The Ethics of Screening

Once again, let me being by assuring everyone that I have no issues, ethical or otherwise, with the constructs that prevent insects from flying into your house, upon which you watch movies, or with which your t-shirts are decorated; the screening I refer to today is the use of test questions asked of job applicants in advance of your interviewing them. This is hardly a new practice; the use of telephone screenings predates the existence of the Internet and most of its current users, and the use of intermediaries to lower the number of applicants you personally have to speak with predates the Industrial Revolution and possibly the rise of human civilization. But given the new technologies being used for these procedures, and the potential for abuse in the Internet era, it seemed worth discussing further…

With the rise of Internet job search services like Monster and Career Builder the traditional task of weeding out the applicant pool has expanded by several orders of magnitude – because so has the size of that pool. Before these systems were available it took time and cost money to apply for a job – there was the cost of typing a cover letter and the expense of printing a copy of your resume on nice paper, not to mention postage to get it there. Consequently, most job seekers were limited in the number of resumes they could send out, and would elect to concentrate their resources on jobs for which they actually qualified. Today, applying for a job is as cheap and simple as pushing a button, and millions of people apparently do this without even bothering to look at the job description…

To counter this, many companies have taken to using automated systems that can use the incoming applications and materials to create a database, which they then mine for applicants who might actually prove suitable for the job. Unfortunately, some of these work better than others, and even very good human resources software is far from perfect, resulting in many applicants who would otherwise be ideal being excluded on the basis of minutiae like formatting and font size, while many others who should never have applied in the first place end up clogging up the works. Clearly there is a saving in salaries to be realized by not having to pay people to dig through this mountain of useless resumes, but if the optimal applicant is not selected for interview (and therefore not hired) there will be a non-zero cost as well…

Then there’s the use of telephone or Internet-based testing. Phone interviews clearly offer an opportunity to use human discretion and judgment when evaluating applicants, but they put hearing-impaired applicants and anyone who particularly dislikes telephone conversations (it’s more common than you might think) at a significant disadvantage. Internet-based assessment tests eliminate the awkwardness of trying to persuade someone who can’t see you (and whom you can’t see) to hire you, but they impart a significant disadvantage to anyone who can’t see well, can’t type well, or does not perform well on standardized tests (computerized or otherwise). In fact, some of the number-sequence and reading-based questions are so disproportionately difficult to some applicants (dyslexics, for example) as to be questionable under the Americans with Disabilities Act…

All of which leads me to ask: do we have an ethical responsibility to give all applicants an equal chance to be selected for interview, and an equal chance to make their case for why they should be hired? If so, does that responsibility over-ride our fiduciary responsibility to our ownership group to contain recruiting costs? Can we ethically use electronic and/or telephone screenings knowing that some worthwhile people will be denied the opportunity to work for us because they will be unjustly screened out? Can we responsibly use such methods knowing that in some cases the best applicants will be incorrectly screened out, resulting in financial loss to our company? Or should we just leave matters up to the hiring managers involved, and let them make the choices they are being employed by the company to make anyway?

It’s worth thinking about…

Again, Words Fail Me

It probably won’t come as any surprise to my readers (assuming I have readers) that the most common “tag” on this blog is the “Stupidity” tag, which appears at the bottom of 248 of our 865 posts to date – or more than a third of them when you discount the 200 or so Ethics and Grad School Diaries posts. One of my primary research interests remains Institutional Failure, and specifically the ways in which otherwise capable people keep destroying otherwise sound companies, which means that I spend a lot of my time reading about business failures that by all rights should not have been failures. I know that not all of these tags are fairly applied – there are things that appear stupid to me after more than 20 years in business and two Master’s degrees in Management that might not be obvious to someone without that experience or training. And yet, I can’t help thinking that a reasonably intelligent eight-year-old could explain to you why asking someone where and when they had been Saved during a job interview would be a bad idea…

If you missed it you can pick up the original story from the ABC News page, but the basic idea is that a man applied for a job with a company in Tulsa, Oklahoma and was asked not only where he went to church, but whether he was “born again,” all of the churches he had ever attended, where an when he had been “saved,” and whether he would have a problem with reporting early for work each morning without pay in order to participate in Bible study class. When the man told the interviewer that he was a single parent and therefore couldn’t attend church on Sundays (what with having small children to take care of and all) the interviewer became “agitated,” and the interview ended shortly thereafter. It goes without saying that the hero of our story didn’t get the job; you could probably also figure that he is now suing for discrimination on the basis of religion under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Naturally, the company is insisting that no such discrimination took place, and they merely went with the more qualified applicant…

