Your call is NOT important to me!
‘Blatant and unreasonable’
Call centre worker fired for hanging up on 62 Sainsbury’s customers who rang to complain
A SAINSBURY’S call centre worker was sacked for repeatedly hanging up on angry customers, an employment tribunal heard.
Muawana McCollin put the phone down on 62 of 129 callers who were ‘unhappy’ or ‘upset’ in a single month.
The 49-year-old claimed the hang-ups were due to the phone system and that someone was ‘trying to make her look bad’, the tribunal was told.
But bosses fired her for gross misconduct after describing her hanging up on customers as the most ‘blatant’ and ‘unreasonable’ case they had ever seen.
Miss McCollin took her call centre employers to a tribunal claiming race and disability discrimination. At the hearing she said her dismissal would not have happened if she was ‘white and Scottish’.
Her claims were thrown out after the panel found she had a ‘skewed perception of events’.
Miss McCollin began working as a customer service representative for Telecom Service Centres Ltd in Glasgow in May 2018, with responsibility for answering calls for Sainsbury’s.
The following year concerns were raised about her hanging up on customers ‘early’ and an investigation was launched. ‘It was found that, in the month of June 2019, 62 of 129 calls were terminated early when customers were upset or unhappy’, the tribunal was told.
The hearing in Glasgow heard she claimed the medical condition ovarian fibroids affected her eyesight and she would terminate calls ‘in error’ because she struggled to press the correct button.
However, she was sacked after being found guilty of gross misconduct for ‘deliberately and wilfully cutting the customer off calls’.
Manager Paul Tausney told the hearing they were ‘among the most blatant and unreasonable disconnects’ he had ever heard. The tribunal, headed by employment judge Ian McPherson, said: ‘We are satisfied that [her employers] had good cause, with overwhelming evidence, to summarily dismiss [her] for gross misconduct.’