Today we had a nice surprise in our official general slack channel the whole company can see. It's the mandatory info channel we all have to check regularly too and that's usually reserved for information with high impact only.
One of our bosses in the engineering department berated CS OPS for letting his customer escalate because he(the customer) had called the hotline and told the CS rep he had forgotten to give an information when talking to said engineer earlier and please add this to the technical request the engineer had received from him. The CS rep told him she couldn't find the request and the customer got angry.
The CS rep generated a request, added notes and calmed the customer down. The system creates an automated mail with the ticket number for the customer, whenever a request is logged into the system, so the customer knew exactly when his request was forwarded first and there was nothing the CS rep could have done to avoid letting the customer know when the ticket had been made.
So after the call, the customer complained against the engineer, while giving the service rep full marks in her CSAT.
The engineer blew up in the official channel, berating the whole CS department because he couldn't see who was the culprit and stated he'd did his job and we shouldn't boost our numbers on other people's costs. He claimed he had forwarded the request via call directly to the tech department and the CS rep should have asked before telling the customer lies.
The head of CS let him know, very friendly I must say, that there were no notes from him in the customers file, neither about their call with the engineer, nor about the issue, neither was there a ticket, so there was no way for the CS rep to know what he did and not her responsibility to call him to ask for information, maybe it was a system glitch? But still it was his responsibility to document the information and next time to please call her directly to clear any questions before berating her team.
Ho, boy, he didn't take that well and the reply wasn't great at all. He accused her of obstructing and hiding her teams incompetence and what not.
Hours pass. Then our COO answers in the thread. He tells us that this kind of communication is unacceptable, that the CS can relax, since we have done nothing wrong. Complimented the impeccable note taking from the CS rep and tells in no uncertain terms that everyone has to create documentation or take responsibility for resulting mistakes.
He then goes on and compliments CS again, reminding everyone that we are the ones who get yelled at by the customers if something gets wrong and not to add to the stress by creating incomplete documentation.
Felt good. It could be different. If management just wanted to make a difference.
Another few hours later a mail goes out informing all of us that the engineer in question is no longer at the company and wishing him good luck with future endeavours… It didn't exactly tell that or why they fired him. But it's not hard to guess.
The fun thing is: our system generates most notes automatically, you barely have any extra work to do, just some copy+ paste here and there, then just hit some checkboxes and the CRM does the rest in the automated log. So either the engineer had to 'forget' checking the boxes, sometimes willingly deactivating pre-checked boxes to avoid the documentation, or circumvented all processes and worked outside the system or well, he just didn't do what he said he'd done and his unhinged try to hide that was what clearly showed that… something wasn't done as it was supposed to be done. Still, sh*t happens and sometimes our system glitches. If it was a one time thing, it wouldn't have been a biggie if he'd just kept quiet. So by trying to shift the blame he probably got fired for something he could have easily excused as an oopsie otherwise and no one would have cared.
Edit:
CS OPS>Customer Service Operations
CRM>Customer Relations Management, a program to document all customer data together with everything concerning the project
CS rep> Customer Service Representative