Tuesday 15 January 2013

'ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn....

Another tolerably rubbish day at work, but I did hear a story that made me chuckle and I thought I'd share it with you.  I'm doing some work with our contact centre, and this week I've been focusing particularly on the process for responding to customer email.  Mostly, responses come from a choice of automatic templates that are presented to the agent when they categorise the call within their logging tool.  Sadly, many of the templates are hopeless, and most agents have their own set or just type up responses on the fly as required.

One of the team leads was telling me the story of a guy currently working on his team.  He's pretty new and had been thrown straight into the deep-end during the Christmas rush.  He didn't actually even know there were mail templates he should be using for his responses at all, but as he's a Cambridge graduate -- boy it's a tough jobs market out there -- he was plenty literate enough to compose his own replies.  Apparently, as you might expect, they were generally outstanding and certainly well above the standard you might expect from a contact centre at Christmas.  Perhaps they were a bit wordy, but were generally eloquent and articulate responses to customer enquiries and complaints.

Except he clearly wasn't to everyone's taste:

One customer took exception to a mail he wrote.  I think the trigger was the point where he apologised for the fact that the incident this person was complaining about had "aroused your ire".

Hmm.  A little flowery, perhaps, but given that one of our pre-packaged mail templates "thank's" customers for their contact, I think I can forgive him his literacy.

You know how the customer replied? Three pithy words (and I swear I'm not making this up):

"POMPOUS VICTORIAN TWAT".

....honestly, there's no pleasing some people.  Feedback's a gift though, eh?

2 comments:

  1. That customer clearly has way too much ire.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ha! Clearly. I like that his insult implies a certain understanding too....

    ReplyDelete