My experience from retail: I often went months without a single nasty customer. I don’t know if I’m good with people or not but it was pretty rare to have an issue. Most of the bad customers were blatant shoplifters too, and not nasty at all (even these were uncommon)
The 5% Rule
151–160 of 212 posts
Re: The 5% Rule
#152It's perhaps worth noting that in excess of 5% of the populace have one form of mental disability or another. ADHD alone is estimated to be a disorder present in 5% of the adult population (2% are currently diagnosed; the 5% is based off childhood diagnosis rates and the fact it usually doesn't go away when becoming an adult). And while those with ADHD are unlikely to populate the OP's 5%, those with pathological nar…
Also when you consider other dimensions of personality that are normally distributed, and intelligence which is also normally distributed... it's not hard to imagine the bottom tails of some of those being contributing factors.
I sort of think what you're really seeing within that 5% is a majority fraction of "baseline shitty" people, and a minority people of "momentarily shitty" people.
The baseline shitty people are likely a kaleidoscope/patchwork of pathologies, and the momentarily shitty people fall within normal ranges but circumstances have pushed their stress levels north of what they can handle.
Re: The 5% Rule
#153Is it the same 5% for everyone or is everyone part of a 5% for some small group of people?
Re: The 5% Rule
#154When I was younger I worked at a local supermarket and later at a sports store - turns out customers at the sports store were almost exclusively nice.
Not a huge sample size as I only worked at the one store but from talking to others seems like the number of degenerates is waaaay lower when people play sports
Re: The 5% Rule
#155Personality 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.
Re: The 5% Rule
#156I deal with technical issues for users and have for over 20 years all around the world. In my experience 5% is too high. There are certainly problem customer, some from frustration for things not working, some more a language barriers and then the jack asses - I’d say that 80% of the work is on 10% of customers which skews the results further. I can only think of a handful, less than 10 customers I wanted to fire and only one who was such an asshole I did in those 20 years. If you are able to solve the problem of the user they normally turn around.
Re: The 5% Rule
#157I 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 ho…
you have great voice and annunciation. They go long way!
Thanks! Just think, my voice is just one call away… so long as I’m not changing a diaper or cooking dinner.
Re: The 5% Rule
#158I 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 ho…
> I handle 100% of my indie app's email
Same.
> Still, 50/1000 seems high to me
Same.
Re: The 5% Rule
#159Another take, one to be sure s/he is not one of the 5%
Re: The 5% Rule
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience (e-commerce) is similar to this. 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…
> 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 ad…
75% convert.
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.