They bought some equipment, captured the imagination of the sales team with stories of massive purchases, bought one moderate purchase and then for over a year RAN OVER the support team in an effort to get what they wanted. Problem was they wanted the world and bought an island of equipment, and claimed we should provide them free the appropriate equipment because they might just buy more.

Their IT staff was so unprofessional / prone to delivering insults rather than providing data I started hanging up on them. Fortunately my boss was supportive. This was an environment where we never had abusive customers, stressed customers but no personal attacks.

Finally someone got in the CEO's ear and demonstrated how much time and money we were throwing at a customer who was not happy, would not buy the appropriate equipment, and had never paid a dime on their support contracts. He cut them off.

Total waste of time and money dealing with Walmart. Nearly 20 years later now when old coworkers get together folks say they still won't shop there because of the calls they took...

If the customer is always angry, sometime the best thing is for everyone to move on.

We actually had some other customers we did that with where they were invited to move on (we supported them in the meantime of course).

For some of those customers after they realized the lay of the land moving to other systems, they came back and things were good (not Walmart).

I just had to chime in here, 2 is coincidence but 3 is a trend. They did the exact same thing to us, spending months telling us to solve an issue that was clearly a result of issues on their end, and despite repeated proof would push us into meetings at really unkind times, not doing the steps we recommended and being increasingly rude and accusatory while demanding time with the product team simply to express discontent.

I would have loved to be able to just say no.

It sounded very harsh and emotionally wrong at the time, but I've learned the hard way that at least for the purpose of building a working team and business, he was spot on.

As a lead, I've learned my most precious resource is my time and attention and one thing I didn't realize until very recently is that I'm rewarding the high performers by spending it on them.

But negative attention is attention as well, and if my team gets the impression I'm rewarding the ones who don't pull their own weight with excessive nurturing and pampering, they will get demotivated and eventually move on.

This is still distinct from abandoning, as I try my best to give everyone an equal chance to get started. But I've regretted more than once investing heavily into employees who ended up quitting anyway over their perceived complaints.

Wanters will always find a way. Not-wanters will always find a reason.

Spend the time saving those who can be saved with the resources you have, and don't waste time on those who can't.

It's an easy thing to talk about (once you discover the concept). It's much harder to put into practice.

Nearly everyone who curses in their first email will apologize upon receiving an email from the founder. They were probably just having a bad day and assumed that $Company was some corporate powerhouse trying to nickel and dime their customers.

There's about 5% of people who persist in nastiness.

But almost everyone ends up being happy about the interaction, many end up renewing their subscriptions, and some will even email other companies asking them to integrate our technology. Sometimes the root of the frustration was that our service didn't work better with other platforms, which is something we can't control on our own.

So having these very excitable folks sending emails on our behalf can be a powerful thing. It just requires biting your tongue instead of replying in the heat of the moment!

I try to remember this when I interact with people in any medium (including in-person). Snark/anger/sarcasm are often just the envelope for the content of a message. If you don't let it affect you, you can respond to the content of the message, not the delivery, and break down a number of walls instantly. And as a bonus you're not giving someone else control over your emotional state.

That said, some people are just abusive idiots and you kind of have to have a sense for when you're wasting your energy.

The angry tech customer generally cares about a problem they're trying to solve. The demanding restaurant patron is focused on the feeling of exercising power over someone subservient to them.

Any overlap between those groups of people is random.

The thing with real stores is that all the assholes are from this group. The ones that are having a bad day may react badly to something, but do not go out of their way to create problems.

What means that real stores have many fewer problem customers. But they can't count on them changing either.

The angry message to a tech service provider can often be a last ditch attempt at resolution. An angry review of a restaurant is usually little more than a public “fuck you”: they aren't getting further business from that customer.

Pictures of health code violations and stories of health code violations usually raise some red flags (especially if recent). Those are too easy to fake.

The most useful ones are when they go through exactly what they thought was right/wrong with the food (and a pattern emerges across the pictures and multiple reviews about different dishes).

If the restaurant is a 3.1, then yeah, try to find a different place - there IS hair in the food, the cockroaches are real and the waitress DID stick the hotdog up the you know what.

