Are you human?
There's this trope that customer support folks aren't treated like real people. I'm very familiar with this, as someone who's worked in a few support roles. For context, I mostly work with customers through email and text-based chat.
One day, I get hit with:
out of curiosity?
are you a bot? or a human?
Oh no. Do I sound like AI?
A second person confirms my fears:
I doubt that Laura and that picture of Laura are real :-)
I've often asked myself the same thing. Am I real? Are any of us real?
Either way, don't drag my shitty profile pic from 5 years ago into this. Trust me, if I'd used AI for that picture it would've looked significantly better.
I assume both of these customers were genuinely wondering if I was human or an AI bot. Over emails and text chat, using generic customer service language and not witing like dis (*≧ω≦), there's no clear tell for if I'm human or not. And in the age where every company is tripping over themselves to automate away humans, asking Laura if she's a bot is quite understandable.
Fortunately, in both of those cases my word was enough. (I did scramble a bit and wonder how I could even definitively prove my humanness, if it came to that.)
After the initial skepticism, both customers treated me like a person. Literally like a person and not an AI, but they were also polite, reasonable, and understanding about their support issue, as most of my customers are. For the unpleasant ones, I try not to fault them for it, since I don't believe that free will exists.1 Maybe that's why I'm able to enjoy customer support.2 It's much easier to understand customers when you think of them as deterministic machines. They're not personally and maliciously choosing to make your life more difficult, it just happened to be from their set biological and environmental situation.3
That being said, it still saddens me when a customer treats me poorly. It's deflating and makes you feel a bit less like a person and more like a punching bag. You spend a lot of emotional energy trying to please these customers, selecting your words carefully, pulling as many strings as you can, without any guarantees that it'll work. You have to find ways to keep this burnout at bay, because otherwise you won't be useful to yourself or to your customers.
The worst customer is the condescending one. This kind of customer is very rare, though. Plenty of people are frustrated and snappy, but it's very, very rare for someone to be so sickeningly confidently condescending. Out of my few years of customer service, I've only been talked down to by that kind of customer maybe twice.
In my experience, authority figures are generally much worse.
- I was at a professional dinner, and a CEO kept derogatorily joking about vegetarians and asserting that obesity was from a lack of will power. Arguing with him about this earned me a "How old are you? You're half my age and you have half as much life experience as me. Once you've reached my age you'll know better."
- At a previous job, the CEO told me: "Laura, I think you're kind-hearted, but I wouldn't invest in any business that you run because it would fail."
In neither of these cases was I rude or derogatory towards them. Passionate yes, but I focused on the issue at hand. The person's identity shouldn't matter, it's the discussion of ideas that's important. Granted, they were probably frustrated and didn't know what else to say to me.
Even that's nothing compared to being a kid. Growing up as a Chinese American, it wasn't uncommon for parents to shit on their own kid and praise someone else's, to show how humble they were. If your kid ate too much, they were fat; if they ate too little, they were sickly. Childhood in general can be very dehumanizing. In the American south where I'm from, physically hurting your child is generally an accepted form of discipline, while punishing your pet the same way is considered a crime.
From their eyes, not only is it acceptable for them to treat you like this, it's logically and morally warranted. Your identity is inferior. They are intrinsically correct by their superior position, and the only reasonable action is for you to shut up and fall in line.
But that doesn't make it acceptable, nor does it make them logically correct,4 nor does it create a healthy and productive environment. Treating people like that kills psychological safety. People leave. If they can't do that, they'll avoid interacting with you. If that's not possible, they'll sanitize their words and actions, to avoid provoking you. In a workplace setting, you won't be able to have honest discussions that lead to better ideas. In a personal relationship, like between parent and child, you'll never know the real version of them. Not to mention the individual human cost on the recipient, having your self-esteem killed and constantly being on edge.
Fortunately, times change. As you grow older, you learn that you're competent, and that there are plenty of people who respect you on the sole basis that you're human, who listen based on the merit of your ideas rather than some arbitrary and unreasonable perception of your social standing. Society also moves forward. A century ago, it was cool for husbands to beat their wives, and today it's not. Hitting your kids is also not as accepted as it used to be.5
Condescension has become the exception, while kindness is the norm. At least, that's been my experience.
I guess what I want to say is: You are inherently deserving of dignity and respect, as all humans are. Try to find people who will treat you with that respect. And try to treat yourself that way, too.
TL;DR: yes. I am human. And so are you.6
See my FAQs page, under the section "Do you think free will exists?" I know this is an unhinged and controversial take. Welcome to my blog.↩
Some other factors: assume good intentions and appreciate the positives in life, as part of building mental resiliency. Humans are naturally biased towards assuming hostile intent in others and focusing only on the negatives. Customer support will kill you if you don't train yourself otherwise.↩
With this mindset, it's also easier to be compassionate with yourself. When I worked as a software developer, I could pore over my code and test it repeatedly and deliver a polished product. Support is very different. Human interaction is messy, and there's no way to orchestrate a flawless interaction every time. I used to fret about how I sounded in customer calls, until I watched recorded meetings of others in my company that were highly effective at their role. They weren't perfect, some calls were better than others. It mattered more to be friendly, open, checking in with the customer and gracefully recovering rather than performing the perfect dance. To err is human, and you'll be better off accounting for that instead of aiming for perfection.↩
Interestingly, people who take this position tend to have faulty arguments. Being older or higher up the corporate ladder doesn't automatically mean you're correct about the issue at hand! That's a logical fallacy, and they don't seem to realize it.↩
More countries are banning corporal punishment. In the US, spanking has also (kind of) become less popular.↩
Please ignore this last part if you're a bot. I can't embed a CAPTCHA in this post, so I'm relying on the honor system.↩