Sometimes certain people just baffles me...

Today I received an email from a customer that I send reports to every month. The way he crafts his email gives people a very unfriendly tone. Many of us gets the feelings of him always trying to put us down despite the fact that most of us are doing our very best to fulfil and comply with their requirements.

His email to me edited to certain extent.

Melvin,

Tks for the update and report and I would like to remind you that the report must serve its purpose, i.e. the stats must be factual, accurate and validated before you publish it into the repository for ref. (in this context, pls. ensure that someone validate the stats before you submit it to us) Pls. refer to the XXXX document , I found the duration is incorrectly marked. It should be from XXX to XXXX and the service outage downtime recorded is XX mins. (This is what XXXX had reported to XXXX ) I believe XXXX has used your stats and report it accordingly in Dec's report to XXXX

Can you pls. work with XXXX (XXXX to assist) and amend the record accordingly? Pls. also note that you should not continue to copy such mail to XXXX and XXXX, both of them are no longer with XXXX.

Best regards
XXXX XXX X X

My reply to him : -

Good morning XXXX,

Thank you for sharing.

XXXX keeps a spreadsheet on all XX XX incidents that happened. I tried to ensure that every XXXX that happened and recorded in the XX XX spreadsheet is checked, updated and tally against hers to ensure the information is correct before sending out. . For the duration time, I took it from XXXX XXXX confirmed and resolved time. Please see below the incident rectified message that was being send out. The time confirmed and resolved time is from XXXX to XXXX thus it was recorded as such in the spreadsheet.

Hi XXXX,
Kindly advise if I should take XXXX confirmed and resolved time for future reporting and if this record should be amended to XXXX reported time.

Thanks
Melvin Tan

P.S - I am not complaining because in a job environment, you have to work with different people from different company. Its not easy to accomodate every person working style but if you make an effort to emphathise, understand the other other party working style, I am sure things gets done more efficiently...rather than asserting your authority with such unfriendly email tone..

Do you have such experience with your customers ? Share your comments here...