Should a recently found cache of errant emails go unanswered?

Are you obligated to respond to an email sent months ago that you inadvertently overlooked?

By my most recent count, I believe I have seven different email addresses. I had a reason for setting up each of these emails. One was for personal use. Another is my work email. Early on, I created a separate email from which to receive email from readers of The Right Thing column. One I have because it came with the url I purchased years ago when I set up www.jeffreyseglin.com. Yet another address doesn’t receive email but is simply an address where all email gets forwarded to wherever I’d like to be forwarded.

All of these seemed like a good idea at the time as a way to keep email correspondence related to various aspects of my personal and professional life separate. But it quickly became burdensome to check on each regularly, so I began having each of them forwarded to the one primary email address I use most often.

I have friends and colleagues who continue to use a separate personal email and professional email to try to ensure their personal emails are kept private from their employers. That seems a good practice. But I don’t do that.

Every time you or anyone else emails me, it all ends up on the same place, or at least it should. I recently discovered that the forwarding service for one of those email accounts had failed to function. It was an email I used to use for reader email to the column years ago, but apparently some publications that carry the column still feature it. I learned about the malfunction after the email provider sent an email to one of my other email addresses to let me know that the account had been inactive and would be suspended if I didn’t log into it. When I did log in, I discovered hundreds of emails that I had never seen, some of which were from readers of the column responding to my request to tell me their stories of kindness…and there were many stories of kindness.

One option would be to reset the forwarding service and ignore the pile of emails I hadn’t seen. If readers didn’t hear back from me, they might assume I chose not to use their stories, that I was overwhelmed by reader email and didn’t respond, or that I was simply rude. But pretending those emails never arrived seemed lazy at best and dishonest at worst.

Instead, I am making my way through the emails – each of them – and trying to respond where possible. I do try to respond to readers when they write, even when they disagree with something, and this should not be an exception to that practice.

While responding to email is not treated by many as urgently as it once might have been, if I ask someone for something in an email and they have the grace to respond, the right thing seems to be to acknowledge their response.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go check the other six email accounts to make sure everything is working fine and I’m as up to date as possible. You can email at jeffreyseglin@gmail.com with your questions, conundrums, or stories, and I will continue to try to respond.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Companies should listen to customers before trying to sell them stuff

Is it wrong to try to sell a customer something after he calls to complain about a service issue?

Twenty-five years ago in The Right Thing column, I wrote about a recently settled strike between telecommunications workers and their parent company. One of the items I focused on that could have added to the workers’ discontent was what seemed to be a disconnect between the company’s values statement and the behavior it insisted on from its customer service representatives.

Among the values the company indicated it held dear were “integrity, respect, imagination, passion and service.” But, I noted at the time, the company requested that its customer service representatives end each call from a customer with the question: “Did I provide you with outstanding service today?” Not a bad question, I guess, but it often placed representatives in the position of asking the question after they’d spent time with a customer who was calling to complain about an issue that might not have been resolved in the call.

As I wrote back then: “Having just calmed an irate customer, a representative offering such a response -- clearly tied to Verizon's core value of service -- could set him off again. The request was cited by strikers as one cause of stress.”

It would have been far better to give customer service representatives the discretion to ask the question or to dispense with it if it seemed clear to them that it might exacerbate their efforts to help a customer.

A recent experience with a cable service provider – a different company from the one I wrote about years ago – triggered my memory of this column.

After receiving a monthly bill that was higher than typical but which had arrived on the heels of a notice from the company that my bill would actually be going down because of the discontinuation of a service, I called the provider to see if they could explain the discrepancy. After about 20 minutes on hold and then another 20 minutes talking to an initial representative and then another half-hour talking with someone in the “loyalty” department, I still didn’t have any clarity about the discrepancy in the charge.

