There are two ways you can go about this:

You can stand up for your rights (and lose customer and any possible referrals) You can keep your temper and keep your customer

Replies to Complaints

Most businesses these days have (or should have) as their policy that customer is always right. It's far better business sense to replace a couple of items which don't need replacing - and reap reward of customer satisfaction and possible referrals - than to insist on your rights and lose unknown numbers of customers and referrals.

So, aim of your response to an irate customer is to find out what he / she wants and to give it to him / her. Even if request appears to be entirely unreasonable, what you earn in Brownie Points, often makes up for what you lose in replacing item (unless of course it's a Maserati or like!).

1. Express regret - sincerely (don't say ...we can't understand how this happened... because this implies that customer is careless or stupid - since no-one else has had this trouble).

2. Explain how trouble occurred (the customer is entitled to know what went wrong- this also reflects well on your business, since it shows that you've taken complaint seriously enough to investigate it thoroughly - and we all like to be taken seriously!).

3. Tell customer what you are going to do to rectify situation - best thing to do is exactly what customer said he / she wanted. If this is totally impossible, suggest a viable alternative.

Sometimes customer will be at fault - by forgetting to include a correct address, or leaving out cheque.

The punctuation of abbreviations is an area that is subject to considerable differences of opinion. For example, as demonstrated by question above, not everyone agrees on when (or if) to use full stops.

It's an indication of just how confused this area is that even basic terminology isn't agreed upon. You'd think that a simple term like abbreviation was easy to define, wouldn't you? Sure you would, yet some camps distinguish between abbreviations and contractions (giving each different punctuation rules), while others lump everything in together as abbreviations.

A common definition of abbreviation goes something like this:

An abbreviation is a shortened version of a word or phrase and is often followed by a period. For example, c.o.d., ft-lb, St. or publ.

Unfortunately, there is rarely any cogent explanation of what is meant by "often followed by a period", so just *when* does an abbreviation take a period, and when doesn't it?

In an effort to provide clear answers to these questions, I present following more precise definitions: