still stopping the customer from using your product, and why should he give you money for something he can't use?

Of course, that doesn't seem likely to apply here - pretty hard for an app crash to be a PEBKAC. I've found it a useful enough perspective to merit mention here, in any case. And perhaps such an attitude would've dissuaded the Garadget representative in this thread from so precipitously making a fool of himself, too.

"You never win an argument with a customer."

Or more importantly,

"You'll never win a customer with an argument."

That is a hundred times better than the standard version. I am stealing that for sure. Do you know who to credit?

It was something my boss told me when I used to work retail. I think it's part of the commons now ;) no attribution.

The two are exactly the same from the outcome perspective; you always treat the customer with respect and try to please them.

There is a slight nuance with this when it comes to support - support often doesn't have the ability to satisfy all customer wants, and sometimes what the customer wants is outside of the supported use cases or the scope of support.

For the topic at hand (Garadget), the rep was absolutely out of line; I don't know if this was a policy they were enforcing or just a bad day, but I've been called worse than that by my customers even on good days, and it should just roll off you at this point.

But, always trying to please the customer has a nasty effect of backfiring a lot of the time, since sometimes pleasing them means getting into support situations that are untenable.

Respect? Absolutely - usually customers are smart, and as long as you are reasonable and respectful, so are they. But aiming to please gets people into a bad mindset of not being able to deliver bad news or establish policy.

Edit: corrected spelling mistake.

Ideally, yes.

The more nuanced formulation acknowledges the existence of limits on what will be done - you don't, for example, get a 90-day delinquency reaged off your account once you pay up to date, no matter how you ask.

It also, and I think this has merit for Tier 1 reps who are constantly exposed to all the marvelous and frequently trying vicissitudes of humanity, explicitly calls out respect as a value. Certainly I found that explicit reminder useful from time to time, and I know others did as well. Perhaps this fellow might have, too.

> This is a useful perspective to take if you're in sales. For a support engineer, not so much. When I did Tier 1 for credit cards, the mantra everywhere invoked was instead: "The customer is not always right, but is always deserving of respect."

If you're going to split hairs to that degree I would absolutely expect you to notice that the customer called the product a piece of shit, not the support engineer.

Respect in this case, or the principle of charity if you prefer to consider it in those terms, requires acknowledgement of the fact that such intemperance of language from a customer almost certainly originates in extreme frustration provoked by the malfunction of the product.

In the course of a year and a few months spent doing credit card Tier 1, taking on average about 150 calls per day, I dealt with a lot of people. A very few of them were indeed just assholes, of the sort who'll open with "your product is a piece of shit" just because that's their attitude in general. They were easy to identify, but hard to work with. A vastly greater number were instead moved to unusually assholish behavior out of frustration with the situation in which they found themselves. Given a touch of professionalism, they were easy to identify, too, and easy to work with as well once given the opportunity to vent some of their ire and settle down enough to behave rationally again.

Perhaps the customer in this case is just an asshole. But my experience, which is not inconsiderable, shows that that is extremely improbable. Given, as I mentioned before, a touch of professionalism on the part of the support engineer, I see no reason to doubt that this situation could have been brought to the same sort of mutually successful outcome which I so often produced in my time wearing a headset all day. Instead, the engineer has succeeded only in producing a PR nightmare for his company, and I hope also in getting himself fired for cause. (I would! On the spot, in a heartbeat. Just as, in any of the several customer-facing roles I've had, such incredible behavior on my part would certainly have incurred the same response.) I fail to see how such an outcome has any utility for anyone involved - the customer's still stuck with the same broken product he started out with, and the company's out both money and reputation, too. I'd be fascinated to see how anyone could argue that that's a reasonable expenditure to buy a mean and fleeting little moment of satisfaction for one support engineer.

"The customer is always right" is a good mindset for both B2C and, to a lesser extent, B2B; but it should not be taken literally. If a customer in store is abusive, politely but firmly showing him the door is the right response. Do not deal with bad customers. But attacking a bad customer, stealing his stuff, etc. is a really bad idea.

Disabling a previously bought product for a negative review is probably illegal in most jurisdictions. It is clearly illegal under Amazon ToS. If I were the device buyer I would just return the unit. Even if they restore access this is an accident waiting to happen.

Reading this reinforced my conviction that I do not want my home hardware managed remotely. At least not the stuff I regularly interface with.

"The customer is always right" is an aphorism which applies to market forces, not individual customers. People keep misusing this phrase to mean that you should never disagree with a customer, but that's not the meaning of it at all.

> this guy should be respectful of this small, indiegogo compnay

This guy should be respectful in general.

That's a basic prerequisite for any normal communication regardless of the context.

If you can't or won't maintain professional conduct in the presence of others who conduct themselves less than professionally, then you can't really consider yourself professional either, can you? You're just playing at it, when doing so suits you.

I don't agree. As a freelancer, when I do business with someone, I expect them to comport themselves in a civilized manner. If they're too thick or ill-bred to manage it, they can take their money elsewhere. I don't see why it should be different for any company. The exchange of money isn't a license to ignore standards of social interaction between equals.

You're absolutely right! Engaging in this kind of substantive retaliation because someone said a swear word you didn't like is totally unacceptable in any professional context.

Sure. And if you are the maker of an App or product, the customer can then give you a poor review, or make his story go viral and totally fuck over your business and you proceed the recieve hundreds of poor reviews.

Feel free to piss off your customers at your own peril.

You can try enforcing those standards, as this company did. But you may find that doing so causes your business to be economically unviable. That's fine as long as it's your preferred outcome, but if it isn't, you need to suck it up and deal with people who don't treat you how you want to be treated.

I'm convinced that there are enough reasonable, civil people in the world that I don't have to pucker up to kiss the behinds of those who can't behave with a modicum of decorum when their expectations are slightly undermined.

The problem isn't the people you "fire" directly. It's that those other reasonable, civil people might wonder where exactly where you draw the line, and justifiably avoid you based on not knowing. There's enough folks in this category that you really have to be more careful unless your product is truly out-of-the-park stellar and one-of-a-kind.