A month after complaining to Thomson about the poor standard of room she received on her £3,000 holiday to Mexico, a customer received a series of extremely offensive emails from a disgruntled employee.
Thomson has since apologised, explaining that 'an employee interfered with a number of internal email accountants, sending inappropriate emails'. The staff member in question was dismissed.
Unfortunately however, the damage had already been done. These emails were sent in March 2012, and the fallout continues to rear its ugly head months on.
So, what could Thomson have done to prevent this from happening in the first place? Well, first they need to accept that every large organisation is likely, at some point, to have unhappy customers and inappropriate reactions from employees. There are, of course, steps that can be taken to motivate and enthuse staff, but this will never be 100% effective. It's all too easy to hit the send button a fraction of a second before the consequences have been thought through.
A proactive approach is required to prevent a single errant email damaging your company and brand. Emails are now the lifeblood of organisations, but once written and sent, they are out there - they don't sit in the post tray until the end of the day, giving you a chance to recall them. They are instant and rarely monitored.
Thomson could have avoided this situation by putting digital policies in place across its email systems that automatically check every email for content that breaks policy, before it leaves the organisation. Digital policies can be set to pick up anything - including swear words, bank details and personal details. If Thomson had used such a system, its disgruntled employee could have sent a hundred emails, but none would have reached the customer as the policy would have stopped it. Furthermore, the policy could have drawn attention of the manager to the offender.
And for those people who have a tendency to accidently hit 'send', systems are available that prevent emails from being sent instantly, creating a window of time in which they can be recalled without the intended recipients even knowing they had been sent in the first place. This is far more effective than the current in-built recalling system people use in Microsoft Office, which doesn't always actually delete the offending message. If anything, it draws attention to it.
But it's not just about email. Many companies, including Thomson, also communicate with customers and prospects via social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Again, digital policies can be put in place to ensure nothing illicit can be posted on these sites from a corporate account. The same polices that are applied to email can be applied to web-based communication as well.
It is a conundrum of business that the customer-facing employees within an organisation are often the lowest paid, and yet they are some of the most important brand ambassadors a company has. With few businesses in the position to give generous pay rises to those at the coal face, protecting your digital boundaries is, as this unfortunate incident shows, vital to the safeguarding of your reputation.
Guy Bunker, Senior Vice President of Products at Clearswift
