I handle 100% of my indie app's email and telephone (yes, telephone!) support. My app is designing/printing labels. Printers in general, and label printers specifically are awful and inconsiderate robots, unable to perform the simplest printing job when you need it most.
Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be. If you can show them the light, if you can "flip" these users, they will become your most loyal customers.
I start by telling them, "Hey, every month I get a call like yours where you are so frustrated you want to scream, and let me tell you a secret, if I got a call every day like this... I'd quit this business, but calls like yours are rare and I want to help you through this."
Boom. They're listening, and they're often listening to advice they don't want to hear. What kind of advice? Oh... like, "you will have to work through this and tweak the measurements until it works, because some printer drivers are mysterious and terrible. But once you get it, you'll be rewarded with it working for a long time until you have to buy a new printer."
Still, 50/1000 seems high to me, I like to think I earn the trust of 90% of my nasty/mean customers. Sometimes I'm lucky and I just paste a URL to a FAQ. After 4 years in business I had my first person hang up on me because they kept demanding a simple answer and I would say, "sorry, it's more complicated than that, I don't have a simple answer... I just have two complex answers that contradict each other until you can choose which one is the lesser of two evils."
It could be a book that no one would read: Zen and the Art of Label Printing
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.
> 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.
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.
Honestly I'm often this customer (the one that flips 180 - not the one who wants to be a cunt!)
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.
I think this is simple selection bias. People who reach out are going to be rather motivated (frustrated).
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.
I did tech support for a few years and probably answered 100k calls or so. I would estimate that less than 1% of people were unreasonable. 2-3% were mean people. 80% were kind. It's a hard job and you have to focus on the good.
Yes, tech support can be difficult and it seems like your statistics are similar to ours. We receive around 5,000 support tickets per day and we simply cannot satisfy everyone. Sometimes we have to "fire" a customer who becomes disrespectful towards one of our attendants.
> Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be.
Yours is a wonderful comment and you must be a very empathetic person.
Sadly, the vast majority of people tend to have just enough empathy to get by (we definitely are outliers!) and have a really hard time understanding that the very mean person most probably just had a terrible, terrible day or week, and lashed out on you. Yeah, it sucks and it is non excusable, but we all go through the worst days of our lives eventually.
In my experience it is wrong to assume that 5% of people are nasty, like the article says. It's a sad view of the world. 5% of people are currently blinded by life that has just shit upon them, and patience and a little selflessness would calm them down, and maybe, make their shitty day even better. And if they are complaining about something, whatever their attitude, there is probably something wrong that needs your attention.
Sociopaths exists but they are very rare, and often they just want to go about their day, not caring much about you to do anything good or bad.
I am at the point in my life where I have a shitty broken printer that I'm still not getting rid of, because at least I am aware of all the ways it is broken and shitty and how to fix them or work around them.
While I’m sure this is a real problem, I’ve been on the other side of this equation where you’ve tried your level best to get a problem resolved, and not only haven’t had it resolved, but have been repeatedly screwed even more.
For example, many years ago, I signed up for a landline phone (when that’s all there was), and signed up for a particular special service that Ameritech was offering that would allow me to have a computer on a modem running 24/7 without getting unreasonable charges. Eventually, I get the first bill and it’s charging me the regular rate. I sigh and call them. They agree it’s their mistake and they’ll fix it to remove the charge and it will be reflected in the next bill. It isn’t. I go around in circles for 6 months, with my bill increasing to thousands of dollars. Finally I call them up and just start screaming at someone, and that is what finally got it fixed.
I’m not proud to have done that, but sometimes it’s the only option. The person I was yelling at wasn’t the one who caused the problem or lied to me, but I didn’t know of any other options at the time. (I was raised by wolves, it turns out.) And, ultimately, it worked.
None of the examples given in the article make me think it would consider screaming at a representative of a company that’s wrongfully cost you thousands of dollars after you’ve spent months trying to rectify it as part of the “5%”. That’s totally reasonable, even if it want directly the representative’s fault. Screaming at a service worker because of a hair in your food isn’t—that’s psychotic.
No, screaming at a worker whose job is to answer the phones is not reasonable. It shouldn't have cost them anything either - you shouldn't be paying incorrect bills.
Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?
Yes, this was my question. Are 3-5% of people horrible all the time, or are we all horrible 3-5% of the time? Or more likely at any given time 3-5% of us are horrible, with some of us entering the group more often than others.
