Is the vast majority of Americans nice to people who work in customer service?

35 comments

1. Yes.

   The jerks exist, but they are the minority.

   Real talk, I’d rather deal with a jerk than somebody who is needy or annoying or self-centered. (Think the type of person who argues about an expired coupon.)

2. I work in customer service and I’d say a lot of our customers are nice and easy to deal with.

   But 1-2x/day we get the real karens and the ultra-karens that make our workday worse. :/

3. No, we all live to verbally destroy a Starbucks barista at least once (this is sarcasm coz I find this a weird questions)

4. Yes. Americans are generally friendly

5. Yes, of course. All the videos you see are exceptions. There are hundreds of millions of interactions with customer service providers daily.

6. I haven’t worked a job like that in 30 years, but in my experience, no. Not that most people are nasty. Thankfully, that was much rarer. Most customers treat you indifferently..Which was fine with me, the purpose of that social interaction is just a quick, minor business exchange, no reason to pretend its anything else.

7. It feels like there is a generational divide. Young Americans mostly recognize that customer service is a hard and thankless job, I’ve never had a rude or combative young customer. The only people I’ve had awful interactions with while working in customer service for the past 10+ years are people who are minimum 45 years old. Most customers are polite, but the ones that aren’t always fall into the older age range.

8. It may’ve been skewed because it was in a small town Texas town but I worked for about 3 years in retail(from 2020 to last week) and the vast majority are nice. We’re typically a very friendly people and the people who aren’t nice aren’t typically that way for no reason. The people who are mean are typically just having a bad day and just venting to anyone who’ll listen. And although I no longer work in retail and I’ve only lived up here for a week, the impression I’ve gotten so far from rural Kansas is very similar, even if the South and Midwest are definitely different culturally.

9. Yes. Americans are polite.

10. As someone that works in customer service, mostly yes. Of course you will get a few assholes who think they’re entitled to everything but that is few and far in between.

11. Been on the customer service frontlines for a long time. The vast majority of people are polite or at least neutral. We see a lot of people who are quite entitled and unaware of it, but that’s a personal pet peeve, not necessarily automatic rudeness.

    I get a few truly bad interactions a year. Most of those, the customer is obviously going through a hard time. 95% of those, if I’m polite, patient, and above all empathetic, I can get them to accept I’m on their side even if it feels like no one else is.

    There’s one person who stands out as the worse customer ever, someone I spent 18 hours trying to assist one week. He insisted on dictating a letter of confirmation of insurance coverage to me, letter by letter. Then he wanted endless assurances we wouldn’t deny any insurance claims due to the $0.01 difference between the estimated coverage continuation cost and what we billed. We wrote the penny off, of course, but he was still freaked out. Everything was an emergency and a reason for him to be combative.

    He popped back up a few months later and I forwarded his email to the right team. He tried to freak out on me for that, calling me a “very rude girl” for forwarding him without his permission, and I got written permission from my boss to ignore him. Felt amazing.

    That’s one truly unreasonable person out of the estimated 60,000 calls I took in that position. Including a lot of escalations.

12. Most of the customers I interact with are very nice. There are a couple i dread interacting with because they have yelled at me or berated me numerous times but 99% of my interactions are good

13. Most are neutral/indifferent.

14. Not so much. There’s lots of entitled Karen’s in the USA.

15. Of course. It would be a huge red flag if someone weren’t nice to an individual who worked customer service.

16. Enough so that it’s notable when they aren’t.

17. Most of the time yes. I’ve been in CX for almost 20 years, I’m now overseeing a support ops team of about 130 in 6 countries. I’ve been here in an executive role for 4 years and like to joke that no one in the CX biz has more legal letters sent to clients on their behalf than I do.

    I work in music licensing and distribution. Our customers are artists, management teams, and labels. We receive pretty serious threats every single day, many are severe enough to involve the legal team and sometimes the police. It’s kind of annoying. We do around 61k interactions a month so of course some of those are gonna be wild but the way some people choose to talk to the people who are trying to help them… they really should be ashamed.

    I’m talking bomb threats, threats of violence, really offensive and vulgar/insulting language, sometimes clients show up at our office to attempt to threaten us in person. It can be scary sometimes but I really don’t fuck around with my teams’ safety and I take these things very seriously.

