Faith in Reconciliation

[Yvette Dubel]

Following up on my last post sharing less than satisfying experiences with service providers I have given more thought to the kind of experiences I would prefer. Most obviously, I would like to encounters within an organization that inspired confidence and trust.

I know not all businesses, particularly larger ones, are guilty of the shortcomings I described in my last post but because of the interconnections - not just with branding but broader social trends and business practices I find it warrants exploration.

For better or worse - I have faith in reconciliation as a potential outcome. It has been my hope from the start of Cultural Fusion that this work might play an active role in actualizing this potential for the best of all concerned.

A point I made in my last post was that about the fact that although companies have set hiring requirements connected to specific types and levels of education - I have not seen this yield (for the most part) better service or products. So it begs the question of why in so many cases this has not seemed to deliver common sense and integrity; why increasing levels of education required for some jobs has not resulted in an improvement of service?

My intention is not about asserting blame but to honestly understand the logic at work and how to create better results which satisfy both the customer and the businesses' reason for existing (profits). To this end I am exploring a few key points in this series of posts.

So, what do I mean by bringing integrity into this discussion?

The example that pops to mind was an interview I watched on CNBC a few weeks ago. In this piece they interviewed different people who had played a part in the financial fiasco pushed to a head by the home mortgage crisis. They were interviewing a manager of a loan operation who had acted as a loan officer. At one point the interviewer asks, "Didn't you know what you were doing was wrong?" He looked somewhat sheepish and hesitated before admitting, "Yes".

Although the question was not asked directly of the higher level CEOs and executives it certainly stands to reason that they also realized that what they were doing was wrong. This kind of skipping over issues of integrity contaminates certain sectors and is expressed in what become the routines of doing business. For example, CDS (Credit default swaps) are a financial instrument that played a significant role in the collapse experienced by the financial titans. To my mind/heart it seems to be a form of financial insurance that is not called insurance because of the regulations that brings to bear.

Essentially the CDS was offered as a means to ensure the bonds where the bad loans were packaged, but the company using them did not have the capital to "insure" them. If it were actual insurance that would be clearly illegal.

Now of all the people working in the offices who literally carried out the mini-tasks needed to carry out these deals also played a vital role in what actually happened - did they all see what was wrong with what they were doing? And if so, why didn't being educated professionals make a difference?

In terms of the customer service point I made in my last post - like many other people I have experience the decline in customer service over the last twenty years. Is this really unrelated to the fact that most companies have higher educational level requirements for ANY position within their organization?

A few months ago a contact invited me to take a survey providing feedback about my feelings of trustworthiness of several brands. I declined because I didn't have a very high regard for any of the brands in question and my feelings about them did not differ much from brand to brand. That all equally failed to win me over or inspire any level of confidence.

If companies stopped offering incentives to take their surveys how many customers would still take them?

I believe this points to a social capital deficit that most will not recognize until it is too late. I started this group in part because I am interested in learning from those companies and organizations that will not wait until they are in free-fall before realizing that finding new ways to do business and market businesses is a MUST if sustainability is an actual goal.