Off the top of my head, I can think of a half dozen people I've known who are just horrible all of the time. Nasty to their family, nasty to coworkers, nasty to strangers. I can think of another half dozen who are just in the habit of mistreating service workers.
Some people you're just catching on a bad day, but there is definitely a portion of the population that are just crappy people.
It isn't your fault. Support systems are designed to triage and remediate. This means the loudest voices get served the best, or, that the squeaky wheel gets what they need. Of course, there are limits to this. One thing I've noticed is when I am in an automated call tree with voice recognition, speaking loudly (almost yelling), gruffly, and demanding a human will often get you an level 2 or higher support tech. I tend to shut this off when a human gets on the line, but the call does get dispositioned and often white-gloved.
No this should not be correct (that is if you are assuming the 3-5% rules is correct and I'm not saying it is). The people who work for companies are vetted by the company so in theory the percentage of people who are bad would have to in theory be less simply because of that filter. The people a company (or someone is dealing with) is unfiltered hence the probability in theory again should be higher.
I think it's more than 5% on the service personnel side. Customers are a more reliable random sample than service personnel, who are likely to not like their jobs in the first place.
Personality traits like this are on a Bell curve, so he's just talking about the "left hand corner" of that curve. The percentage just depends on your threshold for tolerance.
I know people who are convinced that 50% of people are horrible people, their tolerance stops at "anything left of the median".
My tolerance is the opposite, and I can work with even quite problematic people successfully, so I would estimate that just 1% of people make that unnecessarily difficult.
I agree, and want to also add: If you're in software / tech (if this is an incorrect assumption on my part please say so and I apologize in advance; I've become used to seeing your posts and my sense is this might be your domain), on average you're working with people who are significantly more intelligent than the average adult human being.
In my experience, the rate of nasty / miserable / mentally unstable / "want the world to burn" chaotic people amongst the general public in the United States is pretty close to 1 in 20 (5%).
At my swe jobs it's been more like what you say~ 1% or less who are serious struggles to try and work with.
> significantly more intelligent than the average adult human being.
?
You'll probably take offence to this, and I'm sure this will contradict your general experience, and will probably even set off some folks' pet pride narratives about themselves working in software...but I think that's bullshit.
I don't think software people are smarter than any other profession on average, and I think almost anyone can learn to program and be employed in a software job. As someone who worked all of hospitality, hard science and software, I can say that all these folks that seem really smart, basically just seem that way because they use highly specialized technical knowledge. You can have pretty dull people who nevertheless are really smart at chemistry, or customer service or software, because they possess the specialized technical knowledge. I don't even think the average case is software people are smarter...but it definitely (again this will probably sound like I'm denigrating software people) seems like they think they are.
Yet that attitude is not unique to software folks, I've known people who worked other things and: lawyers think they're smarter, accountants think they're smarter, business majors think they're smarter, hard science folks think they're smarter, etc...
This probably will sound like I"m trying to denigrate software people, what I'm actually aiming to do is just to discredit the what I assume to be bullshit stereotype that (to seemingly overstate it): software is some sort of rarified intellectual pursuit confined only to some elite intelligentsia. In that sense, I think HN probably gives software a "bad name" in that sense by associating it with intellectualists, but even then truth belies that, as HN is diverse, it's not just software people.
I hope people stop with the belief that people employed in software professions are a hyper-intelligent rare species, and are actually just regular folks possessed of essentially fairly narrow specialized technical knowledge. To finish on what will probably be the harshest statement you read today: I get if people like that mystique, but I think it's unnecessary, often compensatory, and just plain false.
Happy to be wrong; guess it depends on how you define smart; lies, damned lies and statistics, etc; but that's what my gut says.
In my experience, the smarter someone is, the more entitled/bratty they tend to be (especially to service workers or people they look down on).
On the other hand, “dumber” people (or just poorer people without a knowledge job tbh) tend to be more screwed over by society and may be more reactionary.
Eg. A swe might talk down to a waiter and be demeaned while they work, but a poor person may resort to yelling at a bank representative on the phone because that mistaken $10 charge affects their ability to buy groceries, and it happens all the time.
This has been my experience as well. I, too, have met and talked to thousands of people from every possible background on seven different continents of this world. From the poorest people on Earth to some of the richest.
I've seen the same thing. About 5% are nasty and about 1% are truly bad people who commit horrible crimes.
