Administrative worker unfairly dismissed after accidentally abusing customer, court hears

An admin worker who was fired after calling a client a “prick” in an email she mistakenly sent them has won more than £5,000 in an unfair dismissal claim.

Meliesha Jones, who has been a part-time administrator at Vale Curtains and Blinds in Oxford since May 2021, was dealing with a customer complaint with a colleague when she pressed the wrong button.

She was dismissed for gross misconduct in June 2023, a week after sending the message to the customer rather than the company’s facilities manager, Karl Gibbons, an employment tribunal in Reading was told.

Ms Jones was awarded £5,484.74 after the tribunal ruled she had been unfairly dismissed.

The customer had made “repeated complaints” about his order and had attempted to obtain a full refund of the price of his curtains.

She wrote: “Hey Karl, can you change this… he’s an asshole 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 after, the customer’s wife called and asked, “Is there a reason you called my husband an asshole?”

Ms Jones was “shocked and upset” when she realised her mistake, put the caller on speakerphone so a colleague could hear and apologised “profusely”, but the customer’s wife wanted to speak to manager Jacqueline Smith.

In a subsequent phone call, Ms. Smith apologized for what Ms. Jones had done and said she would be reprimanded.

The customer’s wife asked how she would be compensated and was told she couldn’t get the curtains for free.

She threatened to go to the press and social media and Ms 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 “goodwill gesture”.

The court heard that an investigation had taken place and the company decided that there should also be a disciplinary hearing.

But the court heard that neither Ms Jones nor the client were interviewed, no notes were produced by Ms Smith and no written record of the decision was made.

The customer contacted the company directly and made further threats about publicising the incident, including leaving a bad review on Trustpilot and bosses decided to ‘get rid of’ Ms Jones.

When he arrived at work, a crying Ms Smith handed him an invitation to a disciplinary meeting.

A letter was then sent to the client’s wife informing her that Mrs Jones had been dismissed “as a result of the disgraceful email that was sent to your husband in error”.

Ms Jones appealed her dismissal on 14 grounds, but it was dismissed.

Employment judge Akua Reindorf KC said: “I conclude from the evidence before me that the principal reason for his decision was that the client and his wife had threatened to publish 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 complainant would have been dismissed.

“It is clear that on the day of the incident, Ms Smith believed that the complainant’s error was regrettable but did not constitute a disciplinary matter.”

The judge said: “The disciplinary process and dismissal were a charade designed to appease the client.

“This is clear from the fact that Ms Smith immediately informed the client that (Ms Jones) had been dismissed (including without any apparent regard to the claimant’s data protection rights).”

She added that the company had “decided to sacrifice the complainant’s job in order to appease the customer and avoid bad reviews, and had completely unreasonably failed to consider other, more proportionate means of achieving the same result.”

She described Ms Jones’s sending of the email as “inappropriate and reprehensible” and that she had been “negligent”.

The language used was “not unusual in this workplace” and “the mistaken addressee was a genuine mistake, one that occurs often.”