alt Hacker NewsThe danger in assuming that all your customers who request support are the sort of person who couldn't empty water from a boot with instructions written on the heel is that all of your competent customers will seek out your more respectful competitors, leaving you with only those who couldn't empty the boot, thus maximising your support costs.
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It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. You can see these exact same market dynamics at work in the mobile telco industry. Newer online only upstarts able to save on costs because they don’t operate a retail store you can visit to get help resetting your email password.
Similarly when layoffs hit and morale gets low, guess what caliber of employee is going to jump ship and which is going to stay?
For a few years now, I've found every support department has been trained to treat every single person as if they were a dumb 5 year old.
The condescending replies from the outset, the 'clear your cookies' first line response to every bug report, the ignoring everything you say because you /must/ be wrong, the weird need to explain that they understand your feelings and frustrations (before even expressing any frustration)...
Drives me insane. There is no breaking through it. You will continue to get LLM replies tweaked for 5 year olds.
To be fair, HP lost their competent customers a long time ago.
Which is still not enough punishment for a decision like this. But without adequate consumer protection laws abuse like this is to be expected.