Customer Service
A short essay that’s very LinkedIn friendly
I love the mall. Especially my bizarre, Möbius-shaped mall, with a wing dedicated to subcultures. Walking into a mall feels like stepping into many parallel worlds, each revolving independent of the other. Together, they form a universe with dying and emerging planets.
In some worlds, you’re greeted with indifference. The workers barely glance up, offer no assistance, and leave you to navigate their freshly inflated prices on your own. That was my experience at Erroca, a glasses store, where the staff openly admitted their system was a mess after being bought by Super-Pharm. Their old database was gone, and the worker implied any previous customer’s information may have been sold off. He acted like helping me was more of a hassle than a sale. The mood wasn’t hostile, just hollow. Frustrating. I left wondering if the two employees joke with each other about not wanting customers to come in the store.
Around the bend of my Möbius strip there was another planet, a stone’s throw away, called Carolina Lemke. The manager immediately asked if I needed help. She offered suggestions based on my face shape, pointed out promotions to encourage more sales, and seemed genuinely interested in me getting the best purchase. She told me when frames looked “too nerdy.” Her feedback was human, direct, and engaged. I came in looking for one pair of glasses and left with two pairs plus two sunglasses. Maybe I could have received better glasses or a better deal at another store, but the store’s friendly demeanor made me want to buy.
The contrast stayed with me because I’ve seen both sides behind the counter too, except as a Customer Success and Tech Support worker. At a recent stint at a company, I watched my manager treat customers like a burden, and the team openly mock the customers for not coming prepared to meetings, rather than come up with ways to help confused customers more efficiently and kindly. Genuinely, I couldn’t understand why anyone stayed with that company, aside from being trapped by a monthly SaaS fee that gave an illusion of security compliance. And when I left the company, there was some relief. Despite needing the job, I knew that was not my team. I missed my previous team, where we remembered customer birthdays, vacations, and random personal details of their lives. That kind of attention doesn’t just retain users; it builds advocates.
The difference for me wasn’t in the product. It was in the people. Customer Success and Technical Support are not about The IT Crowd (British TV show) attitude or laughing about customers behind their back, and I never want to join another team that acts so childish. It’s about building relationships, sharing your knowledge rather than gatekeeping it, dogfooding your services, and building from all that.
What people buy has less to do with what we need. At the end of the day, you go to sleep in a bed, and you’ll get used to it, whether it’s a mansion or an apartment without windows. People buy relationships with those who truly care.
