While working as L2/L3 support for a enterprise product, i notice that people were not that mean/angry as they sound in the email (Maybe it was a wrong interpretation of mine) when you actually call them. Even though calling customer sounds like lot of time waste but many issues were resolved quickly over the phone rather than email/ticketing system. I really enjoyed talking with various customers and understand their use case and usually used to go beyond and above to help them.
Yes! This was a huge lesson I learned as well. You can spend days going back and forth over email with a customer trying to figure out wtf they're doing. They get irritated that you're not getting it, you get irritated that they're not explaining things right. All can be solved with a quick phone call or screen sharing. But younger folks new to support are often really hesitant to pick up the phone. Just pick up the phone!
I started doing this ("picking up the phone") and you are 100% right in that in can work absolute wonders. Folks who have grown increasingly frustrated at a back-and-forth email exchange are just insanely delighted when I skip forward several rounds of mutual frustration and just unexpectedly call them.
"Hello, is this Marc? This is Trevor from Quail; email was taking too long, let's just figure this thing out together." is my go-to phrase, and I've lost count of how many customers I've converted from almost-churned into the best possible evangelists through the simple mantra of "just pick up the phone!"
This was my experience too. I worked for a while in tech support for my university and while from time to time we'd get frustrated calls from professors that couldn't upload their grades or where frustrated by how things looked different, it was super satisfying finding ways to help solve their problems.
It was kind of an unique situation because I was also a developer of the system that I was giving support for thus I really had inside knowledge and when things "looked different" I could tell them way they looked different and how it could benefit them in the new way they looked. I don't remember a single case in which after explaining the way people actually preferred the "old look".
I see that time as a highlight in my professional experience (should emphasize on my resume now that I think about it!)
