The sad truth of the harassment faced by female customer support executives in live chats — Women’s day exclusive

On this International Women’s day, we wish to bring about a discussion and figure out possible ways of resolution to an important problem that almost every woman working in customer support/sales undergoes. It is about the harassment faced by female customer support executives.

We have 2 customer success executives helping customers at Inkmonk. At the end of each day, we review every enquiry & chat in order to take pointers from them and improve our service.

During one such session, we saw the chat below.

Yeah, you saw that right. We received an unique printing requirement. I bet none of the printing companies out there had received such an unique printing requirement ever.

A few chats after that, there was one more

And not surprisingly, queries like these were being sent only to a customer success agent who is a woman.

What we were little surprised was the way it had been handled by her.

Yeah. We agree that it is shrewd! But, why should this be silently accepted by our employees? What we had highlighted here is just the tip of the iceberg. Since the users are anonymous visitors to the site until they sign in, they cannot be tracked. And, this continued to happen almost every single day.

We were working on how to solve this and we had to change the display name of the female executive with a pseudo name and had to continue so since then.

The problem with this solution — from the genuine customer’s perspective

There are certain customers who want to know the customer success executive’s name so that they need not repeat their whole requirement again to follow up. It gets harder in this case with masked name.

A loud shout out!

Other than banning & blocking the visitor / using a pseudo name, is there any alternative solution that you have come across in your experience? Do, let us know in the comments below. We want to create a good environment for our employees as well as our customers without sacrificing anyone’s interests.

Women’s day seems like a good day to have this discussion, considering that it is celebrated in memory of the brave women pioneers who sacrificed a lot to earn the right to work freely and equally alongside men.

And again, Happy Women’s day!