Have you ever written a very serious, very important business email and sent it to the wrong customer?

As an Operations Service Management Director, I regularly received urgent emails, notifying me of a customer’s dissatisfaction. To be mailed directly, it meant all earlier lines of complaint had failed for the customer so, with their frustration topping the charts, they were reaching up and out as high as they could, hoping to be heard. What this meant was that they were irate, angry and definitely close, if not already, to losing revenue.

In a company developing and supporting software and solutions calculating complex revenue from telecommunications, many things can go wrong all too often and unfortunately, serious complaints happened regularly. Being the senior management escalation point, on the receiving end of highly infuriated, anxious customers, I soon learned that what’s crucial to rescuing the situation is to respond quickly and calmly. Basically, I needed to convey to my dear customer that they’d been heard, that I cared they weren’t happy, that I recognised the potential effect on their revenue stream and most importantly, that I had a plan by when and how my team would fix their problem.

On one particular day, I received a vexed escalation email from one such irate customer. We had been working to fix their problem for a while and our Service Level Agreement deadline was teetering on the edge. Despite our genuine efforts, we couldn’t for all the tea in China find the malicious coding bug causing the problem. Fruitless hours had been spent and with month end fast approaching, the customer was panicking that he’d start losing revenue. His escalation mail had finally reached my inbox with exasperated pleas for miraculous intervention.

I read his mail with my heart in my mouth, looking around to find my magic wand. Was it still plugged in and charging next my bed, I wondered, as I drained the last sip of my freezing cold coffee? Then, quickly switching back into solution mode, I strategised a rescue plan, plotting how best to effectively communicate back to my beloved customer. I rescheduled agendas to ensure I could talk directly to the experts in my team, and I phoned my customer, acknowledging his mail and promising to send him a comprehensive response soon.

The experts and I diluted the technical details into layman’s English as we brainstormed how to truly fix the problem. Every option was thrown onto the table, including how quickly specialists could get on-site to the customer before the month slammed firmly shut. Finally, armed with a rescue plan that had firm dates and names, and thinking I had enough understanding of the technicalities to define the problem, I closed my office door and typed up the most diplomatic, caring email response ever. I pressed send and left the office to refill my coffee, feeling satisfied with a job well done.

When I returned to my office, I read in horror the response sent back to me; light-headed giddiness matched the surge of nausea that hit my tummy.

I had inadvertently included another customer in the cc list on my response and both the right and the wrong customer had replied to me immediately, expressing their concerns. A flurry of frantic phone calls of apology followed as calm fled my office and I worked to regain my composure and their trust. I was very lucky later that day when the team miraculously discovered the coding bug and released the solution to all customers.

Over and above that though, I learned a valuable lesson, one that I now meticulously apply, always. I can never be too busy to not always check my work thoroughly for errors. I always triple check that I’m sending to the right email addresses and I also always make sure that seemingly simple things like punctuation, grammar, and spelling are right. When you’re busy with multiple things at the same time, mistakes can happen so easily and sometimes, it’s not always that easy to fix them.