Users are losers

I always enter into a new business relationship thinking about what I can do to help someone achieve their goals, and if they dovetail with mine, even better.

But sadly I am learning that not everyone thinks this way.  Oh they may at first appear to be looking out for your best interests, but they can’t keep it up.  In the end their ulterior motives raise its ugly head, colouring and often damaging the working relationship.

Take the situation of a good friend of mine.  She has a supplier with whom she has had to detail every aspect of their working arrangement, otherwise they would twist it around to suit them best.  No win-win situation here.

Customer service is just not part of their vocabulary.  As far as they are concerned, there seems to be little pride in doing a good job, or let alone an outstanding one.  But like most rotten apples, they got caught out. 

A couple of the packages they mailed out have come back to haunt them, totally damaged because they took short cuts.  In studying the photos from the unhappy customers, my friend finds that these suppliers were not using, yet still charging for, the required packaging and instead were using free material which was inadequate for the task.

To me this flags two issues – they clearly don’t care and they have no ethics.  Their actions are totally dishonest in that they have been charging for a service they are not providing, and they know that they are not providing it. Now we are not talking about a lot of money, but their behaviour causes you to question their values, their moral compass and trust is gone.

The outcome?   They’ve lost the business.  So their attempts to squeeze more money out of their clients has somewhat backfired, because now they are not getting anything.  The gravy train has stopped. My friend is pulling the plug.

And let’s face it, once you have lost trust and there’s no shared philosophy on customer service, honesty and good old-fashioned ethics, you have nothing.  It’s done. It’s toast.

What continues to shock me, is how people can blatantly rip off others, without much conscious.  Another world I guess.  But at the end of the day, in my view, users are just losers, and it will catch up with them.

Personally, I prefer to take the high road.