[joshmn]

I've thought about this a lot. My takeaway is that it's incredibly hard to scale personality—which I have in spades—and even more difficult to give the freedoms for each customer support individual to operate equally as themselves.

You can't build a playbook for friendliness, and people have bad days which they certainly can drag into work. I am guilty of this, too. The proceeding week after my mom died I was rather terse, and have some uncomfortable memories of being short and not living up to my own standards. I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better. This user in particular was relatively new. If I recall correctly, he churned.

[freedomben]

> I went so far as to tell the person my situation and they told me that because I'm providing a service I have to do better.

IMHO that's an asshole and not somebody you want as a customer anyway.

[joshmn]

That was one of the lessons I took away was that not every customer is a good customer. While I did have really accessible customer service, I didn’t want to be everything to anyone, even if it left money on the table. The quirks and features of the site where enough for the typical Reddit user (at the time) to discern, more so than those who were accustomed to official services, sports or otherwise.