A car sales manager has won £21,000 after he was harshly sacked for standing up to a rude customer who harassed his team.
Taryl Spinks and his team had been ‘harassed and abused’ by an ‘aggressive, abusive, and intimidating’ customer but when he stood up to him, he was fired, a tribunal heard.
Mr Spinks told the customer to stop repeatedly ringing the dealership and only contact them through emails.
The emails continued for 12 days, and when Mr Spinks said ‘it is your character to stir everything up and make everything a mess’ he was ‘thrown to the wolves’ and sacked.
Now, at an employment tribunal in Bristol, he has won a case of wrongful and unfair dismissal.
Mr Spinks started working at Snows Toyota in Paignton, Devon, in October 2009 and he was promoted to an Aftersales Manager in September 2024.
A customer, who cannot be named for legal reasons but is referred to as X, was known to the garage as a ‘difficult’ customer.
He had been previously asked not to attend the Paignton site but to take his car to the Exeter site instead by Mr Spinks’ predecessor because he was ‘aggressive and unpleasant’.
Mr Spinks had allowed the customer to come back to the site in September 2024.
In February 2025, the customer brought his car in to have some work done to it.
The dealership did some diagnostic work to his car but he wanted to get the work covered by a warranty.
Mr Spinks and his team were sure that it would not be covered by his warranty claim but the customer started to be ‘aggressive, abusive, and intimidating’ to the staff.
He continued with this over the phone for the next couple of days, making 15 phone calls in just one day.
Mr Spinks told the customer that he should not call the dealership anymore and that they should only communicate through email.
He said via email: “Calling us bluntly telling us that we are not doing our jobs is not going to help yourself.
“My team do not want to accept your calls due to the allegations and mannerisms, which I witnessed today, towards them when calling in.
“You have been banned from our site previously and have been allowed to trade with ourselves under the conditions that this behaviour does not resume, if it continues, I will have no choice but to end this partnership in trying to get your vehicle fixed and insist you seek another dealership to start these proceedings with again.
“I will not have my team feeling threatened by anyone”.
A week later, after the customer had continued to insist he shouldn’t have to pay for the diagnostic work, Mr Spinks sent another email.
In it he said: “Please allow me to put this in simple terms. At no point have we asked you tocontact anyone. You have done this because it is your character to stir everything up and make everything a mess.”
He was referred to an investigation meeting after this email because he had been ‘condescending and rude’ to a customer.
Mr Spinks was told that he had poorly handled a customer and their concerns, leading to a serious complaint and possible damage to the reputation of Snows and unprofessional behaviour.
He was invited to a disciplinary meeting, where he was dismissed.
The letter said: “There’s no evidence that X was abusive or threatening, which obviously from the previous banned incidences we’d seem to think he was. But in this instance, we couldn’t find anyevidence of that.”
Mr Spinks appealed this decision but he was unsuccessful.
He has now won £21,031 in compensation for wrongful and unfair dismissal.
The tribunal panel said that Mr Spinks was justified in standing up for his team.
The panel said: “[Mr Spinks’] emails of 14 and 17 Feb 2025 (referred to above as the reasons for dismissal) were lacking in the deference and professional tone in which the [dealership] wishes its managers to communicate with customers.
“So much was acknowledged by [Mr Spinks] himself during the disciplinary process.
“[He] also rightly acknowledged that he should have called in assistance from other more senior managers to help deal with the situation.
“However there was a substantial mitigating explanation for the emails, namely that for about 12 days up to their creation, X had been subjecting [him] and his team to abuse over the telephone and then by email.
“Although [he] did not articulate this well, the obvious point in his favour was that his emails had been written under provocation from X, and with the selfless motivation of protecting his team from abuse and protecting the [dealership’s] business against unjustified demands for a discount or refund.”
The tribunal ruled there were failures in the investigation to get recordings of the phone calls to the customer and also to interview other members of staff.
“[Mr Spinks] had stood up to X, tried to protect his team and not caved into X’s spurious demands”, the panel said.
“Instead of throwing [him] to the wolves, giving into X’s bullying and paying him off, which rewarded his bad behaviour, the [dealership] would have done better to have supported [him], provided him with some words of guidance about how to deal with this type of situation in future, and shown some interest and empathy for the impact which X had had on him and on his team over an extended period.”
