Email example sharings in handling customer complaints part 1

It can be really annoying and frustrating in receiving complaints of job quality from clients and it seems we have no choice but to accept their request of price deduction, especially if they are pointing out that the errors in the translation has brought “severe negative impact” from their clients towards them, there seems to be no alternative but to accept the fact because we have to maintain a healthy customer relationship.

But I think there could be some points to follow when we deal with customer complaints, such as to remain calm and patient, and look into the matter attentively while letting your clients feel that you are taking this case really seriously as a responsible vendor, here I would like to share with you some email examples in one of the compliant case I’ve recently encountered.

(compiled out of email exchanges with the client, part of the text are abriged and client’s name is omitted)

Client Email 1

Hi Cecilia,

I hope you have been doing well! I am contacting you to follow up on the Simplified Chinese translation project you completed for me last month. While we were going through the reconciliation stage of this project, we discovered multiple objective errors in the translation. As a result, we have had to file a corrective action report.

A short (but not exhaustive) sampling of errors we discovered were as follows:

(text omitted for confidential consideration)

In order to help defend you in this process, we’d like to hear from you and see what happened. Did you feel that the project involved a subject matter with which you were not familiar, or that the timeline we provided was too tight? Were there any external issues that impacted this translation? Please let me know, as understanding what happened will help us provide a better defense of your work to our quality department.

Thank you for your understanding, and I hope to hear from you soon!

Reply 1

Dear XXX

We are so sorry about the errors in the translation. We’ll be looking through this matter and will get back to you as soon as possible in regard of the issue.

Attached please see the doc file for our feedback of the excerpts of the translation.

Should you have any queries or comments, please feel free to contact us.

Kind Regards

Client Email 2

Hi Cecilia,

I hope you’ve been doing well–I wanted to follow up on this corrective action report so that it can be resolved.

After conferring with my manager, I have decided to approach you with the possibility of a pay deduction. From what I gathered from your response to the quality investigation, the errors in the file weren’t caught due to external factors, such as the tight deadline. Thus, I believe the issues that arose are most likely do not present an accurate reflection of your usual level of work.

However, because the objective errors listed below (as well several others) were not corrected in the FT, our BT QM spent over 30 hours correcting the translation during reconciliation–much longer than usual. For this reason, I was wondering whether you would be willing to accept a full deduction of pay for this project. This really isn’t something that I want to request, but due to these particular circumstances, I believe that it would be the most appropriate course of action.

Reply 2

Dear XXX

Thanks for your good wishes, I’m fine, hope you are well also.

Regarding this quality investigation, we would like to go through the changes and corrections that you’ve made into the whole translation though before judging the rate of deduction of the project payment.

In the excerpt you sent us the other day which listed a few errors inside the translation, you mentioned that “ A short (but not exhaustive) sampling of errors” were listed into the corrective report and required a feedback regarding those errors.

You wrote

In order to help defend you in this process, we’d like to hear from you and see what happened. Did you feel that the project involved a subject matter with which you were not familiar, or that the timeline we provided was too tight? Were there any external issues that impacted this translation? Please let me know, as understanding what happened will help us provide a better defense of your work to our quality department.

But we didn’t receive your order to correct the errors listed (as well as several others) and to revise the FT, (if so we would have done that), instead we gave back translator’s comment and feedback on the errors listed. Afterwards we didn’t receive further queries from you as well so I supposed that the feedback was okay for you.

Also I hope you understand that we’ll have to pay our translator and editor, and we’ve been trying really hard in meeting the target delivery time.

We are really very sorry for the inconvenience we’ve brought but a full deduction is really unacceptable based on the reason above.

Do you think it’s possible to send us the final files your QA teamed revised and corrected for over 30 hours during reconciliation so that we can have a better knowledge on the exhaustive errors of the delivery before discussing the deduction rate of this job?

Thanks for your kind consideration.

Kind Regards

(To be continued)