The thing that struck me about the story was that even leaving aside the social, legal, and financial aspects of this case that are completely asinine, this doesn’t even make sense in a religious context. Let us suppose that the company’s mission statement and religious beliefs are exactly as stated; that they use the proceeds from their business to further their evangelical ministries and convert as many of the heathen as they possibly can. That being the case, the success or failure of their business quite literally impacts the number of people whose mortal souls they can save. Would they not, in that case, have a responsibility to run the business as efficiently and effectively as humanly possible? Hiring a good Christian (whatever that might mean to the owners of this company) would at most enrich one single person who is already among their “saved” elect, while hiring a person who can do a better job would allow them to extend their ministry to more people and save more of them…

I kid, of course, but my point is quite serious. In most companies, the greater good to be served by the success of the enterprise is the quality of life of the employees and the communities they support, the success of the stockholders, and the well-being of all of the other stakeholders connected with the business. Failure of the enterprise, and particularly failure as the result of willfully idiotic management practices, is a crime against all of those people, and can ultimately destroy whole communities – or even whole national economies – just because someone is placing his or her religious bigotry ahead of the welfare of all of those people. In this case, if what the people from this allegedly deeply religious company say is true, then by their bigotry and discrimination they are not only failing their employees, their vendors, their customers, their community and their country, but also the deity they worship…

Words fail me. I’m sure that in the fullness of time something worse than this will turn up. But for the moment, this wins. This is the dumbest thing I’ve heard yet…

Stupid Lawyer Tricks

I wasn’t going to comment on the ongoing fracas between TheOatmeal and the website that has been pirating his cartoons for all of these years until this morning, when the latest development in the case demonstrated just how dangerous this sort of thing is getting to be. I’m not going to name the offended/offending party, since that’s how this situation started in the first place, but just in case you haven’t been following the story, The Oatmeal is a web comic and humor site, and over the years artwork from the site has been lifted and reprinted across the Internet. This happens to most web artists, and is usually a minor annoyance, but there was one website that was actually making money on the stolen cartoons, and The Oatmeal took notice of it and posted a list of every time the other site had done this. Other ‘net dwellers began referencing these theft listings, and repeating them until references to the other website stealing The Oatmeal’s cartoons became more commonly found on search engines than the thieving website’s own address…

At this point, the thieves decided to take legal action, and had their lawyer send The Oatmeal a letter claiming that the “search engine interference” was deliberate cyber-vandalism and demanding $20,000 or they would sue. Now, for most of us this would be a simple situation; we’d have our lawyer respond to the letter with one of his own, possibly with a threat to not only counter-sue but also take action over the well-documented original theft. The Oatmeal did that, of course, but he also posted a response online in which he vowed to raise the $20,000 from online donations – and then give the money to charity, sending the thieving site’s attorney just a picture of the piles of donated cash and a rather insulting drawing. In the event, it took just over an hour to raise the $20,000 in online donations, and the fund is still continuing to grow, reaching somewhere over $170,000 in just a few days. That should have been the end of the story, but it wasn’t…

The lawyer for the thieves was (understandably) dismayed by the outpouring of support from all corners of the Internet and the disrespect being shown by The Oatmeal (and the illustration referenced above, in particular) and decided to cause trouble by trying to get the company sponsoring the web donations to cancel the program and send back the donations on the grounds that this initiative violated The Oatmeal’s terms of service. This failed, partly because the hosting company didn’t have any problem with the charity initiative, and partly because they like The Oatmeal more than the thieves or their attorney. Unfortunately, this also drew the ire of the collective consciousness of the Internet, who began subjecting the lawyer to real cyber-vandalism and electronic harassment. A reasonable person would have issued an apology, pointed out that he’s just a hired gun doing his job, and let the whole thing blow over…

Instead, the lawyer is now suing The Oatmeal directly, claiming that the whole campaign was intended to have this effect from the beginning, and the harassment he is now suffering is a deliberate attack on the part of The Oatmeal…

Let me repeat that: the people responsible for stealing an artist’s work and trying to then extort money from him for having the temerity to complain about it are now claiming that the work of thousands of people all over the world IN REACTION TO THEIR OWN STUPIDITY, GREED, AND CRIMINAL ACTIONS are an attack on them…

