Saturday, August 25, 2007

Lying...

Seems I'm not the only one who thinks that lying to customers is a bad idea. Seth Godin just caught Home Depot doing the same sort of thing. Do people think that their customers don't compare notes and figure out who's lying and what about?

3 comments:

Bwooce said...

It took me more trips than it should of to realise that the Air NZ cabin crew use the seatbelt sign as a passenger control device.

In the middle of long-haul flights it is suddenly turned on, usu. without a captain's announcement. When travelling with children I found they also stop responding to individual crew calls (seat bell thingys).

I felt rather deceived when I trucked out the back to find them eating. And then, from memory, they were annoyed with me... (babies don't choose to stay hungry, they want milk on their schedule).

I wonder if this is common?

Determinist said...

Do you consider not telling the whole truth and lying the same thing? I'm pretty sure that I've lied to the customer, as well as a few managers and front line people too. :)

I get what you're saying though, and agree with Seth Godin as well. It's a lot easier just to come clean.

Jason Pollock said...

I've noticed that Qantas tends to turn the sign off to let you know that you can walk around, and then turn it back on to remind you to do up your seatbelt when you're in your seat.

I think that there are undoubtedly things that the other person just doesn't want to know about or care about (e.g. the individual line of code that was changed).

However, if people aren't clear about things that will impact the customer in a material way - such as passing off partial fixes as complete fixes, then they will be found out.

How does it look if a company tells a customer that a problem is fixed and it then happens again?

The customer then has two opinions they can have about their supplier, both bad. Either the vendor doesn't know how to do their job, or they lied to the customer.

There's no "win" in that situation.