Politely telling clients I've moved to a different department within the company

Question

I am in the process of moving within my company from a customer support role/department to a new business area.

My email address and telephone number remains the same

The problem I have is that I am the main support contact for several clients. Despite agreed processes in place, I often get calls and emails from clients directly asking for assistance and advising issues to be resolved. The account manager has not advised the clients that I am moving and I know I will be getting emails/calls after I have moved. He seems reluctant to do so for reasons known only to himself (client confidence, fallout, explaining handover processes etc)

Should I just forward all emails directly to the account manager/my old line manager and say "over to you" or should I respond to the client advising them I am no longer working in the support role? The second option feels better to me but is this a little disloyal to my old manager? (Note: I will still have interaction with him in my new role, so there is no concept of bridge burning or not caring, I just want to do the right thing for them AND the client)

If advising the client, should I word my email almost in a generic out of office style? "I am no longer in a role dealing with support queries. Please redirect all enquiries to [email protected]"?

Answer 1

You should ask your old manager about this. These clients are not your clients, so you will not do any work for them, but they are still his clients, so he should decide what you do with emails directed at you. Then do what your old manager says.

If he refuses to answer you, ask your new manager. He or she will either tell you what to do or tell you to do what you think is right; in the latter case, I'd forward to the old manager, and send a reply to the client that you are not in the team anymore and that you forwarded it to the old manager, together with his email address.

Answer 2

I had a similar situation when I moved into my current role - I was point of contact for several internal departments and some external vendors. My strategy was to agree a cutoff point with my old boss and advise him that I'd be calling all these contacts to advise them of the change over. It gave a definite 'cut off point' where I wouldn't be doing anything more with them and also advised them who to contact in future.

This seemed to do the trick, there were a few emails where people forgot but they were handled by forwarding the email on to the new owner and including them in the message with a comment to the effect of "I've moved to a new role now but X will be able to handle your query for you". Otherwise you'll never get out of the loop of dealing with these queries and you'll find yourself doing two jobs.

Best of luck!

Answer 3

Realistically you should have a new email, so I'm guessing yours uses your name rather than job title like [email protected]. So you'll have to use another method.

It's actually your old managers responsibility to do this, but if they haven't then you need to do it both for the sake of the client and your own.

What works for me is just to forward emails to whoever has taken over cc'ing the client with a short oneliner to say that they will be dealing with someone new as you are in a new role.

If the client doesn't know you have moved on, then obviously they won't change, so you need to tell them. Same thing with phone calls, explain politely to the client that they need to ring XXXX since you no longer have that role. Eventually everyone will get the picture.