Admin worker sacked after calling customer a ‘t**t’ in an email awarded £5,000 --[Reported by Umva mag]

A part-time admin worker who was sacked for calling a customer a ‘twat’ in an email sent by mistake has won more than £5,000 in an unfair dismissal claim.

Meliesha Jones, who worked at Vale Curtains and Blinds in Oxford, was dismissed for gross misconduct in June 2023 after accidentally sending a message to a customer that was meant for a colleague.

The customer had made ‘repeated complaints’ and tried to get a full refund of the cost of his curtains.

In an email, Ms Jones wrote to the company’s installations manager Karl Gibbons: ‘Hi Karl – Can you change this… he’s a twat so it doesn’t matter if you can’t.’

But she pressed ‘reply’ instead of ‘forward’, sending the email to the customer instead of Mr Gibbons.

Shortly after the email had been sent, the customer’s wife called her to say: ‘Is there any reason why you called my husband a twat?’

A ‘shocked’ Ms Jones apologised profusely, putting the call on loudspeaker so a colleague could hear.

The customer then demanded to speak to the manager, Jacqueline Smith.

Mrs Smith apologised to the customer for Ms Jones’ email, and told her that her colleague would be reprimanded.

The customer then asked how she would be compensated, and was told she could not get her curtains for free.

She then threatened to go to the press and social media with the issue, so Ms Smith said she would investigate the matter further and get back to her.

Ms Jones said she had offered to pay the customer £500 out of her own pocket as a ‘gesture of good will’.

The customer then contacted the company directly, making further threats about publicising the incident before leaving a poor review on TrustPilot.

The managerial team at Vale Curtains and Blinds decided to ‘get rid of’ Ms Jones, who was dismissed ‘following the disgraceful email that was sent to your husband in error’, a letter to the customer read.

Ms Jones was awarded £5,484.74 after the employment tribunal ruled that she had been dismissed on unfair grounds.

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 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’.

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