TrenchOps 🐎 
The Day Management Banned German in the German Support Team
And other lessons from running teams you don't understand
I once worked in the German unit of an international support organization. Next to us, both on the floor plan and spiritually: the French team. Everyone else on the planet got English support.
Why German support? Not because Germans can't speak English. They can. They just believe they can't, and not every German wears their accent as proudly as Werner Herzog. The market was simply too important. Why French support? France has the Toubon Law - product information for French consumers has to be in French - and in practice companies extend that to support, partly because, let's be diplomatic, the English proficiency curve in France has a certain shape.
Management hated both teams. Openly, structurally, consistently. Two reasons:
First, we were hard to replace. German-speaking engineers outside Germany were rare, and remote work wasn't a thing yet. Leverage. Managers despise leverage they don't hold themselves.
Second, our metrics looked "bad" and couldn't be fixed with a pep talk. German customers are demanding, so closure rates and CSAT ran lower. My favorite artifact: our 1-10 post-case survey collected an avalanche of German 5s. Not from dissatisfaction. A typical case: customer reports our software behaving "flaky," we analyze it, prove their storage paths are dropping, hand them a clean action plan, close the case. The German mind computes: "Friendly, competent, but my issue is technically not resolved. A fair 5." The same conversation gets a 7 or 8 in the anglosphere. Same work, same outcome, two points of CSAT difference - purely cultural. Any dashboard comparing those teams side by side was measuring national character, not support quality. Nobody upstairs wanted to hear that, because the dashboard was easier to read than the customer. On a side note: we also had a lot of German customers who gave of 1's and 2' because in the German school those are excellent grades, just like A's and B's. On a scale from 1-10 those values are, however, perceived as "catastrophic". Later, they changed the survey system to a smiley system which was harder to misunderstand.
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