One of the hardest things when communicating with customers is not taking it personally. Don't take criticisms or complaints as personal attacks and above all else resist the temptation to try and "one-up" your customer.
Loads of times we've received pretty insulting emails, but done our best to be polite and helpful back, more times then not we've received a really thankful and praising email back in response. A lot of times customers forgot they're sending a message to a real person, and just think they're contacting a faceless corporation.
It's doubly worse at a porn company. People already half-expect you to be scamming them somehow, and come into it with apprehension if not outright hostility.
The upshot is when you give them amazing customer service, they turn into instant evangelists :)
Oh definitely, most people don't go around talking about paying for porn sites, but the really hardcore porn customers (the kind who regularly pay for porn) can be extremely loyal if you treat them nicely (and vocal if you don't).
I used to be a development manager at Naughty America, but now I'm doing consulting and development for Dirty Hot Productions (and also helping out with customer service, since it just launched and the volume is still low).
I kind of wanted to avoid being "typecast" as an adult developer (I do have non-adult clients as well), but the owner of Dirty Hot Productions used to be a fellow employee at NA, has funding, and I really enjoy building products from scratch so it was hard to pass up.
That's how it should be, however, it happens the other way around too:
* Company's person in contact with the customer insults the customer/make fun of him/etc (or even swear)
* customer responds politely that it's wrong and uncalled for
* Company respond another sarcastic comment or that it's "not insults" (even when its crystal clear) and that you're in that class of annoying customers
* customer gets real angry
bonus points:
* company goes personally against the customer and tries to threaten him by all possible means
Loads of times we've received pretty insulting emails, but done our best to be polite and helpful back, more times then not we've received a really thankful and praising email back in response. A lot of times customers forgot they're sending a message to a real person, and just think they're contacting a faceless corporation.