This is something everyone should be required to do. Try to last a month at it. I sure couldn't. But I'll be damned if it didn't make me 1000x more considerate towards just about everyone. We all have a choice whether to cause a fuss over stuff that hardly matters, or whether we blame someone for circumstances outside their control. There's no clearer way to see these problems and decide what kind of person you're going to be than there is from the ground level.

In high school I worked at a pizza place and it would not be an exaggeration to say it opened my eyes to a lot of things.

I'm very glad I worked there.

I don't remember where I first heard it, but it's rung true for me.

I asked them why they were filtering my reviews, and got the old "sorry, the algorithm has decided you're not to be trusted, nothing I can do" line.

So much for trying to warn people, I suppose. Though I've seen similar behavior with Google too.

When I found out later how they were running a protection racket to shake down restaurants, I ran for the exit.

Nice restaurant review service you have there, Yelp. Be a shame if something happened to it. Especially if that something was your own damn fault.

Other the other hand, I don’t actually read the reviews at all. I do sometimes look at the user-uploaded photos.

I just don’t give a fuck about Yelpers.

I'd really love to see tipping go away forever, at least as an expectation

Ex: The waiter only hears the first person at the table and then runs off before anyone else can speak. Or, they only bring one thing asked for and forget the rest. Or, they outsource bringing the things to someone else and those people do not bring them, and the waiter never checks again.

From the waiter's perspective, the customer seems unreasonable, but when making that assessment, they are missing information.

Tying this back to the article, people aren't perfect at expressing things. When this design doc situation arises, it really is on the author to figure out why that person objects no matter how it's approached. Fresh ideas are often hard to express and for people to process. Sometimes the objector just has a lingering sense the design isn't right but it's not quite identifiable yet. Obviously, sometimes they are unreasonable, but starting there unless they act like the perfectly logical person in the second example is a bad idea.

TL;DR: in all situations, it's best to try to identify the source of whatever's going on, not immediately assume a person is unreasonable.

Sure, I think I would do that for one or two rounds. But at some point I realize this is just someone who is being willfully ignorant or lazy and trying to make it seem like it's my fault.

I immediately see red flags when someone presents themself as absolutely certain of their pronouncements and more so when they repeatedly show that there is little or no correlation between their confidence level in making a particular statement and the amount of evidence they have or the amount of work they put into determining their conclusions. The truly unfortunate part, in my experience, is that managers typically see this confidence as a surface level indicator that these people know what they're talking about and give these unreasonable people the authority act on their over-confidence.

If you do, it’s only going to squeak louder and longer.

o/~ I guess it's true what they say about the squeaky wheel / always getting the grease o/~

-- James Taylor

The correct business response is to petition management to staff more accordingly so that no table has to be de-prioritized (going by the book on customer service)... Also other measures can be taken, like stocking napkin dispensers and condiments on tables so that trivial requests don't over-burden staff.

Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments, while people are already paying a set price on the goods and/or service a restaurant delivers that should be planned for by management properly. A bad customer service environment only serves to ruin business.

If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them, it can also wrongfully reinforce bias and discourage customers from returning which often drives even some of the most popular businesses (Denny's for example) down.

Management too often plays the training tape for employees without reading their own training book properly.

This poster isn't doing bad customer service.i have no idea how you got that idea. What they're doing is stoping one bad customer from ruining other customer's experiences!

The customer is not always right.

One of my favorite daily visits, is a site called "Not Always Right," and it has many stories like this: https://notalwaysright.com/newest/

If you understand human nature, you also understand that sometimes people are just having a bad day, or feeling ignored, or on their last leg.

Ignoring, or being dismissive to, any paying customer is simply bad business. If a company does that as a practice, they're probably in the wrong business.

An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career.

Those are not just my words, they're words from the bible of doing good business, and a lot of successful CEOs and business people would agree, except for the CEO of comcast perhaps.

For what it's worth, I was a service employee who deprioritized these people and I can tell you I'm certainly not working customer service at Comcast now-a-days... which is a reference I don't even understand (I know what Comcast is but ya...).