Saying this from my personal experience [ workspace related not familial ] : What happens is that some of these bad people have charisma, can make you follow them, for their ulterior motives. So if you get trapped in that circle, because you tolerated for so long, you probably did not get to experience the 5% bad, but maybe 20% bad over your lifetime. So my lesson there is ... walk. You recognize a problem, you walk, rather than try to fix it. Of course you should give a chance, but that is it - just one chance and then none.
Makes me wonder if the distribution is independent of other personality and socioeconomic factors.
Much earlier in life I helped recruit for a cult (much has changed since then). 3% - 5% seems on the high side for people who "just suck" -- perhaps by an order of magnitude. But perhaps the "just sucks" is context dependent. I found early on the FORD bulletpoints makes it pretty simple to start smalltalk (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams/Desires).
IDK about "horrible" but https://www.sentencingproject.org/research/ puts it at 1.5 million peak. Thats not quite 1 percent of the US population but its also not that far off. And we can quibble about US sentencing rules but the BoP has a count[1] of felony categories and drugs make up less than half, and its even less in state prisons.
The reason the estimate feels high is likely that the HN crowd is progressively separated from less stable elements of society. The bullies picking on kids at recess don't generally make it onto the gifted / accelerated track, or your 4 year degree granting university. You're going to encounter fewer of them at upmarket shopping centers and corporate offices, if for no other reason, 1.5 million people are in prison.
The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you.
Other cases, it might not be the person's first time in the store. If they tried several times to fix a problem they are frustrated and and angry. I've had this happen to me multiple times and no matter how patient and nice the representative is, it doesn't change the fact I've wasted way too much time on this problem and you can't make me happy. Even if you solve my problem, it will not make up the lost time and energy.
The only thing I'd recommend is to try and be more empathetic. You never know what the person has been through. If you think they suck and you see them at their worst, they could probably use some empathy.
> The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time. When you work sales, some people will enter your store on the day they got dumped, their family member died, they got kicked out of school. You never know why people are acting out. Chances are it's nothing about you.
As much as I hate to post training material from ChickFilA…one of the videos they required us to watch explained this all so well and really made me stop to think about what others might be dealing with when I’m interacting with them. It’s a bit heavy on the emotional angle, but does it’s job well imo.
It’s been a long time since I’ve worked there, so no clue if it’s still required or not but, here it is in its ~3 minute length.
> The silly thing is to assume that since you had a bad experience with someone they are like this all the time.
The post mentions doctors and seems to indicate that they would put a higher percentage of humans in the ‘terrible’ category.
Add stress and people act poorly. There also seems to be a thing where people can’t always articulate what they are feeling (eg a specific phobia they have) and act out in response to the stress.
Once the stress has gone they are different people.
Don’t get me wrong, I also think that more than 5% of people are terrible.
It depends on how you handle a bad day. If you are self aware and explain "I am having a bad day before I got here." any rep with a modicum of empathy will appreciate your grace/effort to not lose your shit, often being extra nice about it.
But that relies on customer 5% not meeting a rep in that 5% too.
I feel like this guy is my therapist and just told me a fantastic insight that's perfect for me at that moment.
As I was reading it, I came to the same conclusion as the writer -
You really have permission to free your mind of those people and just focus on taking care of the people who don't suck. Just expect it and move about your day.
In 20 years of dealing with customers I've had to deal with maybe 3 people who were real jerks. Maybe my experience is unusual, but my customers come from all over the world. Rich countries, poor countries, non-profits, startups to fortune 500. Practically everybody is friendly and respectful.
Occasionally people are irritable or upset, but I don't take it at all personally. I just assume they're having a bad day or that they're angry for valid reasons I just don't know. When people figure out you actually want to help them the anger dissipates immediately.
Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice, and when you call their support the phone operators are not authorized to actually resolve your issue anyway. So yeah, that makes people angry. They would leave if they could, but where would they go? AT&T? It's a racket.
> Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice
I agree, but with actual support technicians at Verizon I've actually had pretty decent, even above average interactions. The company itself does things I detest, but I try not to take it out on the people answering the phone.
Personality disorders are very real and surprisingly prevalent, with 3.6% of Americans meeting the diagnostic criteria for antisocial personality disorder and 4.4% for paranoid personality disorder (the two disorders that are most likely to make people difficult and unpleasant to deal with). https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/pn.3...
I wonder if people with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) might be high on the "likely to make people difficult and unpleasant" list as well. A quick search suggests that ~5% of the population has NPD, which surprised me.
