When a company and a customer stand at different stages

A support agent answers calmly, evenly, very slightly from above, in the voice of someone who has seen this a thousand times and already knows how it ends. The customer on the other end of the line is wound up. They need a resolution today, they are ready to fight for what is theirs, and they are waiting for somebody to finally step in and put it right.

Two temperaments have not collided here. Two different points on one line of development have met, and it is the ordinary line along which any psyche matures.

The line both sides are standing on

The psyche can be described as a sequence of stages running from the earliest dependent state to a mature position able to absorb almost anything without breaking. At one end of that line stands the child who needs to be looked after. Further along, the hero who fights and proves. Further still, the lover, capable of closeness without a struggle. Then the parental figures, the maternal ones among them, and at the far end the sage who has stopped proving anything and simply knows.

In a commercial contact the two sides almost never occupy the same stretch of the line. A company, by the very role of supplier and expert who has walked the path and accumulated the experience, normally sits in the maternal zone, somewhere between care and wisdom. A customer who comes looking for a solution they do not have sits on the opposite stretch: hero, child, lover. They fight for what is theirs the way a hero does, or ask to be taken care of the way a child does, or look for warm closeness the way a lover does. They rarely speak to a company in the language of self-sufficient maturity.

That reads as unflattering until you notice what it actually describes. It is a map of where the other person is standing, which is the only thing that tells you which words will reach them.

Why the asymmetry is the design and not a fault

Hold on to one idea here: the difference in stages is how the relationship is built rather than evidence that it broke.

In negotiations between two legal entities, where representatives of equal standing sit on both sides of the table, the parties do sometimes meet in a partner zone somewhere in the middle of the line. Both sides speak the language of adult interests. Both carry responsibility for the outcome.

Move from negotiation between organisations to the contact between a company and an end customer, and the symmetry almost always disappears. The ordinary situation: a person is choosing a complex service whose insides they do not understand, a financial product, a medical procedure, a technically dense piece of infrastructure. They cannot judge it from within the way an expert can. They have no access to the data the company holds. In that shortfall they inevitably take an earlier, dependent position. They ask to be looked after, and occasionally demand attention the way a child demands it of a parent. The company, whether it wants the role or not, lands in the senior position: it knows more, decides faster, and holds a context the customer simply does not have.

The difference in stages is what produces the parent-and-child structure of the contact. Nothing in it concerns respect or the lack of it. It follows from one side owning expertise while the other approaches precisely because they own none.

What the Russian market adds to the tilt

For a company selling into Russia from abroad the asymmetry arrives already tilted, and in a direction worth understanding before the first support ticket.

Trust starts lower, so the customer slides further down the line. A foreign supplier carries uncertainty that a local one does not: how payment will actually go through, who handles a warranty claim, whether anybody is physically present in the country. The customer who would have arrived at the hero stage in their home market arrives closer to the dependent one, wanting the ground under their feet described plainly before anything else is discussed.

The channel is a messenger, and a messenger is a live room. A large share of pre-sale and support conversation in Russia runs through Telegram and WhatsApp rather than through an email queue. In a ticket system a day of silence is normal cadence. In a chat window the same day reads as abandonment, because the format itself promises presence. The senior position has to be held in something close to real time or it is not held at all.

The Western support register travels badly. Scripted acknowledgement with no decision behind it reads here as being processed rather than helped, and a customer in the fighting position escalates instead of settling. What lowers the temperature is a decision with a name attached to it and a date. Russian also carries a formal and an informal second person, and a friendly first-name tone copied over from English can read as familiarity from a stranger, which undercuts the very seniority the customer came for.

The arena is public by default. A dissatisfied customer in Russia writes in map reviews, in a Telegram channel, in the question block of a marketplace card. The hero position looks for an audience for its fight, and the audience is easy to find. The cheaper move is to give that fight a place inside your own channel, where a decision can still be made, before it goes looking for a stage.

Self-service reads differently. In many Western markets a help centre plus a bot is an acceptable first line and often a welcome one. My reading from practice here is the opposite: a bot placed between the customer and a person confirms the fear that nobody will take responsibility. Automate the retrieval of information, keep the decision visibly human.

None of this changes the structure described above. It changes how far down the line the customer starts and how quickly an unheld register turns into an escalation.

Trying to flatten the asymmetry is the first mistake

The first thing companies try is to force the two sides level: to talk to the customer as an equal expert and expect a mature, partner position in a contact whose structure does not allow one.

A customer standing in the hero or the child zone is not equipped to negotiate in the language of the sage. Pressing that role on them produces confusion or irritation rather than gratitude. The detailed comparison table, the methodology explained in full, the invitation to weigh the trade-offs: all of it is addressed to someone who is not in the room.

Holding the point the customer needs right now

The second strategy is the productive one. Deliberately occupy the point in the maternal zone that this customer needs at this moment, and hold it steadily.

A customer in the child position needs care and plain simple steps, not elaborate explanation. A customer in the hero position, fighting and proving, needs their effort recognised and room for a small victory, not a mentoring tone. A customer in the lover position needs warmth that is unforced, without pressure and without condescension. The ability to switch between those registers is the practical application of the whole model: stop fighting the asymmetry and start serving it precisely.

Reading the position takes no research budget, because the customer states it in their first message. A request to be told what to do next, carrying no argument, comes from the dependent end. A message opening with everything already tried and your system being broken comes from the fighting end. A message opening with how long they have been a customer is asking for closeness. In Russia those messages exist as messenger threads, which means they can be read in bulk rather than recalled from memory.

A short list for a foreign company selling into Russia

1. Decide who actually holds the senior position. A local team, a partner, or a help centre translated from English. The third option holds nothing: a self-service knowledge base speaks in the register of equals, which is the register the customer came here to escape.
2. Put a decision in the first reply. A named next step with a date does more for the temperature than any amount of acknowledgement language.
3. Keep one person on the thread. A queue that reassigns the conversation resets the relationship to the anxious stage, and the customer restarts the story from the beginning, louder.
4. Translate the register, not the sentences. Formal address, concrete commitments, no imported informality.
5. Find out where your buyer stands before writing scripts. That is a research question with a cheap answer, and it belongs in customer research rather than in a debate among the marketing team.
6. Decide support at entry planning, not after launch. The first hundred conversations set the register for everything that follows, which is why support sits inside market entry alongside the channel plan.

Where symmetry genuinely exists, protect it

The third consequence concerns negotiations between organisations, where symmetry really is possible. Where representatives on both sides of the table can speak a partner language, build the contact deliberately in that zone, sliding neither into the all-knowing parent nor into the needy petitioner. That zone appears less often than people assume, and where it is available it is worth protecting.

The company knows the road, the customer is walking it

The line of the psyche runs from the child to the sage, and most business contact happens at its opposite ends rather than in its middle. The company stands nearer the end where the road is already known. The customer stands nearer the end where the road is still ahead. The conversation works when the senior side remembers what it was like to walk it for the first time.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Russian version of this article on belokrylovo.ru: Компания и клиент на разных стадиях психеи