A lack of integrity is costing you big time

Many years ago I attended a personal development programme known as The Landmark Forum. Many of you will have heard of it, and some of you may well have gone through it yourselves. To those people, you know all this stuff, so why not just flick over to my website and have a look at all the new merchandise that we have to offer.

I want to talk to you about integrity. Now this word means many things to many people, but for the purposes of this blog – and any future dealings that you may have with me – the definition is very straight forward. It is quite simply doing what you say you are going to do, when you say you’re going to do it.

Not exactly rocket science, but you’d be amazed just how many “professional” organisations fall down miserably on this point.

Allow me to elaborate. I’m having a bit of trouble with a mobile broadband service provider at the moment. Now discretion prevents me from naming names, but suffice to say that their name is synonymous with the symbol for carbon dioxide, once you take all the carbon out.

After going round the houses and getting absolutely nowhere, the person on the phone gave me his word that he would call me back the next day. Now I’ve dealt with these people before, as has my wife, and I didn’t believe for a moment that he would actually call me, so I questioned him on it. With all the reserve I could muster (and that’s a lot of reserve let me tell you) the conversation went like this:

“No offence (OK, I realise that these words usually mean that the statement to follow has a 99.9% chance of actually causing offence) but I have no faith in the statement that you will call me tomorrow. In all my history of dealing with your company, nobody has ever called me back once they’ve promised to do so”.

“I understand Mr. Rose”, he offers, “but my Team Leader has told me to make sure that I will call you. So it’s in my notes to do so and I’ll be in tomorrow afternoon and will give you a call.”

I see – so despite the fact he’d offered to do it anyway, it seems that unless his manager was on his case to provide basic customer service, that he simply would not have bothered at all?

So did he call back the next day? I think we all know the answer to that question. But it gets worse – when I called the day after it turned out that he had made no notes reminding him to call me at all!

What kind of crappy customer relationship management is that? It’s bad enough that these massive organisations like this make you feel like just another number, but when given the chance to do just a little better, they totally stuff it up!

Anyway, rant over – I put in a formal complaint to them and they plan to invest more in staff training. Quite sad though that the training in question is to tell them to not lie to their customers. I mean seriously, if you don’t think you’ll be in a position to call me tomorrow then just don’t tell me that you will.

It all comes down to managing expectations. If you know that an order will take 7-10 days to fulfil, tell the client 10 days. That way the customer is either satisfied that their goods are on time, or delighted that they are early. Tell them 7 days just because you think it’s what they want to hear and you are inviting a world of trouble.

Is it really necessary to point out to the business world that they should not lie to their customers? Sadly, in the faceless, unqualified, most likely to not care about their job, assuming they’re even in this country – not that I’m a racist or anything but come on, you know what I mean – call centre mentality, the sad truth is that integrity has been lost to the ages.

Just don’t stand for it OK? If you’re getting given the wrong information by any of your providers, call them on it, and demand better of your business partners. Ultimately, the world will be a better place for it.