I don’t want these post to be mistaken for a rant. If I did I would have disclosed the name of the Institution but instead a starting point of a discussion of what to do when things go wrong.

Yesterday at 4:45pm I received an email from a Financial Institution, this is not one of those scam alerts, and the lady was informing their customers from that particular office that some documents were going to be available on their website, the title included something about going green, when I opened, big surprise, instead of the bcc the Lady used the cc field of the email system and now the email that I shared with the institution along with the ones from the customers are all there, so I have a list of all the active customers for that branch.

Immediately, I called their office and nobody answered the phone, it was before 5:00pm, so I decided to send an email back to inform them of the situation, didn’t heard from them so I sent an email to the Senior Vice President’s at 5:47pm. I didn’t hear back from them until this morning at 9:10am, when the Senior VP called me to apologize, finally at 9:55am I received an apology from the Lady that sent the email on the first place.

Everything would have been good, but noooo, they were up to fix the problem, the Lady in question decided to “recall the email” guess what, I received the list of ALL the customers AGAIN, I called back, again I left a message and they called me back, this time I demanded that they keep these Lady away from their email system until she gets retrained in the use of a computer.

Here are some points that I will recommend for any Small to Medium Business (SMB) to take into consideration:

• eMail on your mobile device is not a “hip thing” anymore

You need to be able to access your email ALL the time, not only your personal stuff but your professional email system (I really hope you have them separate), you need to give your customers the importance that they deserve, people appreciate this.

• You don’t need to know the answer

But as soon as something happens, you need to put yourself in front of the problem, if anything, to assure your customers that even when you don’t have all the details yet, you will investigate what is going on and that you will correct the situation.

• This also apply to Social Media

You cannot prevent bad customer service situations from happening but there are plenty of companies out there big and small that are doing a great job to monitor and respond immediately when this things happen.

Do you have your own Customer Service blunt to share?, or do you want to share another point, please leave us a comment.

(names were changed for now, but I’ll make certain that all the people involved receive a link back to this post)