Dec 06 2008
Transparency Is Best Policy
In serving customers, I’ve learned that transparency is one best policy to adopt.
Let say you are expecting an urgent incoming email but suddenly your mail server goes down. You just can’t send or receive emails at all. You become frustrated and call up your hosting provider. You are about to curse them.
“We are sorry for the inconvenience. We just restarted the server. Please try to check your email again in 5 minutes.”
Have you heard such standard reply before? Perhaps few weeks later the same thing happens again. And you get a reply just similar to the above, again and again.
What if your hosting provider is so honest to explain to tell you that they are facing such as such problem, taking such as such steps to fix it, and doing such as such to prevent this from happening again in the future? Will it not be better?
Problems can occur from time to time. But customers can judge us by how we handle problems. Instead of hiding the problem and keeping the customers in the dark, we could be more transparent and let customers know exactly what happens.
This way, we will not only pacify our customers, but could actually delight them!
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Indeed. Serving them sincerely is the key!
I don’t totally agree with you. Many customers do not want to know your problems. They have enough of their own problems.
They just want their problems to be fixed. Just assure them that their problems will be fixed, at what time. full stop.