At a minimum, if you take a friendly personal tone in important communications, but there isn't a real person waiting behind it in an easily accessible manner at customer support with the same tone, I get extremely annoyed. There is something infuriating about the cheapness of projecting friendliness in a UI but then directing me to some robot phone line or an auto generated email where it really matters.

In my case I was a real person writing and waiting behind it. I was emailing a response directly to a support case I was handling.

Does that change anything in your opinion or would you still feel the same way? (Please don't spare my feelings. I'm really asking as I need to know the hard truth in order to improve)

"uwu we'we sowwy dis isn't wewking anymowe.. pwease don't be angwy wiff us"

I get it, some forms of communication aren't your bag. But I think it's at least reasonable to focus on a company's intent even if the verbiage isn't what you'd prefer. FWIW I'm quite older than a millennial, but I didn't find anything infantilizing about Notion's response - I'd much prefer a genuine expression of regret, which is what this FAQ appeared to be, than some nonsense corporate-speak.

if they were concerned or empathetic, the issue would not have lasted as long as it has.

in short, it's disingenuous and it's an attempt to minimize the customer's concerns.

God people, have a touch of respect for our colleagues.

They lose it when they talk down to me. "oof, sorry about that, but this is not important enough for us to fix right now" is not how you keep my respect, when the functionality has been broken for months.

Please.

P.S. Jokes are not totally forbidden, but they should be more subtle and not so intrusive as "You are asking me a question, but here I'll give you a performance instead of an answer".

Except that’s not true. That whole paragraph is a load of malarkey.

It’s a word. You don’t know the person involved and you’re making more awful assumptions based upon three letters.

There is such a thing as technical writing style and it is about the relevance of information pieces and the relations between them.

A person doing the export manually would be OK as a workaround and instead all they have is that message. That's not OK.

If they really felt sorry for this particular customer, they would be actually solving their issues, not answering with automatic messages.

I think the best way to handle support is to be yourself.

Casual is almost always a recipe for disaster if the person on the other end doesn't know you. It makes it sound like you aren't taking their issue seriously.

It's more than likely some dude that is just starting their career that has almost no training that is trying to the best of their ability to express empathy, provide a workaround, and make the customer happy. He doesn't control what gets fixed. Why do business interactions need to be devoid of social niceties? It's some software company, not a morgue.

You can be casual and a jerk. You can be friendly and professional. Someone telling me "oof" when my business is offline and losing money (or insert major issue you've caused me) isn't a social nicety, it's something I would expect a buddy to say if I told him I lost money playing poker.

Please don't make light of their issues. People want to be treated seriously when they're having a problem.

You can't tell people they're entitled for disliking how you're treating them in a serious situation, and call it empathy in the next breath.

It is a front line support rep, it is the same as some guy at McDonald's. Yes, I think people are entitled when they feel they have a right to be mean or difficult to some person who is just trying to do their job and is making a plausible attempt to be nice to you. You can't read that workers mind, they said one word that can be plausibly used in either circumstance. That word expresses anguish that their customer is having trouble. That is empathy if it was used sincerely. It is not the south park episode with the cable company workers.

There’s nothing wrong with expressing anguish. And I happily fire customers who have a problem with that. Life is too short to deal with that level of entitlement.

If my customer is having a problem, I can try being friendly after the communication is already ongoing, problem has been aknowledged, and it is on his way to be fixed. Ending in a friendly tone is a big plus. Starting with it, not at all.

On the other hand, as a customer, having to deal with you at all is already stressful enough, i'm paying you and still losing time over your screw-ups, and still you start with an "ooof". It would give me a feeling of "not only i'm losing time, i'm also being joked on".

Being professional and gradually friendly is simply the most secure way to operate, because every person that contacts you for a problem, big or small, doesn't want to contact you to begin with. Don't "ooof" me please.

The person could have just copy pasted the canned response with no help and it sounds like a lot of people would have been happier with that. At a minimum, they wouldn't be hating on the customer support rep personally.

They are just people trying to do their job and I don't recall a single support rep that wasn't just trying to do their job well. People are complicated and socializing is hard, especially when it's not in person. What we do is almost always not life and death. We shuffle bits around between computers, we shouldn't take ourselves so seriously. There is no reason people can't be nice to each other in these interactions.

I repeat, there's a big, big value in being friendly and basically "a human", but the very first starting interaction must be serious, not a joke.

People realize the guy there is not the whole company, but they also realize they are the only way to get communication going, and losing time only to be greeted with an "ooof" can be annoying.

Of course it also depends on the specific case (how big the problem, how angry the customer, how long the "ooof"), but I've been on both sides for a couple of years now and starting in an over-frienly manner sets the mood for an "un-important" context.

And, in particularly bad cases, that could sour the entire conversation.

I thought things had being going well, as I've gotten lots of messages from people that appreciate it, and never ones expressing unhappiness about it. However it's not worth it to roll the dice and be myself if people might actually be offended and mad about it. I got this response from someone (who had previously identified as a 75 year old man who struggles with technology) not that long ago:

> Thanks for acknowledging the issue and for not being a robot. The personal touch was nice, and your comment about blood pressure brought a smile to my face in a time of deep frustration. In the mean time I'll try the work around from your PDF, but hopefully this is fixed by time renewal comes around.

I’m taking a break from this fucking site. I can’t believe the extent to which my colleagues are roasting someone over three letters. Bunch of fucking bullies if you ask me.

Personally, if it was a human at the other end of a chat who started off with "Oof" I'd be fine with that as we're having dialogue, but when used as a generic automated message it would feel a little unprofessional. Not enough to complain about, but it would be noticed.

Nothing to do with bullies, personalities, or roasting someone. Quite the opposite in fact in that it is totally fine from humans - just not ideal from an automated system.