21 September 2024, 17:47 | Updated: 21 September 2024, 17:53
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An admin worker who was fired after calling a customer “a t***” in an email which she mistakenly sent to them has been awarded more than £5,000 in an unfair dismissal claim.
Meliesha Jones, who worked at Vale Curtains and Blinds in Oxford since May 2021, was dealing with a customer complaint with a colleague when she hit the wrong button.
The part-time administrator was sacked for gross misconduct in June 2023, a week after she sent the message to the customer instead of the company’s installations manager Karl Gibbons, an employment tribunal in Reading heard.
Ms Jones was awarded £5,484.74 after the tribunal ruled she had been unfairly dismissed.
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The customer had made “repeated complaints” about his order and had tried to get a full refund of the cost of his curtains.
She wrote: “Hi Karl – Can you change this… he’s a t*** so it doesn’t matter if you can’t.”
By mistake, instead of clicking “forward” she had clicked “reply”, so the email was sent to the customer instead of Mr Gibbons.
Shortly afterwards the customer’s wife rang up and said “Is there any reason why you called my husband a t***?”
Ms Jones was “shocked and upset” as she realised her mistake, put the caller on speaker so a colleague could hear and apologised “profusely” but the customer’s wife wanted to speak to the manager Jacqueline Smith.
In a later telephone call, Mrs Smith apologised for what Ms Jones had done and said she would be reprimanded.
The customer’s wife asked how she was going to be compensated and was told she could not get the curtains for free. She threatened to go to the press and social media and Mrs Smith said she would investigate the matter and get back to her.
Ms Jones said she would offer to pay the customer £500 out of her own pocket as “a gesture of goodwill.”
The tribunal heard that an investigation took place and the company decided there also had to be a disciplinary hearing.
But the tribunal heard that neither Ms Jones nor the customer was interviewed, no notes were produced by Mrs Smith and no written account of the decision was made.
The customer had contacted the company directly and made further threats about publicising the incident, in particular by leaving a poor review on Trustpilot and bosses decided to “get rid of” Ms Jones.
When she arrived at work, Mrs Smith, who was crying, handed her an invitation to a disciplinary meeting. A letter was also sent to the customer’s wife informing her that Ms Jones had been dismissed “following the disgraceful email that was sent to your husband in error”.
Ms Jones lodged an appeal against her dismissal on 14 grounds, but it was denied.
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Employment Judge Akua Reindorf KC said: “I conclude from the evidence before me that the principal reason for his decision was that the customer and his wife had made threats to publicise the Claimant’s email in the press, social media and/or Trustpilot.”
She added: “I am satisfied that if a fair procedure had been followed, there is no chance that the claimant would have been dismissed.
“It is clear that on the day of the incident, Mrs Smith thought that the claimant’s mistake was regrettable but not a disciplinary matter.”
The judge said: “The disciplinary process and the dismissal were a sham designed to placate the customer. This is clear from the fact that Mrs Smith immediately informed the customer that (Ms Jones) had been dismissed (notably, without any apparent regard for the Claimant’s data protection rights).”
She added that the company had “decided to sacrifice the claimant’s employment for the sake of appeasing the customer and heading off bad reviews, and wholly unreasonably failed to consider other more proportionate ways of achieving the same outcome.”
She described Ms Jones’s sending of the email as “improper and blameworthy” and that she had been “careless”.
The language used was “not out of the ordinary in the particular workplace” and “the mistaken addressee was a genuine error, and one which is often made”.