HMRC webchat - awful SPAG

[Hoppinggreen]

I had to contact HMRC yesterday regarding SE. After being on the phone for a while I decided to try the webchat. I did actually get a human without waiting for too long but the SPAG was awful!!
She wanted me to "bare" with her and said wrote "could of" at one point. There was also a lot of mixing up of Your/You're. Lots of other things that made me cringe.
I assume they have spellcheck but as most words were spelt correctly it wouldn't have picked them up, although I think a few things were mis spelt too
Am I being daft or should a large public body like this be better?
To be fair the person helping me was nice and we did manage to get the issue sorted but even so

Many people will tell you it doesn’t matte and that your query was resolved. I think it does matter and it’s poor.

Aww I feel bad as I think my dh and ds might come across like this. Both very intelligent, great jobs/ ds is currently doing an MEng. But both have dyslexia and don't notice obvious SPAG that I do.

But if your actual job involves typing things for the public to read then I think its much more important to get these things right surely?
I don't usually pull people up on MN for bad SPAG (unless they are YL supporters) but I think in the circumstances I describe its not great
Mind you its not as if I can decide to take my custom elsewhere is it?

You say it was on a webchat so I'm assuming you never actually spoke to the person and heard her voice? It's possible English isn't her first language I suppose.

Even so, it's not acceptable to have someone typing messages to people and making such basic SPAG mistakes.

Of course I can't be sure but I think English WAS her 1st language, there were just SPAG errors and a few typos

People who don’t have English as a first language usually have better SPAG as they actually learn it properly!

I think it’s appalling and I would’ve screen shot it and sent it to HMRC.

I don’t think YABU.

i’ve interviewed for roles before where candidates would be manning webchat and other public facing written comms channels and we’ve always included a written task at interview. I do think in that sort of role it’s an essential criteria that has reputational repercussions.

I quality check for a civil service dept on web chats and there’s not many I don’t mark that have no mistakes.
Lots of ‘bare’, limited use of capital letters at the start of sentences and various other misspelled words.
Most of the workforce are indeed British from birth just have poor literacy, and it’s embarrassing for that communication to go out. There are canned responses for the staff to use but obviously so many of the conversations take different pathways and it’s when the agents go solo it goes downhill and to give credit to the agents they have to juggle multiple web chats at once to meet targets.

Hopefully as systems use more and more AI, spellings will self correct in the near future.

@Ddakji Yes of course, you're right.