Readit News
Sure, 2-5% of my users are nasty/mean, but let me tell you a little secret: They are immensely frustrated with their life situation and they know how simple the solution should be. If you can show them the light, if you can "flip" these users, they will become your most loyal customers.
I start by telling them, "Hey, every month I get a call like yours where you are so frustrated you want to scream, and let me tell you a secret, if I got a call every day like this... I'd quit this business, but calls like yours are rare and I want to help you through this."
Boom. They're listening, and they're often listening to advice they don't want to hear. What kind of advice? Oh... like, "you will have to work through this and tweak the measurements until it works, because some printer drivers are mysterious and terrible. But once you get it, you'll be rewarded with it working for a long time until you have to buy a new printer."
Still, 50/1000 seems high to me, I like to think I earn the trust of 90% of my nasty/mean customers. Sometimes I'm lucky and I just paste a URL to a FAQ. After 4 years in business I had my first person hang up on me because they kept demanding a simple answer and I would say, "sorry, it's more complicated than that, I don't have a simple answer... I just have two complex answers that contradict each other until you can choose which one is the lesser of two evils."
It could be a book that no one would read: Zen and the Art of Label Printing
A quick video of my app Label LIVE, narrated by yours truly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnqUP1CZd24
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.
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.
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.
Yours is a wonderful comment and you must be a very empathetic person.
Sadly, the vast majority of people tend to have just enough empathy to get by (we definitely are outliers!) and have a really hard time understanding that the very mean person most probably just had a terrible, terrible day or week, and lashed out on you. Yeah, it sucks and it is non excusable, but we all go through the worst days of our lives eventually.
In my experience it is wrong to assume that 5% of people are nasty, like the article says. It's a sad view of the world. 5% of people are currently blinded by life that has just shit upon them, and patience and a little selflessness would calm them down, and maybe, make their shitty day even better. And if they are complaining about something, whatever their attitude, there is probably something wrong that needs your attention.
Sociopaths exists but they are very rare, and often they just want to go about their day, not caring much about you to do anything good or bad.
Same.
> Still, 50/1000 seems high to me
Same.
For example, many years ago, I signed up for a landline phone (when that’s all there was), and signed up for a particular special service that Ameritech was offering that would allow me to have a computer on a modem running 24/7 without getting unreasonable charges. Eventually, I get the first bill and it’s charging me the regular rate. I sigh and call them. They agree it’s their mistake and they’ll fix it to remove the charge and it will be reflected in the next bill. It isn’t. I go around in circles for 6 months, with my bill increasing to thousands of dollars. Finally I call them up and just start screaming at someone, and that is what finally got it fixed.
I’m not proud to have done that, but sometimes it’s the only option. The person I was yelling at wasn’t the one who caused the problem or lied to me, but I didn’t know of any other options at the time. (I was raised by wolves, it turns out.) And, ultimately, it worked.
Had they filed official complaints? Gone to any regulator? Had the issue escalated?
Some people you're just catching on a bad day, but there is definitely a portion of the population that are just crappy people.
...unless call center support is a biased sample.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xtgH74hh6pQ
I know people who are convinced that 50% of people are horrible people, their tolerance stops at "anything left of the median".
My tolerance is the opposite, and I can work with even quite problematic people successfully, so I would estimate that just 1% of people make that unnecessarily difficult.
I agree, and want to also add: If you're in software / tech (if this is an incorrect assumption on my part please say so and I apologize in advance; I've become used to seeing your posts and my sense is this might be your domain), on average you're working with people who are significantly more intelligent than the average adult human being.
In my experience, the rate of nasty / miserable / mentally unstable / "want the world to burn" chaotic people amongst the general public in the United States is pretty close to 1 in 20 (5%).
At my swe jobs it's been more like what you say~ 1% or less who are serious struggles to try and work with.
?
You'll probably take offence to this, and I'm sure this will contradict your general experience, and will probably even set off some folks' pet pride narratives about themselves working in software...but I think that's bullshit.
I don't think software people are smarter than any other profession on average, and I think almost anyone can learn to program and be employed in a software job. As someone who worked all of hospitality, hard science and software, I can say that all these folks that seem really smart, basically just seem that way because they use highly specialized technical knowledge. You can have pretty dull people who nevertheless are really smart at chemistry, or customer service or software, because they possess the specialized technical knowledge. I don't even think the average case is software people are smarter...but it definitely (again this will probably sound like I'm denigrating software people) seems like they think they are.
