Conversations you should not be having, and how to notice
Ordinary business inboxes receive extraordinary messages: a health condition explaining a return, a child using a parent's phone, somebody in real distress, somebody who cannot pay. You did not ask for any of it, and you are now holding it.
Not legal advice. What follows is about noticing, responding like a person, and not making the record worse than it needs to be.
Special category data arrives unasked
"I need to return this because of my heart condition" is health data in your messages table. Most regimes treat it more strictly than an address. You did not solicit it and you are still responsible for it.
- Do not repeat it back into notes, tags or fields. One copy in the conversation is unavoidable; five copies across your CRM is a choice.
- Do not make it a tag. Tags get exported, filtered and shown in lists.
- Do let retention reach it. This is a good argument for a real retention policy rather than keeping everything forever.
Children
Phones are shared, and a message from a number you have as an adult customer may be a child. If a conversation reads like it is with a minor, do not continue a commercial exchange - ask to speak to the account holder. This is one of the few cases where slowing down is unambiguously right.
Distress
It happens: a bereavement mentioned to explain a cancellation, somebody clearly not coping. Two rules that cover almost all of it:
- Respond as a person, briefly and kindly, and do the practical thing - waive the fee, cancel the order, whatever removes the burden.
- Do not counsel. You are a shop. Know one sentence and one number for where to point somebody, decided in advance rather than improvised.
And make sure no automation fires. A satisfaction survey or a promotional template landing after a message like that is the worst thing your system can do. Excluding recently active conversations from automated sends is the one rule that prevents most of these.
Tell the team it is allowed
Agents freeze on these conversations because they do not know whether they are permitted to be human. Say explicitly that they are: they may waive a fee, take their time, and escalate without justifying it. A team that knows it has permission handles these well; a team that does not sends the policy paragraph.
Questions people actually ask
What should I do if a customer discloses something distressing?
Respond as a person, do not record more than you need, and know in advance where to point them. Nobody should be improvising this at 22:00 on a Friday.
Is health information in a chat special?
Under most data protection regimes yes - it is a special category with stricter rules. An ordinary retail inbox can receive it without asking for it, which is exactly the problem.
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