Sometimes, customers are so sure they know what the problem is that there’s no talking them out of it.

One ISP technician dealt with that when a customer complained that his online games kept lagging.

The strange part was that every speed test looked great, and his ping was already right where it should be.

Still, the customer insisted he needed a higher ping because that’s what his friends told him would fix the problem.

The technician explained that higher ping would usually make things worse, but when the customer threatened to leave, he gave him what he wanted.

Read on to see what he did.

Customer demanding “higher ping” for their games…

I work for a large-scale ISP in the United States.

I work on anything residential, but also offer technical support for small businesses and enterprises.

This happened around a year ago. I work in the chat department, and I got a chat.

To find the problem, he conducted several tests.

There was a guy who chatted in and gave his details. He stated he was having speed issues.

I looked at his modem, and everything looked fine, so we decided to run a speed test. The speed test was indicating he was getting great speed and had a ping of 10. With modems, any ping from 5–50 ms is considered great.

He then proceeded to tell me he lagged in his online games. He was hard-wired from his Xbox into the modem. We ran speed tests on the Xbox as well, and it was showing very similar numbers to what we were getting with his PC.

At this point, he wasn’t seeing anything wrong.

I told him there shouldn’t be an issue, and he should try rebooting the Xbox or taking it to Microsoft since it’s a third-party device and is part of our demarcations for obvious reasons.

He was convinced it was our connection that was the issue and not his Xbox, and he wanted “higher ping.”

I explained to him what higher ping would do and that it would make the lag worse, but he didn’t believe me and was going off what his friends were telling him. I get that, in some games, lag can actually help (extremely rare).

The customer was not happy with the response.

He then threatened to leave the company if he didn’t get higher ping. So I asked if he wanted to be on a lower plan that could make his ping higher, and he said yes.

We got him from 250 Mbps download/10 Mbps upload to 50 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload.

We tested his connection, and there was a higher ping due to the amount of devices connected.

That’s all it took to keep the customer happy.

He thanked me, told me I should get a raise, and hung up.

To this day, I still check up on that account every month or so, and he has yet to change his speed back to the speed he had before.

I guess all he wanted was higher ping after all…

Nice! That’s one way to handle a difficult customer.

Let’s see what the folks over at Reddit had to say about this situation.

This is a great way of looking at it.

Here’s an interesting point.

This person has a different idea of what he should’ve done.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a brother who is upset his parents bought his recovering sister a brand-new car but wouldn’t help him out with a used one.

Apparently, this person was good even if it lagged.

This is kinda crazy!

If the technician tells you higher ping will make the lag worse, maybe listen before demanding it anyway.

And his friends clearly had no idea what they were talking about either.

But judging by the fact that he never called back, maybe that slower internet was exactly what he wanted after all.