I've been drawn back into doing some work for a bricks and mortar company again recently, as needs be. This morning one of the office staff made a huge mistake-sent out an email to the wrong list, emailing all of the clients rather than the occupants of the building to complain about the trash not being taken out.

Trouble was, they chose not to apologise. They just changed the image on the servers to a plain white, empty jpeg, so they wouldn't see the offensive photo she took of the bins. Doesn't this seem like the perfect way to offend hundreds of clients?!?

It's also a perfect opportunity to not only appologize to customers but more importantly, lock down policies and procedures and forbid certain employees from access a list of customers.

Imagine if the same person, one day, becomes disgruntled with how the company is operating. They then choose to air the "dirty laundry" with all the customers of the establishment. This can be a huge PR issue for the owners of the building.

I hope someone gets spanked on this and the owners of the company take into consideration the ramifications of someone having access to this list and not double-checking who mail is sent to!

Every process should have a checks and balances procedure!

Completely agree with "handsonhosting", you should implement strict policies and only allow certain staff members (experienced and responsible) access to most of the things. If such things continue to happen, it will create a very bad impression on clients and they will for sure know their hosting is in wrong hands.

Have to concur ... safeguards need to be in place.

wow....what a story...Its both funny and really unpleasant for you. Hope you wont get many problems from this...
Good luck

Definite possibility to offend clients, and more importantly if they would have apologized it wouldn't have offended them.

Mistakes happen, it's good corporate responsibility to acknowledge when they occur, apologize, and explain what steps are being taken to ensure that the same thing doesn't happen again.

You should write a funny email appologizing, kind of "Dear customers, this is how we think about you, you are so close to the company that we send you even internal emails. ;-) Please ignore our mail from...."
Something like this. Your customers will understand, as mistakes can happen. But this depends on you customers if you can do this.

That would be a funny idea. I'm sure people would be more likely to laugh it off if there was a slight joke thrown in. I wonder if all the people that got the email just brushed it off or were offended. Best of luck on that.

Well we know that before the spooling was cancelled that several hundred were sent out, and we got back read-receipts for them all. Yet the only comments we had back were humourous-so we'll never know what the rest of the clients thought but those who answered were just fine. Thankfully. It's only sheer luck that that is the case.

This is definitely a very creative idea

I think using humor in this situation is the best remedy to get out of this situation. It shows you have a personality, not just a corporate name, and it also puts your clients at ease.

I agree completely. I think that a simple apology will still leave customers wondering how that sort of a mistake could have happened and even make them view your company as a bit unprofessional. With a little humor, you can get a laugh out of your clients and I'm quite sure they will be over the mistake.

This is one smart idea, And one smart thing I would do. Contact those customers and make it look like it was a promo code, For example put something like put a special promo code dealing with trash, and have it take 10% off there next month billing.

I can see that working actually-maybe even change the image so that it has something humorous in it instead. There had to be a million and one ways that they could have handled it, and instead they didn't handle it at all.

I think that the fact that they did not handle it is a bit disappointing. They probably just didn't know what to do