[slver]

What customers hate is tier 1 support acting as a brick wall between them and the people with the solution to their problem. Or at least that's how they perceive it.

While I don't shout at tech support, as I know what the script is, you better believe my blood is quietly boiling as I'm rebooting various devices that have nothing to do with the issue on their instruction, just so I can get to an appointment with technicians to fix my real issue.

Same thing occurs with GP doctors, and basically every other system in tiers, where it inevitably organizes to basically stall you, so people don't overload the higher tiers.

[wccrawford]

That's a different issue, though. We have problems that literally nobody knew the reason for, and they required formatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows to fix. They did eventually figure things out, but it was over a year later, IIRC.

In the mean time, the techs would get yelled at for not knowing what was happening. I wasn't surprised when they invented reasons... And they may even have believed them.

As for the rebooting... I've seen too many weird things to deny them the reboots. And a few times it has actually fixed my problem, even though I believed it impossible. (And had the same happen to customers I was supporting.) So I know it's frustrating, but it's necessary in a surprising number of cases.

Also, techs were often the worst customers. They thought they knew everything, even if it was just Dunning-Kruger. Forcing them to reboot was painful, but actually worked more often than non-techs because the non-techs would blindly try things like that after having been told it once in the past. There were plenty of times I fell back on the "I can't send this up until you reboot it" because I knew there was a good chance the reboot would actually work if the customer tried to avoid it.