Joel really demonstrates his qualities here... This is quite simply an awesome post.

Having worked in tech support in a variety of capacities, all of this sounds familiar and I'm gratified to see some of the stuff I did (and do) corroborated.

I take the blame, diffuse people's fury and invent clever (if I may) ways to get people to do what I know they have to do, but which they are reluctant to do out of pride, laziness or frustration.

I've made up all kinds of stories about static electricity and magnetic resonance and god knows what garbage in order to get people to do what I needed them to do. It's easy to be upset at such people for being so dense, but (and I know, coming from me, this sounds a bit strange) being infuriated by your customers doesn't make you feel better. I was happiest when treating the whole thing like a game -- Manuipulate the Human.

All of that being said, even being awesome isn't going to prevent you from getting one or two really unmanageable customers. It's good that Fog Creek seems not to have any, but I have. People for whom no answer was sufficient, and who needed to yell for their own sake. I'm going to break from what Joel would probably advise and state outright that I refuse to let people verbally abuse me over the phone. I will not be called a "fucking idiot" or "dipshit" (which has happened) and continue pretending that we're having a civil dialogue. If I'm being berated and can't get a word in, I'll hang up. This will make the customer even more angry in the short term. He'll call back even more furious, but that's good in this case because he'll be sputtering and have more trouble keeping up the pace. He'll demand to know why you hung up on him and thereby actually let you say a word or two. Of the two times I've had to hang up on a customer, one eventually apologized and ended up chagrined but pleased with the results. The other one demanded to speak to my boss, and her boss, and eventually was reined in, but was probably never happy. Then, I figure that guy was probably never happy for more than 5 minutes, regardless of the circumstances. Some people really are just broken. -k]

When we handle a tech support incident with a well-qualified person here in New York, chances are that’s the last time we’re ever going to see that particular incident. So with one $50 incident we’ve eliminated an entire class of problems.

Somehow, the phone companies and the cable companies and the ISPs just don’t understand this equation. They outsource their tech support to the cheapest possible provider and end up paying $10 again and again and again fixing the same problem again and again and again instead of fixing it once and for all in the source code. The cheap call centers have no mechanism for getting problems fixed; indeed, they have no incentive to get problems fixed because their income depends on repeat business, and there’s nothing they like better than being able to give the same answer to the same question again and again.

Wow. So true. Except for one guy I keep getting at Sun's online customer service Chat. That guy is cool.