    When I worked in retail (10 years ago) and was managing a store team, I really enjoyed working on the floor with customers. I like helping people and helping them find clothes that fit right and made them feel good was really rewarding. I’m most of our customers were regulars and we were super friendly. There were def some crazies but they weren’t frequent.

    Some people just want to take their shit out on someone they know can’t do much about it. In my career the good interactions definitely outweigh the bad, but the bad are sometimes very very very bad. I stick up for my teams, I don’t let customers treat them like shit. They know I have their backs.

18. I’ve worked 15 years in retail and it’s hit or miss. 99% of the people are largely polite and forgettable but the 1% will ruin your life and outlook on humanity.

    It’s getting worse as entitlement grows, if that’s even possible.

19. Sadly, you can help 100 nice people in a day and the one jerk is the one you remember.

20. I’d say yes. Most people I’ve interacted with as a customer service person have been nice and considerate. You don’t hear about the 50 normal people you helped, you hear about the one crazy person because it’s unusual.

21. Let’s go with ‘slim majority.’

22. Most people are cool. A good handful are very nice and a good handful are the scourge of the Earth

23. Probably, which is why we hear about those who aren’t – they are NOT usual, and it is always a bit of a shock that Karens are running around without mental health workers chasing after them.

24. It varies. A lot of Americans have worked in customer service at some point. I’d hope that gives most people some measure of empathy.

25. Absolutely. The vast majority are quite neutral and just getting on with their task, buying something. Then some are really polite and understanding, fully aware that the service person is a person, possibly has other tasks then just your immediate requirements and simply go with whatever flow the worker needs.

    The freakout videos are generally quite rare to non existent unless you’re living in a more feral area of a big city, where things are, well, more feral in general. They’re really only news because they’re so rare, everyday interactions aren’t really news.

26. My very first job in college was working as a customer service person answering phone calls. I’d say 99% of my phone calls people were very nice and polite.

    I might get 1-2 calls per week (out of 20-30 hours of working) where people were doing the kind of stuff you see in online videos.

27. Yes

28. Probably, but the people who call the most are the worst fucks there are, and eventually, it puts you on depression meds listening to them all day.

29. From my own personal experience as a customer service rep for a national bank about 10 years ago I would say the majority are neutral to pleasant. Probably 1 in 5 might be a bit rude and maybe 1 in 10 were actively being assholes. But 75-80% were generally nice.

30. Worked in retail for 12 years. 80% of my customers were forgettable but nice, 15% were genuinely great people, 4% were annoying and probably miserable people in life, only 1% of people were straight up assholes.

31. Generally yes. You just hear about the bad ones because that’s more notable.

    Not sure if English is your second language but the better grammatical form of this question would be: “Are the vast majority of Americans nice to people who work in customer service?”

32. Nearly 25 years in security and specifically in tech support for security. I am also just a voice on the phone and a female which is very important. I have been called every name under the sun, insulted, cussed at, etc. And the sexism especially from older gentlemen? Ridiculous. It’s daily. And many times a day daily. No one listens to a woman doing tech support except middle aged and younger women. Older women and men always want to “talk to someone more knowledgeable” and younger men can be just straight condescending or even patronizing in tone.

    I’m sure in many industries 99% of the customers are pleasant but not in security. I’d say its about 2/3 to 3/4 of people are fine. The issue is that we are dealing with many mentally-ill/paranoid individuals, along with wealthy and/or entitled ones. It’s very unpleasant when they are both. So many think the rules just don’t apply to them, that they are somehow the exception, and in security there is very little gray.

    Why do people who want help talk to me like this? So incredibly rude.

33. I work in customer service and most people are perfectly fine.

34. Yes, working in customer service most people are perfectly fine. The problem is that in American customer service culture, employees are expected to bend over backwards to accommodate people who are throwing adult temper tantrums and not allowed to stand up for themselves. Most people still behave appropriately, but those who don’t are rewarded.

35. In my experience working in customer service (in Wisconsin if that makes a difference), the vast majority of people are really friendly and nice. Maybe like 99.5% of people. But that .5% of people really are the worst people.

    I think it is also important to note that this might change depending on what type of customer service you do. I think there are some companies (airlines or cable providers for example) who treat their customers pretty poorly. I am sure someone working in customer service at those places probably deal with a lot worse and it is really terrible that the company puts their employees in that position.