I work in Customer Services for a London-based company, taking calls and answering emails. The calls range from easy to difficult, from complicated to simple and from happy to intensely frustrating.
Yesterday I had a conversation on the phone with a customer who was looking to obtain a refund. He’s been given some wrong information by staff at the company, had experienced some problems, but by and large had behaved himself well. After our phone conversation, I realised I had made a mistake in what I was saying and emailed him to correct my error and clarify exactly what I was going to be doing next.
I received in reply a long and rambling email in which he went over all the points we had talked about again and complained about them. Most interesting, though, was the point at which he said:
“so in essence. i have gotten more different answers than brittney spears has sexual transmitted diseases”
I stopped reading and spoke to my manager, stating that I did not think I could reply to this email in a professional manner. For someone to write that, no matter how frustrated or annoyed they were, pretty much makes my blood boil. I appreciated that the customer wanted to get a point across, and that may have been trying to be humorous, but still.
Happily, my manager read the email and completely agreed that I should not have to respond to that email. He took on the response himself and put in the phrase:
“I absolutely accept that you find the situation frustrating, and am of course willing to believe that your comments regarding diseases etc were intended to be humorous, however in this instance they caused offence and upset to a colleague and I feel it is important to remind you that colleges expect their students to conduct themselves, and to correspond, in a professional manner at all times and I feel on reflection you would agree that this correspondence fell short of that standard.”
Now, I have slightly mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, he has told the student that his language “fell short of a professional standard” and that it caused offence.
On the other hand, he has not quite gone as far as I would have liked, in that in that a later email he did end up giving the student what he wanted. I personally felt that using this sort of language should effectively take you out of any chance of getting something that it wasn’t clear was yours to get.
Suzi asked me to blog about how it feels to be a pro-feminist man, and this is one of those times it becomes relevant. I can’t help but feel that many of my work colleagues would have shrugged that comment from the customer off without mentioning it, rather than challenging it and asking for it to be noted. Whilst I’m happy that it was noted and addressed, I also certainly feel that the response was not quite what I had hoped for.