Continual Improvement

I recently read an email from another software vendor’s customer support team. In the email, the support representative stated something like ‘however, for special customers we can perform this requested DB change’. This made me start wondering whether I was really a “special customer” or whether they would do this for anyone who asked. In the end, it doesn’t really matter, because the customer (me, in this case) thinks they are receiving extraordinary and personalized attention. This is very similar to the sales tactic of congratulating a buyer on the “once in a lifetime” deal being made. While the sales version of this can be shady, especially when the deal is unscrupulous in nature, the customer support version seems much less ethically harmful. After all, most of a business’s customers are “special” in one way or another.