Yet that attitude is not unique to software folks, I've known people who worked other things and: lawyers think they're smarter, accountants think they're smarter, business majors think they're smarter, hard science folks think they're smarter, etc...
This probably will sound like I"m trying to denigrate software people, what I'm actually aiming to do is just to discredit the what I assume to be bullshit stereotype that (to seemingly overstate it): software is some sort of rarified intellectual pursuit confined only to some elite intelligentsia. In that sense, I think HN probably gives software a "bad name" in that sense by associating it with intellectualists, but even then truth belies that, as HN is diverse, it's not just software people.
I hope people stop with the belief that people employed in software professions are a hyper-intelligent rare species, and are actually just regular folks possessed of essentially fairly narrow specialized technical knowledge. To finish on what will probably be the harshest statement you read today: I get if people like that mystique, but I think it's unnecessary, often compensatory, and just plain false.
Happy to be wrong; guess it depends on how you define smart; lies, damned lies and statistics, etc; but that's what my gut says.
In my experience, the smarter someone is, the more entitled/bratty they tend to be (especially to service workers or people they look down on).
On the other hand, “dumber” people (or just poorer people without a knowledge job tbh) tend to be more screwed over by society and may be more reactionary.
Eg. A swe might talk down to a waiter and be demeaned while they work, but a poor person may resort to yelling at a bank representative on the phone because that mistaken $10 charge affects their ability to buy groceries, and it happens all the time.
E.g.: I noticed variance comparable to yours going from a general public school in a poor neighbourhood to a university.
I've seen the same thing. About 5% are nasty and about 1% are truly bad people who commit horrible crimes.
Much earlier in life I helped recruit for a cult (much has changed since then). 3% - 5% seems on the high side for people who "just suck" -- perhaps by an order of magnitude. But perhaps the "just sucks" is context dependent. I found early on the FORD bulletpoints makes it pretty simple to start smalltalk (Family, Occupation, Recreation, Dreams/Desires).
The reason the estimate feels high is likely that the HN crowd is progressively separated from less stable elements of society. The bullies picking on kids at recess don't generally make it onto the gifted / accelerated track, or your 4 year degree granting university. You're going to encounter fewer of them at upmarket shopping centers and corporate offices, if for no other reason, 1.5 million people are in prison.
[1]: https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_offen...
Other cases, it might not be the person's first time in the store. If they tried several times to fix a problem they are frustrated and and angry. I've had this happen to me multiple times and no matter how patient and nice the representative is, it doesn't change the fact I've wasted way too much time on this problem and you can't make me happy. Even if you solve my problem, it will not make up the lost time and energy.
The only thing I'd recommend is to try and be more empathetic. You never know what the person has been through. If you think they suck and you see them at their worst, they could probably use some empathy.
As much as I hate to post training material from ChickFilA…one of the videos they required us to watch explained this all so well and really made me stop to think about what others might be dealing with when I’m interacting with them. It’s a bit heavy on the emotional angle, but does it’s job well imo.
It’s been a long time since I’ve worked there, so no clue if it’s still required or not but, here it is in its ~3 minute length.
https://youtu.be/2v0RhvZ3lvY
The post mentions doctors and seems to indicate that they would put a higher percentage of humans in the ‘terrible’ category.
Add stress and people act poorly. There also seems to be a thing where people can’t always articulate what they are feeling (eg a specific phobia they have) and act out in response to the stress.
Once the stress has gone they are different people.
Don’t get me wrong, I also think that more than 5% of people are terrible.
I work in healthcare as a radiographer.
It depends on how you handle a bad day. If you are self aware and explain "I am having a bad day before I got here." any rep with a modicum of empathy will appreciate your grace/effort to not lose your shit, often being extra nice about it.
But that relies on customer 5% not meeting a rep in that 5% too.
As I was reading it, I came to the same conclusion as the writer -
You really have permission to free your mind of those people and just focus on taking care of the people who don't suck. Just expect it and move about your day.
That's freeing for me.
Occasionally people are irritable or upset, but I don't take it at all personally. I just assume they're having a bad day or that they're angry for valid reasons I just don't know. When people figure out you actually want to help them the anger dissipates immediately.
Verizon treats their customers with contempt as a business practice, and when you call their support the phone operators are not authorized to actually resolve your issue anyway. So yeah, that makes people angry. They would leave if they could, but where would they go? AT&T? It's a racket.
I agree, but with actual support technicians at Verizon I've actually had pretty decent, even above average interactions. The company itself does things I detest, but I try not to take it out on the people answering the phone.