Is this the most condescending customer support ever experienced by mankind?

#1

Post by helloworld15 » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 8:13 PM UTC

Here's the exchange (anonymised as I'm not into public shaming): http://pastebin.com/grbfp3Kv

I'm sincerely interested in knowing what people's opinion on this exchange is. I felt condescended and disrespected from answer 1 all the way to the end. I may have overreacted but I was honestly blown away by how unhelpful and condescending this person was.

Thoughts?

--

UPDATE: thanks for all the answers so far. It's really helping balance my position in all this. I still feel like I'm the one who's right in the exchange but given how many pointed out I was too aggressive from the get go there has to be something there too.

I just feel like pointing out that a straight no (a.k.a. door shut in your face) on such a basic request is terrible and disappointing in 2015 isn't disrespectful enough to warrant the flood of condescension that came my way. I definitely escalated it after that, but I feel it was somehow warranted.

To those who ask that I name the company: please realise I only posted this here to get people's 2 cents on an exchange, not to publicly shame a company or an individual. There's already too much of that online and things like that have been known to have dire consequences for parties involved.

This is not my goal nor my motivation in posting this there.

Re: Is this the most condescending customer support ever experienced by mankind?

#2

Post by mariuolo » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 8:24 PM UTC

They know what they're talking about and they can spell.

Perhaps I suffer from lower expectations, but that's very much above average:)

Re: Is this the most condescending customer support ever experienced by mankind?

#3

Post by gus_massa » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 8:33 PM UTC

CUSTOMER > Your insularity and lack of touch with the developers community, not to mention your complete lack of manners, lost you a customer today.

I think that the previous email from SUPPORT was polite and this reply looks unnecessary aggressive for me. Perhaps the COMPANY doesn't have a real reason not to provide the link you wanted, but they can choose to do in their way. Vote with your wallet.

Re: Is this the most condescending customer support ever experienced by mankind?

#4

Post by orangecat » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 8:38 PM UTC

Honestly, this makes you look worse than the tech support person. They answered your question (presumably correctly), you didn't like the answer and told them they suck, and it unsurprisingly devolved from there.

Re: Is this the most condescending customer support ever experienced by mankind?

#5

Post by mtmail » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 8:42 PM UTC

The first response was basically "no, we don't have that feature", which I think is an acceptable answer. If other providers have that feature, then you're free to use them. A company doesn't have to implement any feature users ask for.

If you want me to be an independent judge, then the customer is the pushy and somewhat insulting one. For my product I would have (maybe) given you money back and wished you a good day. Any further discussion with the customer would have been wasted time.

Re: Is this the most condescending customer support ever experienced by mankind?

#6

Post by jefflinwood » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 8:48 PM UTC

I think the customer support at that Wordpress Plugin company was actually quite reasonable - if they use time limited S3 URLs (for presumably paid downloads), that's certainly their choice.

I must be completely misunderstanding something, but why wouldn't you buy the plugin, and then distribute it using your private server (like they suggest)? If the company goes out of business tomorrow, all of your builds will break if you depend on them being available.

I understand relying on RubyGems, NPM, etc., but commercial theme and plugin companies go out of business/switch licensing models/etc. all of the time.

Re: Is this the most condescending customer support ever experienced by mankind?

#7

Post by jordanpg » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 8:56 PM UTC

It's clear that the customer support rep has no training in customer relations, or at least doesn't care about customer satisfaction. It's rather obviously a bad business practice to engage in this kind of conversation with a customer.

That said, you definitely picked this fight. You got a direct answer to a direct question and then moved the conversation in a confrontational direction. "FYI, in 2015, that’s absolutely TERRIBLE."

I also don't think you're doing the world any good by not revealing what company this is. Why don't you let us judge for ourselves how bad things are?

Re: Is this the most condescending customer support ever experienced by mankind?

#8

Post by simonblack » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:01 PM UTC

Instead of clarifying the request, in case the support person had misunderstood it, the customer goes on the attack on the very first message after the first reply. The second reply of the support person is an explanation, and once again the customer continues the attack.

If I was the support person, I wouldn't accept that. People are mirrors, they reflect how you are treating them. If you ever feel you are mistreated, it's likely that your own previous behaviour is at fault.

Re: Is this the most condescending customer support ever experienced by mankind?

#9

Post by StudlyCaps » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:04 PM UTC

The customer support rep gave you the answer. You didn't like the answer and you picked the fight. Customer support staff don't get to decide what features a product will or will not have. Your feedback probably could have been directed to a different channel within that company that actually does look for feedback.

Re: Is this the most condescending customer support ever experienced by mankind?

#10

Post by helloworld151 » Sun, Feb 22, 2015, 9:21 PM UTC

mtmail wrote: post #5

The first response was basically "no, we don't have that feature", which I think is an acceptable answer. If other providers have that feature, then you're free to use them. A company doesn't have to implement any feature users ask for. If you want me to be an independent judge, then the customer is the pushy and somewhat insulting one. For my product I would have (maybe) given you money back and wished you a good da…

I'll stipulate that I might have phrased things in a somewhat aggressive way, but if you exclude the rest of the conversation all I pointed out was that in 2015 having your customers download code from your website and not offering tools to work with is terrible. I do stand behind that statement and as proof of that ALL the other providers had a solution for this as people do expect this kind of feature in 2015.

But yes, reading it now I could have beaten around the bush around more and I could have been more reasonable.

Things went south when the condescension started.