The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
I'm not sure I understand the problem correctly, but engaging somebody in customer service is not exactly a social thing. It's more a transactional thing. You need X. There's a person whose job (presumably) to provide X to everybody asking. You approach this person and ask them for X, they solicit some information if they need it, ask you for payment or other things, and then you get X. It should be quite transactional, not some complex social game. Unless it's haggling or something like that (I hate it so not sure I am qualified to give answers here). Of course, there's grease like saying "good morning" (or appropriate time of day) when starting the the conversation, and saying please and thank you, and being polite in general - but otherwise there's not much to it. Or at least it's how I see it? Maybe I don't understand something here, or maybe you're trying too hard? I mean, CS person shouldn't really get to know you and like you, you're not about to become best friends forever, you are just there to get whatever you need and they are there to do their job and get paid. Of course, there are corner cases, but that's the normal situation. I think thinking about it transactionally may help you to concentrate less on what could (or did) go wrong. Usually transactional approach to people is considered bad, and in social situation - like friendship or courtship - it's true, but in commercial setting, like customer service, etc. - I think it's ok.
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