I'm not going to excuse the faux pas, but customer service is a hard job. I answered nearly all customer support for my company for years, until we finally hired people to do it. The change in my mental health when this happened was profound.
People are sometimes nice, but often irate, cruel, or upset. That wears on you after a while, unless you are a total psychopath. I learned to cope by not reading emails until I was in a good state of mind in the morning, where before I would flip on my phone the moment I awoke. I can understand why the Postmates CEO needs to blow off some steam, though an email to staff is of course inappropriate. Save the user support gossip for office banter.
Thankfully, we haven't had any turnover in our support people (1 full-time and 1 part-time), but it's a job that is rife with it. It just wears you down after a while. If you are doing support for your new start-up, give yourself a break and manage your state of mind when you read support. And if you hire people to do support, make sure you empathize with their position, encourage them relentlessly, and tell them what bastards some users can be.
Sorry users, you are everything to me, but you get us down sometimes! We care so much about the product and what people think of it, and the lowest trenches for us are when we don't do a good job for someone, either in the software or support.
Try working customer service face-to-face sometime. I did it in a grocery store for over a year, handling everything from 1 hour photo processing to $15k out of country Western Union transfers to people unhappy with their bill to people returning all 6 stocked items of (unbought) Saffron for store credit, which they then sold outside the store for 70% of face value.
I imagine working at the DMV would be worse, but I would have killed for the chance to just handle these people over phone or email.
1) The one I mentioned (don't start out your day with support) is important. Have breakfast first, drink your coffee, read Hacker News.
2) Take a break. We answer support even nights and weekends, and this is important in connecting with users early on, but on nights when you aren't in tip-top shape, just don't do it.
3) Complain to your co-workers. Venting helps.
4) Strenuous exercise really helps. Nothing like a 20 mile hike to clear your mind.
5) Vacations without internet access.
And of course, make your product better! Fixing bugs is usually a better way to stop complaints than adding features. People thanking you for your work is a soothing balm, and you can eliminate a lot of harsh complaints. I'm not sure how actionable the advice is, but hang in there and do good work, and ceterus paribus, it will be a fulfilling existence.
Haha, it wasn't a joke. He said it under the assumption that in no way it would be forwarded to the customer. Oooops. Employees are always saying stuff like that, sort of a behind the scenes tough guy/gal thing, while smiling to the customer. It's just a human way to deal with customer frustration I guess.
I think the worst part, actually, is that he tried to make the excuse that it was a "joke". That comes across as disingenuous.
We all know it wasn't a joke (a joke = funny). But I don't think it was meant to be literal either. It was a pretty clear instruction from the CEO to the staff to basically tell the customer to go away. There's no reason for the CEO to translate that message to his staff -- a good customer service person knows exactly what that means:
CEO: "Tell him to fuck off"
Staff: "We are very sorry to hear about your problem, but I'm afraid at this point there's nothing we're going to be able to do further to assist you. I know this may be disappointing to you, but please understand that we receive a lot of concerns and that after reviewing......." Etc etc.
The only issue here is that the internal message got out, which is indeed embarrassing. The CEO's job was to make the final call on how to deal with the customer, and good customer service sometimes means telling some customers to, well, fuck off.
I don't think it's a good idea to tell customers to "fuck off." Even behind their back where they aren't meant to see it. Even just in your own head. It's not a good attitude. That's just my two cents.
I agree in theory. But the fact is there are customers who are simply irrational. They use your $5 product, make up an excuse to be unhappy, and then demand $1000 in credit. They'll threaten you with "negative publicity" if you don't give them exactly what they want, etc. etc.
Thankfully, these folks are few and far between, and I have no idea if this person in the Postmates case was one of them (haven't seen the whole thread), but the fact is you really do need to put your foot down as a business at some point, and telling a customer to fuck off -- internally or otherwise -- is necessary in some cases. Good customer service is one thing - letting customers waste your time and bully you is another.
I don't think anyone believes it's a good idea. It's just that sometimes, in frustration, we say stupid things that we probably shouldn't. It's called being human. Our error rate, as a species, is fairly high. It runs even higher when we're under high load.
Sarcasm is a form of joking. Whether it was funny would depend on context. I know sarcasm often pops up in the midst of tense meetings at our company, and we certainly find it funny.
I don't think I've thought this in over a decade. Early in my career, my attitude might have been a little more confrontational.
Experience has given me thick skin and taught me not to take anything personally. If a customer is toxic, then I just tell them to take their business elsewhere. There's no need to lower yourself to a bad customer's level by getting vulgar.
Well then you're better than some of us. Congrats.
I also occasionally leave the restroom without washing my hands if I'm in a really big hurry too. Gross, I know, but I'm a flawed guy.
The only "excuse" Bastian has offered is context. He's taking full responsibility though. I'm not sure what more he can do but wait for this to blow over. It doesn't make him a bad CEO, it just means he got frustrated and said something he shouldn't have.
Last night I sent a private e-mail to our Customer Service team in response to a customer complaint regarding her past orders and restaurant profile. My e-mail, which outlined how to resolve the customer issue, contained a bad joke which was very poor in taste. Subsequently, the bad joke was sent to the customer. What I said was a major lapse in judgement on my part. I deeply regret this.
