As a Bufferoo you’ll get the privilege of building relationships with thousands of customers. Hopefully most of these will be enriching, positive experiences. Every once in a while, an interaction might take a negative turn. It could be that our product has led to intense frustration, or that the customer is just having an off day. In rarer cases, things may turn abusive or threatening. If things do turn abusive, we never want a Buffer teammate to feel unsafe.

This teammate protection pledge is aimed at giving you the confidence to end Buffer’s relationship with a customer when it’s clear that the wellness or safety of our team is at stake. If you encounter any of the following three elements, you are empowered to initiate a process to part ways with a customer:

1. Any form of racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, or otherwise discriminatory or derogatory or harassing language. Simply put, you should never feel unsafe at Buffer, no questions asked.
2. Threats, either personal or professional. This includes: threats to reveal information about a Buffer teammate, threats of personal or professional blackmail, and so on.
3. A history of negative behavior with no sign of improvement or change. This could be a long pattern of berating our company or team, a history of aggressively demanding refunds, etc. Context is important here, and this one will be the trickiest to gauge.

When these situations come up, if it feels like a clear and strong example of abuse, we trust you to make the right call! If it feels like a complicated decision, getting advice from a teammate or your lead may be best.

<aside> ⚡ Note for Customer Advocates: If you ever feel uncomfortable interacting with a customer due to their language, you can always escalate the conversation to the Leads right away - no questions asked. Or you can DM a Senior Advocate for help. We recommend not sharing the conversation in a public Slack channel to avoid unintentionally inflicting hurt on other teammates.

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If you do encounter a situation where it would be best to end things with the customer, you are welcome to initiate that process yourself, or pass it off to a teammate if you’re uncomfortable being the one to end things. No one should feel obliged to continue correspondence after being the recipient of abusive behavior, so we encourage you to lean on your team here.

If you’re the one to end things, here a few thoughts on how to approach it:

1. Be direct with the customer, sharing examples of why we made the decision if possible. It’s absolutely appropriate to use a more factual tone and steer away from opening up an ongoing conversation. Do your best to let the customer save face as much as possible, without obfuscating why we are ending things.
2. If on a paid plan, refund the customer more than might be warranted. Here’s a helpful excerpt from a Help Scout blog: [When breaking up with a customer], we laid it out as matter-of-factly as we possibly could…and we quoted incidents directly back at him. We calmly explained why we were making this decision, wished him luck, and — this is important — refunded him six months of payments. Why did we refund him? Because giving the outgoing customer something to part with defuses the situation….We didn’t ask if he wanted the refund, we just gave it to him, said goodbye, and moved on. In the end, he thanked us and we haven’t heard from him since. For refunds, let’s reimburse two months of payments anytime we need to suspend an account for abuse. If it feels like a unique circumstance, feel free to get advice from your lead.
3. To finalize things, you can cancel the customer’s subscription, suspend the account, and tag the email or tweet as ‘suspended’ for tracking. If we later discover that the customer has started a new account, please suspend/refund again immediately. There is no need to re-engage in communication.
4. If the customer or another user is reaching out via social media, flag their content to the social network (if applicable). For Twitter, unfollow them (if applicable), and mute them. For Facebook, ban the Facebook profile from our page.

Thankfully, the moments where this comes up are few and far between. We hope this pledge empowers our team to protect themselves and each other when it’s necessary. At the same time, we're excited to continue surprising and delighting in difficult situations, bringing light into dark moments, and choosing empathy even when it’s hard. That’s what makes Buffer special, and we're so very proud to be here with all of you.

Adapted from HelpScout’s guide to handling abusive customers