Tangentially, I feel that there should be a form of conscription where everyone is forced to work at year or two of customer service in their teens. While I'm sure it wouldn't discourage everyone from being a prick, it could certainly help.

A more thorough analysis of human nature reveals that a double-digit percentage of humanity suffers from a serious personality disorder. Some of these disorders involve taking perverse pleasure in ordering others around for no good reason.

Most experienced wait staff that I know can tell the difference pretty quickly between someone having a bad day and a bully. The latter do not deserve good customer service.

Yeah, that's kind of the problem with your whole argument: it reads like your entire understanding of the field is from an undergrad business textbook.

For one, you keep equating a job having a customer service component with the specific job of customer support as you have it in the tech field.

>An employee that thinks ignoring customers is a good practice likely ends up working in customer service at Comcast as the pinnacle of their career.

Waitstaff to Call Center is not a career path I've ever seen anyone take. Too orthogonal to be a desired career change (if not downright worse if you're in a good market for service industry), doesn't build upon the skillset you've already built, and doesn't have the allure of long downtime that draws people into Security and Reception work.

This isn't a staffing issue.

If you do this kind of work, sometimes you will meet people that are completely unreasonable and there is no satisfying them.

Try working at a Toys R Us at Christmas and get shouted down by a parent because you ran out of the hot thing that season. For a concrete example, it was Tickle Me Elmo for me. It is not your fault, or the business' fault, but you can reset assured you will be the lightning rod for this.

As for serving, you can bet the people causing the most trouble are the least likely to tip. And at BEST they will tip nominally. There is some division that I don't understand between certain diners and servers that these diners consider their servers to not be their peers.

The customer is not always right, the entitlement of customers is off the charts in the past ten years. Expectations of online shopping applied to real life are very extreme. "I just want to have a good experience" style reasoning, when sometimes, things just don't go your way, and that is life. Deprioritizing a table is a survival strategy, to keep the plates moving.

How we solve this, I don't know, but I would say top down thinking is assuming that customers are 100% rational all the time, and I can assure you from the trenches it is not.

If you can gift them to a competitor, you can double the win.

You can absolutely do that in a literal restaurant while a party is eating, though that's normally for customers who harass and disrupt other patrons, not karens.

Nonsense. Such customers are a huge cost and will always find reasons to overburden services.

The correct business response is to find ways to identify and eliminate them as customers, but that is rarely possible, so barring that you absolutely have to limit them to avoid their power of nuisance.

They are not people you can satisfy, or even want to: doubling staffing requirements in case one of those head cases swings by is not affordable.

> Applying attention rules to customers is a hallmark of bad customer service environments

That’s exactly what you’re advocating for, and what GP is advocating against.

Condiments and napkin dispensers on the table are hallmarks of fast casual and otherwise down-market restaurants, aren't they? Last time I waited tables, I had a few customers like the ones the GP described, and the best you could do was give them whatever time you could spare after giving your other tables the attention and service you would normally give. If I had asked the chef/owner to put ketchup bottles on every table, I would have gotten a long lecture on the joys of fine dining and the importance of maintaining a luxurious atmosphere.

Not so sure. Trying to accommodate the worst case customer seems a fools game. You're suggesting escalation, from running the server around to running the management around (and more work overall). Adding napkin dispensers at the tables may go against the entire aesthetic they're looking for, while not doing anything about the ketchup, water, and other frivolous requests.

>> If we create rules like this for how to deal with customers, based on assumptions about them...

There is no choice but to make assumptions about them (even just a generic model of a customer) unless you want to form some kind of relationship with them, which is not really possible in a restaurant setting (with the exception of regulars). Besides, the idea of simply deprioritizing them is quite sound - keep the other customers happy but don't deliberately insult the difficult one. You can not please everyone, so have rules that allow you to please the majority and let the others go.

As management “staff” are also your customers and you want to serve them as well.

Of course here, it's about economics. Better overworking employees rather than paying one more salary. That is the economic incentive is stronger than the "aim at the most efficient system" one.

If you had a client that insisted on uploading terabytes of data to your small “unlimited” text storage app, you’d likely tell them to knock it off, instead of buying more servers. This is a similar case