Rule #1: "The customer is always right: no exceptions".<p>This is absolutely flat-out wrong. Bad customers will chew up your support time, engineering resources, and mental health.<p>The sooner it is recognized that some customers are simply toxic, the sooner you can get rid of them. If you fail to even entertain the notion that customers might be wrong, you're doing yourself and your employees a huge disservice.
#13 is a tricky one, but important:<p>Don't be too technical. Gauge the technical ability of who you're talking with and match it.<p>I can't tell you how many times I've called customer support with a problem that I've done all my homework for the support call and then get greeted by a person who absolutely must follow a script.<p>You could tell them you restarted the server, restarted the process, etc., etc. but they don't care - they just force the script on you. I get that the first line of support needs to triage the caller before escalation, but annoying them right up front makes the experience very unpleasant.
Great advice, I live by this stuff, so it's neat to see it codified. ;)<p>One thing I would add - always strive to respond within 24 hours, but do NOT respond in seconds/minutes.<p>Five minutes after sending, users are often still frustrated and a good number won't read your response before firing back as their adrenaline is still up (also, they think you're a robot because you're too fast and robots can't possibly have the right answer!)--it'll take twice as many emails to solve the problem.
Whether or not the rule that the "customer is always right" applies is context-dependent. In an educational environment, for example, we can't embrace this principle; it is contrary to our mission to leave people with misinformation that can affect their studies or research.<p>I think it can be reworded to be useful guiding principle in more environments if you're willing to parse it more carefully. Perhaps something like "The customer's perception is more important than yours."?
"The customer is always right - no exceptions"<p>Well, if I am a customer and I am asking for something stupid I'd rather have this pointed out politely and then let me make an informed decision. Indeed, some of the best examples I've had of customer service is where the salesperson politely pointed out that what I was wanting to buy might not be such a great idea after all.
One thing I'd add is: Once a problem is escalated, put the customer in direct contact with the higher level support. Triage is fine, but not being able to communicate with whoever is working on your problem is really frustrating.