As someone who has customer service experience in both the USA and Germany, I can tell you that there are, indeed, cultural differences. There are certain situations in the USA where Germans and other Europeans don't always have the best experience because of a cultural misunderstanding.
I am also the in-house English teacher here at Hetzner. (Most companies have no in-house teacher.) Something that I personally work on with my students in my conversations class and customer service class is intonation, which can cause spoken language to come off as sounding "arrogant" by accident. In addition, written responses may accidentally come of as sounding too direct or "arrogant" for the same reason. We work on these situations in my classes.
So if you ever have a ticket that you think might make for good learning material for one of my classes, or that you would like to see escalated because of a serious language/cultural misunderstanding, please write to marketing@hetzner.com and mention my name (and include the relevant ticket number). --Katie
While it might be a cultural issue, I have to admit that this isn't the case with many Germans. I interact daily in open-source projects I'm involved with. While they are direct most of them seem very respectful and welcoming. From time to time some people might seem a bit more arrogant but I think that there might be a cultural bias too at play here.
Kudos for assisting your colleagues with better communication in English, I think this practice could be useful for many organizations with people that speak English as a foreign language.
