Putting a bunch of unhappy customers in one place sounds like a nightmare waiting to happen.

And that’s exactly what employees at one phone company thought when management announced plans for a shared tech support chatroom.

Once created, customers would be able to talk to each other while employees tried to help them and answer phone calls.

The staff warned that this could get ugly, but management went ahead with it anyway.

As expected, customers started fighting and making threats, while employees had little say in how to handle it. So when one worker was tasked with reviewing the logs, he made sure the union saw what was happening.

Read on to see how the union handled it.

Providing a chatroom where unhappy customers will hang out? What could possibly go wrong.

Back when this happened, I was still relatively new on tech support’s senior staff at the telco I still work for.

Nowadays, here, you can have 1-on-1 chat-based tech support in 3 clicks, and it’s pretty standard industry-wide.

Back then, the company was just exploring the possibility of expanding beyond phone support, and eventually, orders came down from the VP’s office on how to set it up.

Apparently, the company had a new idea for customer problems.

Then, my ex-boss told us what would happen with a frown. A nice-looking portal would go live on our website, but it would be just a skin for an IRC chatroom.

People would come in, write about their problems, and some frontline staff reading them while simultaneously taking calls would direct them to either call tech support for the harder issues or type solutions if it seemed like a quick fix.

$colleague: “So, there will be some kind of system put in place to ensure customers can’t see each other’s requests and our frontline staff’s answers, right?”

Ex-boss: “No… just an IRC chatroom with a skin. We have to leave it wide open, too. It’s not like we can only let +v people ask a question.”

Everybody in the room either facepalmed or stared at the table.

A few colleagues tried making comments.

$colleague: “You can’t be serious.”

Ex-boss: “I know, they’ll be chatting with each other, and some will get angry and stuff, but our staff will be in there, and there will be a bot able to automatically kick for obscenities and such. The directives came from up above. I can’t do much, and it’s just for a trial period.”

Bytewave: “Could we at least moderate the channel and have customers first PM a moderator/employee with their issue? Once they seem rational about their situation, give them +v?”

Ex-boss: “No, that’d be about as ineffective as using only PMs altogether.”

Bytewave: “And what’s wrong with that? Only using PMs? Why would we want a chatroom where they can talk to each other?”

Unfortunately, the boss wasn’t able to do anything.

Ex-boss: “The Vice President expects that in a crisis, such as a significant outage, we can be substantially more effective. Users asking redundant questions will realize their issues are already answered and will…”

Bytewave: “Okay, sure, in the best of worlds. But this is not going to end well. Angry customers will work each other up, there’ll be rants, stuff will go public, people will hold us accountable for things outside our control, and I’m sure I’m just scratching the surface.”

She basically agreed with us, but it was out of her hands.

The chatroom and the web interface were being designed by internal IT, and the actual interactions with customers were to be handled by frontline staff below us. TSSS was simply supposed to help them with tough calls about chat-based technical questions. But we all left the room knowing no good could come out of this.

A few weeks later, things took a dark turn.

Some weeks later, once this was live, my boss came to my desk looking crushed after reading the piece of paper in her hands.

Ex-boss: “Look, there are a few customer complaints with the new chatroom, some threat of a lawsuit, other stuff. Can you look at the logs for the last two days and tell me if there’s anything we need to be worried about? One of our employees filed a grievance about it, too. There’s also a redacted copy of that in this file. So please, send me your findings in writing and CC the union steward?”

I was surprised that she didn’t ask me to come to her first. Technically, her request was perfectly proper, but it’s rare that supervisors don’t at least ask for a heads-up before we send work product to the union. So I guessed she wanted what would follow to happen.

I looked at the logs, not surprised one bit by how badly it went wrong. Customers were spending more time reinforcing each other’s belief that our support was horrible because they had issues than trying to get them fixed.

In a chatroom, all sorts of words are thrown around.

Since there’s ALL KINDS of people out there, and they are less inhibited in a chatroom than they are on the phone, there were insults, swears, ALL CAPS, and even threats thrown around liberally.

I made a call and learned frontline staff ‘moderating’ the ‘experiment’ were still waiting on official instructions on how to react when customers were being abusive, and that so far, their instructions were only to ‘escalate to Legal any situations where criminal threats or admissions are relevant.’

This was being treated like alpha testing even though real customers were on the other end and it was on our official website.

In short, they allowed any disgruntled customer to visit an open chatroom where the ‘moderators’ were supposed to let anything slide unless a customer issued direct threats. Moderate ‘I’ll **** you,’ but do nothing if they merely said ‘I wish you ***’ … with our logo on top.

There were all sorts of disagreements in the chatroom.

The time I spent looking at those logs truly hurt my faith in humanity. I say this despite having manned frontline phones for two years. The stuff in that chatroom was insane.

The employee who had filed a grievance had to deal politely with customers implying she’d be ******** *********, all over a 4-hour network outage she had no control over, because the threat was ‘indirect’.

People in there were at each other’s throats, too, like in any poorly moderated, angry IRC chatroom, and then blamed us for the resulting chaos. This thing had just been rolled out, but even the early adopters went in there willing to lash out at just about anyone.

There were customers with RF issues threatening lawsuits in writing if we didn’t fix them remotely, even though their problems were due to unapproved/untested splitters in their own houses.

Customers were getting into catfights with each other because they wanted to do something whenever we weren’t responding quickly enough.

Angry, he started writing an email.

And customers were working each other into ‘joint lawsuits’ plans at 4 a.m. when we weren’t around (nobody had ensured the chatroom would be closed when the staff was offline). Employees threatened or mocked for adhering to the project’s ridiculously strict policies. Even one instance of two customers starting to cyber in the **** public tech support chatroom.

The stuff I read in the logs made me lose my cool, so I wrote one of the angriest emails of my career. Our union guarantees a fair degree of job security, and my boss did specifically request I CC the union stew. Union employees have the luxury of being able to speak the truth to power without consequences, as long as we’re right, at least.

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So late that night, while being paid at overtime rates, I spent two hours crafting a huge wall of text, longer than any tale I ever published here.

When it was done, he sent it to everyone.

I sent it to my boss, the department’s director, the union stew, the union executive, and CC’d the employee who put in that grievance, calling the whole thing a farce, amateur hour, and a serious threat to both the corporation’s and the union’s interests. I generously copy-pasted lengthy parts of the crazy stuff written in that chatroom.

I knew I was taking chances by sending an angry email this broadly, but it still worked out. Before business hours the next morning, union execs had a talk with upper management, and within the day, the chatroom was offline and they were working things out, including the grievance.

For almost two years afterwards, we simply had no chat service.

Once we launched one again, it was strictly one-on-one and serviced by dedicated employees who weren’t multitasking. That’s the only way to do it properly. It shouldn’t need to be said, but never put multiple angry customers in the same chatroom before you’ve even had a chance to address their issues.

Yikes! They should’ve known that wasn’t going to work from the start.

Let’s take a look if the readers over at Reddit have ever encountered anything like this before.

This reader takes it out on management.

Here’s someone who does the same kind of work.

This Canadian knows it would be a bad idea.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who can’t complete her work-from-home duties because her mom’s houseguest won’t stop talking.

This is a funny way of looking at it.

This whole thing really could’ve been avoided.

After all, the staff told them exactly what would happen before the chatroom even opened.

But rather than listen, they had to learn the hard way. And learn the hard way they did.

Once the union gets involved things are guaranteed to get better. That was the best move he could’ve made.