No matter how big is the team, always speak with ONE voice to your customers.

Once in a while, some one in my team would surprise me with an email to customers. Yesterday, a customer wrote in to complain about our poor services and cited an incident that happened on Saturday. Next thing I know, one of my staff wrote back an email saying that nothing was wrong on Saturday and even proof that transactions were indeed coming in. Unknown to him, there was indeed a downtime on Saturday due to some technical difficulties at our partner’s site. It is good that he has taken the initiative to address the concerns but it is going to cause more harm than good if he confuses our customers.

I will need to do some damage control first thing in the morning to avoid giving customers the wrong impression that the Operations team is out of control. It is extremely important that team members communicate internally first before communicating with customers. This is to ensure that we have all the facts right and we effectively speak as ONE voice outside of the team.

One of the challenge when dealing with this situation, besides handling the customer, is to determine the best way to educate the staff who sent out that email without sending the wrong message (I appreciate his proactiveness but not his lack of communication with other team members). Sending the wrong message will result in him not taking a more active role in the operations team.