Respond rather than react....especially on email!

It is all too easy to react to things as they happen, but in doing so we often display unattractive behaviour and moreover often go on to fail to get a desired outcome as a result. Last week I made an email complaint to a retailer about a piece of clothing that had been bought as a present for one of my children. The label had the age right, but the size stated on the label was more appropriate for a child 1 year younger and the actual size of the teeshirt seemed to correspond with that rather than the age stated. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but as it was a clear case of both mis-labeling and mis-selling I decided to complain. The tone of my email was non emotional and purely stated the facts. The reply came promptly at least, but it was an insult to my intelligence and integrity, it was a pure customer service email which spent more time telling me about the company's superb quality controls than it did focussing on the problem at hand. It went on to talk about how I 'felt" I had a piece of clothing that had somehow missed their standards of control and suggested I take it in to a store with "proof of purchase". (as if their label wasn't sufficient and being seasonal ware that should also have helped. )They completely failed to ask where it had been purchased or what specifically it was, so they clearly had no intention of following up. The email made me feel doubted, barely paid attention to and then quickly passed on to someone else. My instant reaction was one of hot indignation and I immediately typed out an incensed reply. I then took a deep few breaths and considered the situation - was my righteous reply going to get me anywhere? Unlikely. The recipient would in turn get annoyed and feel even less incentive to help and so I would get nowhere. Even the immediate gratification of sending a snooty email in return would soon dissipate and leave me feeling empty and slightly embarrassed. So I decided to do delete the email and do nothing. In this case I decided that no response was better than a negative reaction. It reminded me of many a time at work when emails would incense, my first reaction would be to fire something back, but my second response was more calculated and invariably I would delete the email and carefully consider the best course of action to get the desired results. I would ignore (to a degree) the feeling that I was right and they were wrong. Usually this would mean me trying to put myself into the other's place and figuring out how we could both come out of this feeling like we had won. I tended to assume that the sender's mission in life was not to annoy me and therefore the fact that they had was probably a by product of something else going on in their life. A soft and sympathetic phone call or face to face conversation with the sender often ensued. The outcome was predominantly positive. Everyone won, everyone felt happier and lighter and the result of whatever process/issue it was, was achieved more easily. How different things might have been had I reacted instantly rather than more thoughtfully responded. An escalation of a barely concealed disagreement, negative tensions, bad moods, raised heartbeats! Response rather than reaction is to be commended as a good course of action in most instances, but perhaps especially so on email.