But as we were finishing the call, the last of these representatives told me of this great offer they had on computer tablets for customers. He wanted to know if he could sign me up for one. I asked him if he was really trying to sell me something additional after I had spent an hour unable to get a clear answer about the charges for what I already received. “I understand,” he said (not for the first time in our conversation, although it was pretty clear he didn’t understand what the issue was or what caused it), but again asked if I’d like to buy the tablet at a special price. I declined and hung up.

Twenty-five years after my initial plea to companies not to put their customer service representatives in the position of having to work from a script or to close even the most frustrating calls by upselling more services, they are still at it. The right thing, however, would be for companies to knock it off unless they want to continue to place their representatives in stressful situations and to leave their customers wondering if they want to continue to do business with them.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

 

When all goes wrong, patience can help

How should you respond when a speaker’s presentation goes woefully wrong?

Several years ago, I was invited to moderate a panel of business executives responding to ethical situations I presented to them on stage in front of a large audience in downtown Richmond, Virginia. The panel of executives was seated across the stage. I was standing so I could roam a bit as I posed questions.

As we got started, the audio technicians connected a lavalier microphone to my necktie and had me place the transmitter for it in my pocket. They carefully showed me how to turn it on when I was about to introduce the panel members.

The auditorium filled. The executives walked to their assigned seats and sat down. As I recall there was a brief introduction of me by someone offstage and then I walked on, turned on my microphone and was greeted by intense screeching feedback. I tried turning the microphone off and on with no luck. The audio tech quickly came out, removed the lavalier microphone connected to me, and attached a different lavalier microphone. I turned it on. More screeching that they couldn’t figure out.

As he removed that lavalier microphone, the audience began to chuckle a bit, particularly as I held up my forefinger and told them I’d be with them in a minute. Another tech came out with a handheld wireless microphone, but before he left he had me turn it on and try it out. I did and it worked fine. As he handed me a second handheld microphone, the audience could hear him say something to the effect of: “Here, stick this one in your pocket just in case.” And then he walked off.

The audience, who perhaps wasn’t supposed to hear his directive, broke into applause as he left the stage. As the applause subsided, they were still laughing as we began and seemed far more relaxed than they had been when they walked into the room.

We started in on the program of posing ethical questions and the audience was among the most attentive and engaged I’d experienced.

The executives were relaxed and patiently waited as we resolved the audience issues. The tech guys never panicked but continued to try to solve the challenge, even adding a bit of humor to their attempts at the end, even if the humor was unintended. Partly because I kept talking to them without a microphone – or at least tried to by shouting – the audience never seemed to grow restless. Instead, they seemed to have empathy for what they knew must have been a bit of a nerve-wracking few minutes for me and the techs.

The audience’s grace and understanding about circumstances beyond my control has stuck with me. I also learned that more often than not an audience will stick with you if they believe you are trying to do good work.

Occasionally, I have wondered if it might be a good idea to hope something goes wrong prior to every talk, but that wonder quickly dissipates. Instead, my appreciation for the audience’s response that day has reinforced my belief that having patience with others when they might be struggling to do something is the right thing to do. I still haven’t perfected my ability to do this. Nevertheless, I persist.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

How much does a columnist owe his readers to write something new?

Does a columnist owe it to his readers to let them know if he is actually writing new material?

Writing a weekly column can be a chore. If you’re trying to do it on top of working a full-time job, meeting family obligations and trying to live a balanced life, sometimes it can be downright oppressive.

I bring this up having just finished teaching two intensive January-term courses on column writing. Each course met from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, with two finished columns due by midnight on Friday. Writing two columns a week can be daunting, particularly to those who have never written a column before.

To give students in each class some perspective, I remind them that from 1935 until 1962, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote her “My Day” column. She did this while being first lady of the United States, helping to draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and doing other stuff that involved being Eleanor Roosevelt. Until 1961, she wrote six columns a week. In 1962, she cut back to three columns a week until September. She died in November 1962.

