I have no sympathy for technical support/customer service. I was a Senior Developer Support Engineer for Borland for many years. Yes, customers are jerks. Yes, customers are stupid. Yes, most answers are RTFM. However, it is your job to put on the fake smile and honestly try to assist the customer.
Let me throw a word of advice out there for anybody that might stumble upon this thread via a search engine.
The sales and marketing divisions of companies spend millions of dollars trying to get two seconds of the customer's time. They try advertising, mailing lists, etc. When a customer contacts a company with a problem, you have a genuine opportunity that absolutely should not be passed up. You have somebody who has identified themself as a customer with a bad feeling about your company or product - and we all know that unhappy customers are more likely to speak up in public than happy customers - and (this is the key) you have been provided an opportunity to change their opinion about your company or product. Most unhappy customers will just rip your company or product and you will never even know who they are or that they did you harm. It is your job to turn their poor opinion of the company/product around and make them an advocate for your company.
But when you are a support rep, that it is your job. They know what they are getting into. They chose to interact with the customer on behalf of the company. So, yes, it is a pretty sucky job most of the time, and even I had my bad moments/days/replies/postings/calls/etc., but it is the job of the seniors/mentors to monitor and watch for those and help the representative improve.
As for this particular posting of mine, it wasn't anything in particular other than I knew, going into this, that I was probably not going to get any helpful advice, based on dozens of contacts with support people in the past. It was meant to be more of a "look, the industry as a whole still sucks" posting, than anything in particular. The only hope I had was that, at best, multiple people had the same issue and so they had found an answer but hadn't posted it online yet, and if not, I would be adding a +1 to help the issue onto tech support's radar.
And last, a company's rules/policies/procedures are a huge part of customer support/service. You can have excellent people in those roles, but if you don't provide them with the proper tools, and atmosphere, to do their job well, they can't. A support department is a multiplier that can be positive, and raise the level of support a customer receives, or it can be a negative, driving down even your best workers.
