I wish I remember where I read that every good customer service relationship has two roles: The Complainer, and the Apologist. The secret to happiness is this: If your customer assumes one role, you must assume the other.

If your customer calls in anger and yells at you about Problem X, he's the Complainer. The proper response is to become the Apologist: "Gosh, I'm so sorry about X. I am filled with shame. It's entirely our fault that our product is filled with bugs; we should have embraced testing sooner and hired a better design team. I wish my parents had raised me better. Please don't hit me. We'll struggle to do better in the future, despite our haplessness. Here, have a free upgrade and a free support call."

If your customer calls and meekly reports that, oh, the software is great, and it's a real bargain, and he hates to even mention it, but Feature X really doesn't work... he's adopting the Apologist role. So you must become the Complainer: "WHAT? Feature X doesn't work! That is terrible! I can't believe we shipped a product with such an awful flaw! I'm going to fire the entire testing staff! Here, have a free upgrade and a free support call while I go shout at whomever is responsible for this travesty."

When people don't understand this rule, the situation often turns grim. Two Apologists risk descending into apathy: "Oh, this isn't really a problem, but..." "Well, yeah, that's not correct, but if it isn't really a problem..." "Gosh, though, it sure would be nice if you would fix it." "Well, okay, maybe... next week, sometime? Or maybe next month?"

A pair of Complainers risks an escalating argument that starts with insults and ends with lawsuits and violence.

(For a fun illustration of this, consider Monty Python's "dirty fork" sketch, in which the workers at a restaurant keep switching roles, from Apologist to Complainer to Extreme Apologist to Extreme Complainer to Suicidal Apologist to Homicidal Complainer, in dramatic and hilarious fashion, and the customer is completely confused. The sketch works because you get the sense, along with the customer, that the whole situation is somehow the customer's fault -- if he could just figure out which role to play, and adopt it, the situation would defuse. But the game is rigged: every time the customer picks a role the restaurant staff perversely adopts the same role and the situation escalates.)