I occasionally get rude customer service emails at my startup, and in nearly every case the person apologizes after receiving a personal reply (from the founder, in my case) within 24 hours.
In many cases, the customer actually becomes an advocate for us. Once they understand that what they want (to be able to use our text enhancement within Kindle/gdocs/iBooks/Nook) is not something that my startup can do on its own, they will offer to reach out to the relevant BigCo and ask for them to build an integration.
Basically, people who will take the effort to reach out to complain to me are more likely to be willing to reach out to another company as well.
25% are just rude forever.
I have had to fire a few aholes from my SaaS. They would ask a question, get an answer, do the wrong thing, then call my support team member profanities. So I just refund their last bill and delete their account, and send them to a specific competitor I don’t like.
:-)
It's quite strange. Maybe it's because I have in the past drafted kind and considerate support requests only to be met with an incomprehensible response that's not related to what I said. Getting a genuine response is a pleasant surprise.
Consider that calling customer support often takes 30 minutes of being on hold and then talking to someone with no power to help you. People are generally do everything they can to figure it out on their own.
A lot of people contact support half-expecting that they'll get fucked around, and you see a complete 180 in their tone as soon as you offer a decent solution to their problem.
Of course, there are still those people who just want an excuse to be a cunt (maybe 1% or less, from my experience). I don't push them too hard to reach a solution, and just graciously accept the money they've paid me as an admission fee for what they actually wanted - an excuse to feel righteous when they smear shit on the walls.