The Importance of Business Transparency
by Leeia Ladipoh on March 18th, 2008
You may have heard the old adage “honesty is the best policy”. This is also true in business. While most people think that anything goes in business, when it comes to what your customers think about you and your company, you are definitely better off letting them know what is going on.
You have heard of the “business – customer relationship”, but do you really treat it like a relationship? You should. The better you build this relationship up front, the more supportive your customers will be down the road – especially if problems arise.
Transparency in Product Problems
It seems every time we turn around, there is something on the store shelves that is a health threat, from peanut butter and pot pies with salmonella to toys with toxic lead paint. While the companies involved may not have known there was a problem in advance, the way they dealt with it said volumes to their customers.
Let’s look at the lead paint issue. Once the first “toxic toys” were discovered, the toy companies pulled those specific toys off the shelves and said little more about it. A few weeks later, there was another wave of toys being pulled off the shelves due to the same threat. A few weeks after that, it happened again.
To many consumers, it seemed the toy companies were willing to leave toxic toys on the store shelves until someone “caught” them. That doesn’t do a lot for trust.
Many of these companies were actually doing the right thing. They were testing their other toy lines to see if they, too, had the lead based paint. But they did not divulge that information to the public, until they found more problems.
Communication Is Key
The way the media made the situation sound was that these companies were “caught” with more bad toys – not that these companies were working to ensure that the rest of their toy lines were safe for the public.
It all came down to communication. If the toy companies had gone out of their way to let the public know what they were doing, they would have sounded like proactive, concerned and responsible corporate citizens, who were looking out for the welfare of children who may be using their toys.
By quietly going about this business, they looked like they were lurking around trying to hide something, but were caught doing something shady.
While you will always have some customers who are unhappy no matter what you do, the majority of customers realize there are humans behind any business and that humans make mistakes.
By being honest and open when your business makes mistakes and letting people know what you are doing to fix them, you will come across as a company run by people who are trying to do their best, instead of a company that is trying to go behind their customers’ backs and hide things from them.