Subject:
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Reply 7: Businesses, Customers and Trust
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.color, lugnet.lego
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Date:
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Mon, 14 Mar 2005 17:03:18 GMT
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Viewed:
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5370 times
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Jake McKee wrote:
> This gets into an entirely philisophical and bigger conversation
> about the core nature of business. I was talking just last night to
> an industry friend of mine and was saying that a big side effect of
> the Industrial Revolution was that business began a path of
> disrespecting the consumer. This wasn't any one company, but the
> overall concept of "business". The pushing of goods, where consumers
> either bought or didn't buy.
Accurately observed.
> With the grow of the Internet and a massive explosion in consumer
> choice in the last 10 years or so, the shift began to happen where
> consumers began to demand interaction with the companies they do
> business with. Some companies have responded wonderfully, others have
> responded but take a while to turn fully around, and others have not
> responded at all.
I wouldn't credit the demand of interaction to the explosion in customer
choice - on the contrary. If the customer can readily choose from a
range of products with sufficient quality the one that fits his needs,
an interaction with the company apart from the purchase is not
necessary. I would favour the idea that the wide availability of
communication is changing society, and the companies with them. A
company that does not notice the customers demand to communicate is
doomed to die.
> I personally think we fall into that middle
> category. A company isn't some big concept in the sky (a belief that
> was also a side-effect of the Industrial Revolution), but a group of
> people. So to change a company is to change a group of people. That
> takes time.
Precisely.
> > I sincerely hope that this relationship is improving even further.
> > Customer relation beyond complaints handling is still something
> > that does not come easy to TLC, and a lot of trust has been burned
> > as cheap firewood in the past. And trust is important in any
> > relationship. For many of us, the trust in many aspects of the
> > product still stands, but the trust in the company is more or less
> > gone.
> I completely and totally agree that trust is a huge deal. It's what
> I've based my entire relationship (and it is a relationship) with the
> community on - this idea of an open and honest communication. I think
> the relationship between the company and the community overall
> (clearly not you personally, as I understand) has improved 100-fold
> in the last 5 years.
Relationship and trust are two deep-entangled concepts, but they are not
the same. I consider it important to seperate the trust I have in
Community Development and its team members, the trust I have in the
product, and the trust I have in the company. I trust you and your
colleagues to do their best to improve communication with the community.
I trust the product per se to be a good one, although the trust is
declining due to discontenting quality issues. But when it comes to the
company itself, i.e. decision making, management, etc, I developed a
huge distrust because of the way they acted and reacted in the past.
With that impression I am not alone - this mindset can be found with
many people in the community I talked to.
BTW, I'd be careful with the use of the "open and honest" thing. We both
know that your communication can only be open and honest within certain
limits. This I fully accept, but I beg not to overuse these terms. Be
open and honest and say "I am open and honest, but you'll have to accept
that there are limits to the openness set by the job.".
> > I, personally, take everything you or Jan or Kate or whoever else
> > from the company say or write with an extra large grain of salt.
> > Not because of a personal distrust, but because nobody knows what
> > the company behind you is up to next. You've been caught by bad
> > surprises as cold as we have been, and neither you nor us can be
> > absolutely sure that this will never happen again.
> True, and again, there's going to be problems in the future. That's
> the only given in this situation. But for every bad surpise, we've
> delivered 50 bits of information or insight. For every major mistake,
> we've made 100 small successes. That in no way excuses the the
> mistakes and surprises, but I do think it's important to keep things
> in perspective a bit.
This is, of course, duly noticed. It is hard, though, to add them up.
> So you're saying that overall, we're not any further along (overall)
> that we were 5 years ago? I sure hope not.
Things have certainly changed. You have moved, we have moved, mistakes
happened, successes were achieved. The situation is different from five
years ago. Totally different in more than one way. I, personally, am
indifferent wether the situation is better or worse than before, but it
is hard to tell because one cannot sum up all the events into a single
number. For that, this relationship has way too many dimensions.
Five years ago, it was a good company with a good product, and with no
customer relation worth calling it except for the complaints department.
Now we've got a good customer relationship, a product that has been
bitten by the need to reduce costs, and a company I would not trust to
manage a shovel of manure if I had one, sorry.
Things have changed, but if it is for the better or the worse, only time
will tell.
Yours, Christian
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: Reply 7: Businesses, Customers and Trust
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| In lugnet.color, Christian Treczoks wrote: <snip> (...) ANd this is exactly the point where you put in concrete terms that you've been too close to th ehobby to have an objective opinion--you've been 'burned too much', in your opinion, by TLC. I (...) (19 years ago, 14-Mar-05, to lugnet.color, lugnet.lego)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: CEO-Letter // The answer
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| In lugnet.color, Christian Treczoks wrote: Christian, thanks for your indepth response. We can have discussions much better when the posts are calm and logical like this. Just to make sure it's clear, I'd like to point out that you're absolutely (...) (19 years ago, 10-Mar-05, to lugnet.color, lugnet.lego, FTX) !
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