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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the disconnect here is that the angry people are viewing this one person's response as representative of the entire company and as though it was filtered through a PR rep, while the more understanding people are viewing this person a person speaking for themselves, not necessarily the whole company.

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.

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Yea, that sounds about right. I think I recall being a support rep for trading software in college and I've interacted with those front line workers for a long time now so I have a lot of empathy for them.

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.

This industry mostly provides very ephemeral services, so it's almost never a matter of life and death (the entire multi-million email marketing sector could implode overnight and life would go on just fine), but you still charge money for those ephemeral services, and the least you could do would be to take your screw-ups a bit seriously.

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.

Yes and no.

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.

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