Postmates CEO tells customer to 'f--- off' (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

His "apology": http://blog.postmates.com/post/61340672198/a-message-to-our-...

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 team’s 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

Oh, come on. Who among us has not said something like this in private about one of our customers? The only problem here is that it got leaked out.

It's weird to see this on the Toronto Sun. (hometown gossipy newspaper)

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?

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.

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.

As embarrassing as it is, he didn't actually tell customer to fuck off.

Apparently some poor sod in support didn't trim internal exchange when using last mail in the chain to reply to that lady.

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!

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."

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/54/poker-beats-brags-varia...

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.

And actually... this is pretty poor form from the customer support... poor technical understanding to not delete the trailing email forwards if nothing else!