Not every column was a literary masterpiece, but they were reportedly widely read and influential. I remind students of this not to shame them, but to encourage them to find their inner Eleanor Roosevelt if they want to write columns regularly.

Near as I can tell, Roosevelt never recycled any of her columns and tried to pass them off as new to leverage her time. That technique is tempting to me as I am now writing the 1,152nd “The Right Thing” column.

Shortly after ChatGPT became available, there was a spate of articles that appeared by writers who acknowledged they were produced by ChatGPT as a way of showing what the bot could do. But doing that quickly became a gimmick and cliched.

There are enough Right Thing columns floating around the internet that I can easily ask ChatGPT to write a column on a particular topic at a particular length in the style of Jeffrey Seglin’s Right Thing column. As research, I tried this and ChatGPT kicked something out in 12.3 seconds. So on those weeks when I am feeling particularly overwhelmed or just plain lazy, why not recycle something I wrote years ago or have ChatGPT write my column for me, a task it can do far more quickly than I can?

As tempting as either might be, each would be wrong unless I told the readers that that was exactly what I was doing. I do revisit topics I’ve written about before if it seems relevant to do so, but I always disclose that I’m doing so to readers and I’ve never just run the same column that ran years ago.

And while ChatGPT can point out copy that is serviceable, it can’t draw from the same experiences I have nor make the same judgments I try to make each week when trying to wrestle with some issue or another.

If the weekly column feels like too much of a chore to write or procrastination seems to be winning out, the right thing is to hunker down and write. It’s a privilege to be able to write for you each week and that, for now, is motivation enough to assure you that the words I use are both new and my own.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Should existing customers also get good deals?

Are companies wrong to offer incentives to new customers that they don’t offer to existing customers?

I was a fan of the former television critic for the Boston Globe before he stepped down from the position after holding it for 27 years. His take on which shows were worth watching generally matched my own taste. Often, however, he would recommend a show that appeared on a streaming service to which I didn’t subscribe. On more than one occasion, his recommendation to readers who balked at paying for yet another streaming service was that they take advantage of the many free trial offers that often allowed new viewers several months for free. After that, he advised, you could cancel before the fees kicked in.

Alas, I had no interest in keeping track of which services I needed to cancel before the trial was up. Admittedly, there has never been a television show I’ve missed that made me feel as if my life was somehow less complete. But his advice reminded me of a recent question from a reader about whether it was fair that companies offered incentives to new customers that weren’t offered to existing customers.

The reader, whom we’re calling Clare, had been seeing advertisements from her cable television service, her cell phone provider, and other service providers that offered either better rates or attractive product discounts to new subscribers. The offers were far better than what she was receiving as an existing customer. On the one occasion she called her cable provider and waited on hold for several minutes, she was told the offers she saw were indeed not for her.

The only way Clare figured she might get some of these incentives would be to cancel whatever service she’d been getting and then wait to sign up as a new customer. But even if that were permitted, that meant the possibility of living without television service for a spell. It was hardly worth the effort Clare figured, but it was something she found annoying.

Clare wonders if it’s unethical for companies to offer new customers offers they don’t offer to existing customers.

There’s nothing wrong with companies offering incentives to attract new customers as long as they are clear and honest about whatever it is they are offering. Clare herself may have been attracted to her providers initially because of a new customer incentive. Companies do run the risk of annoying existing customers with such offers, but such risks are likely worth it to them to build up their client base. If Clare is annoyed to the point of wanting to search for new service providers, she should do that if such offers are available.

Even if there’s nothing wrong with such offers, there’s also nothing wrong with companies making sure their existing customers are rewarded for their loyalty by offering them incentives to stick around. Might cable television or cell phone providers lock in customers for life if, say, for every 10 years of being a customer they received a break on their bill or even a month free? Perhaps, no matter how unlikely it is for them to exhibit such gratitude.

As long as companies make clear to customers what they are paying for and for how long, they are doing the right thing. Customers should be able to make as informed a decision as possible.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2025 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.