One New Customer Support Policy Turned Every Problem Into Four When This Software Customer Support Worker Followed It to the Letter: ‘I Reminded Them That I Had Simply Followed the New Policy Exactly as Instructed’ – FAIL Blog

A lot of workplaces will tell you that they value a lot of things: Quality, innovation, empowerment. Along with transparency, integrity, and collaboration. They’ll tell you that “People are our greatest asset” and that they’re “building for the long term,” and that challenging the “status quo” is a ticket to the top. 

These are all empty boardroom gestures. Things said at company quarterly meetings where something needs to be said to fill the silence before 45 minutes of slides discussing the coming months’ pursuit of perpetually increasing profit.

Empty words that have no other meaning other than to sound good at the right time in the hope that someone listening will believe them, even if the managers themselves can hear the hollowness in their voice as they are uttered. 

The reality is decisions are made behind closed doors, and employees need approval for minor decisions. Departments compete for budgets and internal politics dominate all else. Disagreement is viewed as disloyalty, and a word out of line isn’t something that is soon forgotten.

Employees learn the hard way that hitting KPIs is more important than any other underlying objective, and whatever quarterly targets are set are really the only thing that matters.

It really should come as no surprise that the bottom line really is the only line. Businesses exist to make money. It is their sole purpose. Everything and anything else is either a calculated distraction from that fact, a sleight of hand to hold your focus while the other hand maneuvers out of sight. That or a hoop to jump through to clear red tape and meet some pesky legal obligation, something that they wouldn’t engage with if they didn’t have to.

Despite everything that they said, it was clear that this employer followed that same logic.

After introducing a policy requiring nearly every support ticket to be closed before the end of the day, managers instructed staff to close unresolved issues that were still waiting for developers and have customers submit new requests later if necessary. The customer support worker followed the policy exactly, earning the team’s highest ticket closure rate while unknowingly creating duplicate cases, confusing developers, and causing a surge in customer contacts.

Keep reading for the rest of the story as it was shared by the worker online.