I immediately reached out to the customer and offered my full and sincere apology. I would like to extend that same apology to all of our customers and Customer Service team. There is no excuse for this.
At Postmates we love and value our world-class Customer Service. We take great pride in our Customer Service team. However, with my comment I have not lived up to our own standards and also damaged my teamβs reputation.
I cannot find the words to describe how much I value our customers and how deeply I care about them being happy. There is no excuse for this type of conduct.
I take full responsibility for my actions. I am sincerely sorry.
Bastian Lehmann
The difference here was, he didn't say "it was just a joke - you don't need to be offended" - which is a definite non-apology.
He's saying "it was intended as a joke", but then goes on to deliver a sincere apology, taking responsibility and saying that there's no excuse for his behavior.
Ever seen a web developer rant about how his client insists on a project's price, because his third-removed nephew could implement it in a weekend? Or a web designer having to use some gaudy color-palette, comic sans, animated gif, or feature like an on-page pageview-counter or marquee? I see it every day, and there is never some voice of opinion telling them to not vent.
The developer, designer, and this CEO can very well want the job or position. They want to make the client happy, but they are going to have to vent, at some point. Perhaps there are better ways of doing it, but in a sense, the vents are "a joke" and don't negate the fact the customer is still in good hands.
Not every failure needs a post-mortem. What do you want him to say: "We've determined that all employees -- including me -- need to attend sensitivity training to ensure that this does not happen again"? Or perhaps: "We will install filtering software to catch this kind of message before it ever reaches our customers in the future"?
No - it's not an operational failure to be picked at until a systemic solution is arrived at, it's a human failure. His failure specifically, and he acknowledges this.
He's human. Customers are frustrating as all get-out; you want to do the very best by them; and your best is NEVER good enough. Chances of this happening anywhere is non-zero, and there is no indication this incident has a frequency, so you can't really reduce it. Not to mention, it's pretty probable that he has learned his lesson and thus decreased the frequency of such incidents, but we won't know until, at least, the third time.
That's important when you're dealing with a systemic problem that needs some specific effort to reform or eliminate - which is not the case here. It's a solid and sincere apology, offered without reservation or blame for others, and clearly heartfelt. Most people seeing something like that are satisfied. Turning something decent into something obviously and needlessly formulaic actually undermines its quality.
I don't know anything about Postmates or their CEO, or about the situation beyond what was reported...but I could see how this was meant as a harmless, internal quip that was meant to be ironically flippant. I can think of a few situations where a customer or client has an incredibly important and entirely reasonable need/complaint, such that it makes the company look sheepish for not having thought of it, and saying something like: "Oh Christ, someone's concerned about [our product/program/whatever] potentially burning their house down. What a whiner!"...but in the "Oh-shit-this-is-so-serious-that-I-need-to-lighten-up" tone of voice.
So I'm totally willing to accept that the CEO was being flippant here....the problem is that you should never do it in email...or anything written. Things in writing have a permanency that long outlast their original context...and that's even before someone selectively cherry picks from it.
Couldn't agree more, it's a lesson that applies to almost anything in life, don't put it in writing unless you want it to be seen by a wider audience than the intended.
I've done customer technical support both in person, over the phone, and via email -- and yes, you get rough customers, rude customers and ridiculous customers. But maybe I just take it better than most, because you can write of the cranks and the fools easily, and you can empathise with everyone else because they have real problems they want to solve.
And telling the customer to "f* off"? Even as a joke, you just don't put it out there... if you ever have to feel like that you make sure it's totally private!
I'd call the customer's response to his apology both classy and appropriate: Yes, obviously he meant the sentiment behind it (in the way people often talk about those they don't know personally or who aren't standing right in front of them), but accepting the apology is a nice change from the normal "OMG EVERYTHING IS A CRISIS THIS IS AWFUL" reaction we normally see from Problems On the Internet.
This reminds me of a similar incident where a customer accidentally got a similar message from the owners/management forwarded by customer support: according to the message, he was a "freak and a very weird dude."
I'm just curious how this could even happen from a workflow perspective. A customer service rep forwards an email to the CEO asking how to handle a situation, the CEO says "Tell her to fuck off", and the rep... forwards the message back to the customer?
And actually... this is pretty poor form from the customer support... poor technical understanding to not delete the trailing email forwards if nothing else!
People are sometimes nice, but often irate, cruel, or upset. That wears on you after a while, unless you are a total psychopath. I learned to cope by not reading emails until I was in a good state of mind in the morning, where before I would flip on my phone the moment I awoke. I can understand why the Postmates CEO needs to blow off some steam, though an email to staff is of course inappropriate. Save the user support gossip for office banter.
Thankfully, we haven't had any turnover in our support people (1 full-time and 1 part-time), but it's a job that is rife with it. It just wears you down after a while. If you are doing support for your new start-up, give yourself a break and manage your state of mind when you read support. And if you hire people to do support, make sure you empathize with their position, encourage them relentlessly, and tell them what bastards some users can be.
Sorry users, you are everything to me, but you get us down sometimes! We care so much about the product and what people think of it, and the lowest trenches for us are when we don't do a good job for someone, either in the software or support.