No one wants to feel like they’re talking to a used-car salesman. Make your customers love you by trusting you.
“In most businesses, someone is getting screwed,” said my childhood teacher. I don’t remember what grade I was in, or who even said it to me, but I will always remember hearing it and how much it bothered me. I promised myself I would never be in one ofthose businesses and I would always want the people around me to know they could trust me.
I got into public relations initially because I wanted to talk about and promote amazing people and their products, but I quickly learned that that world wasn’t exactly what I thought it would be. There is in fact, quite a bit of “spin” in many ways, which is why when I started my company, I would make social impact a pillar of my business and being picky about the companies we work with.
I wanted to know my 18 hour days were benefiting something good.
But I digress. Backing up for a moment, part of the reason someone would feel slighted in a business deal of any kind comes down to transparency and trust.
In many ways, transparency can sound scary – do you really want your customers to know you made a mistake while shipping? The answer is yes. While it might seem the more information a customer has the worse off you are, its actually the opposite if you want the lifetime value of your customer to be very, very long.
Over the years, I’ve learned the best policy has always been full transparency. It’s also the scariest thing to do, but you always come out on top which is why its so important for young startups to adopt this as part of their culture early on.
A particularly good example of this is the car market.
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Inc.