Meliesha Jones, who was a part-time administrator at Vale Curtains and Blinds in Oxford since May 2021, was dealing with a customer complaint when she accidentally forwarded the email to the customer rather than reply to a colleague.
She wrote: “Hi Karl - Can you change this… he’s a twat so it doesn’t matter if you can’t.”
She was sacked for gross misconduct in June 2023, a week after she had sent the message to the customer instead of the company’s installations manager Karl Gibbons, an employment tribunal in Reading heard.
Ms Jones was awarded £5,484.74 after the tribunal ruled she had been unfairly dismissed.
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Shortly after she had sent the message, the customer’s wife rang and asked: “Is there any reason why you called my husband a twat?”
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The tribunal heard that a probe took place and the company decided there also had to be a disciplinary hearing.
But the tribunal heard neither Ms Jones nor the customer was interviewed, no notes were produced by Mrs Smith and no written account of the decision was made.
The customer had contacted the company directly and made further threats about publicising the incident, in particular by leaving a poor review on Trustpilot and bosses decided to “get rid of” Ms Jones.
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Employment Judge Akua Reindorf KC said: “I conclude from the evidence before me that the principal reason for this decision was that the customer and his wife had made threats to publicise the claimant’s email in the press, social media and/or Trustpilot.”
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The judge said: "The disciplinary process and the dismissal were a sham designed to placate the customer.
“This is clear from the fact that Mrs Smith immediately informed the customer that [Ms Jones] had been dismissed - notably, without any apparent regard for the claimant’s data protection rights.”
She added the company had “decided to sacrifice the claimant’s employment for the sake of appeasing the customer and heading off bad reviews, and wholly unreasonably failed to consider other more proportionate ways of achieving the same outcome”.
And that’s exactly the reason why you don’t call customers names - neither in private, nor email. They might be the biggest twat, cunt, idiot imagineable but you simply don’t do it. You never know who reads the emails - reminder that your org most likely has access to them and will be checking them when need be. At the end of the day it could’ve been left at “can you change this? It’s okay if you can’t”. She still would have her job, the customer wouldn’t have been insulted to their face and life would go on.
Me…
Two email threads on the same subject with the same subject line, slightly different recipient lists.
It was a really deep thread and at one point I had emailed the internal version with “the customer is not good at math.” And included the correct math.
Some time later we had resolved the issue and I replied to the customer, but somehow ended up on the wrong thread. Fortunately it was so deep that I don’t think they ever saw it. But one of our VPs did. We had an entertaining conversation.
To this day I hate threads that go on for ages and I hate it when people reuse threads.
Exactly.
If you have a workplace culture where you’re emailing backwards and forwards calling the customers names and that’s seen as totally acceptable workplace ‘banter’ then of course it’s going to go wrong sooner or later.
The blame is equally as much on the management for allowing and normalising that behaviour, and the tribunal recognised that.
You’re right. Always insult customers to their face 👍