Hi Evil HR Lady,
I came across your website and decided to write you right away – I am having a hugely difficult time with a co-worker of mine. So here is the deal:
Our team is split in two offices in two separate locations
This co-worker – shares an office with our President and CEO and our Vice President.
The rest of us are in another office.
She has build a strong relationship over the years with many of our customers so when some of them have problems they contact her instead of the Sales Rep they have been dealing with.
Following this – she will then call the Sales Rep whose client had the problem and speak loud enough for everyone to hear in her office (namely the CEO and VP) to inform them of the ticked off client and situation. In her words she is only doing this to “make the sales rep aware” and “protect them” and “give them the heads up.” So to a naive person they think she is helping but to a more season sales veteran we know exactly what is going on. The problem is the CEO and VP are only hearing one side of the story. Her evil intent is to make herself look like the savoir of the day to the big guys while throwing the sales rep under the bus.
So the big question is – how do I expose this co-worker?
You don’t. Your customer is calling to complain. The Pres, CEO and VP want to know when there is a disgruntled client. I suggest you work on building your relationships with your clients so that they call you instead of her.
What can this coworker do for them that you cannot? What’s preventing you from doing that level of service? Somehow you are not meeting the needs of your clients and she is.
I agree that she’s not being nice. But don’t be so naive as to think that the muckity-mucks of senior management don’t understand that she’s trying to make other people look bad. They aren’t stupid either. It’s super obvious when someone does the loud talking thing.
If you improve your customer service, your clients will call you and this problem will go away.
I am going to have to disagree a little on the response. Although there is always room for improvement in all areas of a company, just because calls come to her, why is it assumed the sales dept is completely at fault and amiss of their duties?
Customers can complain about everything. It is valid to them but not all complaints are necessarily a failure of sales. And if it is sales needs to address it.
Customers sometimes will call anywhere to complain or ask questions and if they find someone that will take the call and help, the customer will call again to that same person unless directed elsewhere. Apparently this has been the case for quite sometime.
The calls should be directed to sales and weaned off the co-worker. Or if not, then it is what it is and as long as the OP is not getting in “trouble” for it, let it go. The CEO and VP obviously don’t care. Or take a stand and say, please direct these calls to me directly so I can do my job.
If the co-worker keeps fielding the problems why would the customer go anywhere else?
OP are you getting heat about the customers calling the co-worker and not you? Are you able to address the issues and fix them?
We had a customer that always called this on manager in production for everything. When a new company took over that produciton area they told her to start calling me. She was royally ticked off and made it very clear.. loudly how ticked she was.
She just wanted to talk to this one gal because that was who she was used to. Not to complain always but that was who she wanted to call.
Managment directed her to me and we actually had a great relationship.
I am just saying, in the OP’s case the calls need to be directed to the right people from the from the get go. If the sales area needs to fix something the co-worker needs to stay out of it.
This is hard to deal with as a receptionist, too. So many people call to complain and want to go over their sales rep’s head, even when they haven’t discussed the problem with the rep and he/she has no idea there even IS a problem! I always tried to ask them “Have you spoken with your project manager yet?” to see if at least they had gone that route before I sent them to the manager, and then would give the manager a heads-up before I transferred it.