However, that in no way precluded me being a consummate professional on support calls. Being nice and polite to your customers isn't difficult, though it can require a bit of patience if they are slow or make mistakes as you talk them through stuff. Or biting your tongue if they are rude or nasty; that's generally due to the frustration the software you wrote caused them. Show them some sympathy! I can't say that I particularly liked doing support calls, but I think pretty much anyone can play the role and do a decent job if they can use some basic common sense when talking to the person at the other end of the phone and keep their cool in the face of an angry caller. If a developer can't handle a routine telephone call in a civilised and respectful manner, I'm not sure I'd want them on my team.
However, some people really do associate lacking social skills with technical skills. That sometimes informs company culture - be it by peefering to hire more stereotyped people or by creating culture where unnecessary confrontational style wins the day. In such culture people who have good social skill adjust the way they communicate (full disclosure: I personally did through I am not claiming super superior communication).
For a generalization to be accurate it doesn't need to apply to everybody in a group, just to a larger percentage of people in the group than in the general population.
It doesn't also need to apply absolutely to each one of the group that it does apply: it just needs to apply more than it does to an average person in the general population.
Generalizations are not laws of nature.
People I know who've worked on B2C support got verbal abuse almost daily.
In these situations I'd like to remind you that the person you are talking to very likely may be copping that abuse from their customers or managers, and most don't pass it on. So try to help them out, they're literally making your job less miserable :)
Is this generally the case? I've answered thousands of customer service queries for my (mostly B2C) startup. I can count on two hands the number of angry/abusive emails I've received.
I don't know how big your startup is, but I'd hazard a guess that you're small enough for your support to still feel "human." I think this is the biggest issue with most bigco CS.