As you all know, I collect stories of business-related stupidity, but I can’t recall any story that tops this one for sheer idiocy combined with bald-faced gall. I’m not even presenting this one as a cautionary tale; I can’t imagine how anyone could think this was a good idea in the first place, much less now that it has exploded on the people who were trying it. If there is any lesson to be learned here, it’s probably that letting copyright theft slide isn’t a good idea, or that assuming that no one could possibly be stupid enough to attempt a specific asinine act isn’t safe…

I’ll let you know if anyone tries to sue me for making these points…

The Ethics of Father’s Day

Of all of the so-called “Hallmark Holidays” – events which are said to benefit people who own greeting card shops more than anyone else – probably the least well observed is Father’s Day. It isn’t clear why this holiday is treated much more casually than its counterparts, but several observers have noted that there are fewer universal expressions of Father’s Day – you can always get your mother flowers and a card, for example, or offer to do chores around the house, but it’s harder to shop for a man, and many of us are perceived as not doing housework in the first place. By the same token, men are more likely to be resistant to fuss, particularly when it is made over us, and some would prefer to have a day in which they are not particularly acknowledged, but are instead left alone to do as they please. If either of these contentions is correct, then I believe we should at least consider the ethics of the holiday itself…

As I noted in my post about the Ethics of Mother’s Day (May11, 2009) it’s hard to argue against the existence of any holiday that involves commerce on ethical grounds, given that the opportunity to sell merchandise contributes to the economy in general and to all of the companies involved and their stakeholders in particular. Even the purchase of a relatively inexpensive gift like a greeting card generates revenue for the retail store that sold it, the shipping company that delivered it, the printing company that printed it, the greeting card company that designed it, the paper mill that created the card itself, and the logging company that harvested the wood pulp in the first place, not to mention all of the other businesses that supplied those firms with everything from gasoline and machinery to accounting services and Internet access. When we add in all of the people who work for those companies, and all of the additional firms that supply the employees with their consumer goods, it seems clear that these sales have some far-reaching positive effects…

On the other side of the issue is the question of whether acknowledging a holiday that the putative recipient doesn’t want you to observe is ethically acceptable. Granted that some men are merely “protesting too much,” in the classic phrase, there are some men who really would prefer that you simply wish them a Happy Father’s Day and then drop the subject without further discussion. Unfortunately, between false modesty and the increasingly neurotic head games (yes means no and no means yes; I won’t tell you what’s wrong if you don’t already know, etc.) infesting our civilization, it’s often hard to be sure of what your course of action should be. This can lead to bad feelings if you guess wrong, or even if you devote too much or too little effort to the acknowledgement, and can legitimately be considered a negative consequence of the holiday. Even granted that the sort of people who would experience serious relationship issues over the correct observance (or non-observance) of Father’s Day would probably also experience serious relationship issues over corn flakes, the question of whether it is ethical for the various companies involved to create artificial social conventions, artificial relationship requirements, and artificial pressures to behave in ways that benefit those companies seems dubious at best…

Personally, I see a clear difference between the friendly acknowledgement of a minor holiday that honors the role of a male parent and the actions taken by male parents on behalf of their children, and advertising pressure that suggests (without actually saying) that you are a bad person and an ungrateful child if you don’t spend large sums of money on that parent. But I am not the world, and there are in fact people who do resent any such implications. So I have to ask, can we as business people ethically promote the observance of Father’s Day as an obligation borne by all children? Can we ethically promote the observance of the holiday at all? Should we discontinue sales, advertising reminders, and all other support for the event? Or should we accept that our customers are going to make their own choices, regardless of what we think, and make our goods and services available to those who want them without prejudice to the issue?

It’s worth thinking about…

Strategic Failure

I thought I should share an email I wrote earlier today to the Speaker of Michigan’s House of Representatives regarding a package of bills currently under consideration in the Legislature. Normally I don’t discuss politics in this space, because as I’ve mentioned, I don’t consider it within my expertise; none of my degrees are in Political Science, History or Law, and the Internet is already overflowing with would-be pundits holding forth on every conceivable political position. But in this particular instance, it struck me that the strategy being employed by the Republican leadership in Michigan is inherently flawed, and that a case could be made for abandoning the legislation in question regardless of what your political orientation happens to be. So I decided to see if I could make it in the letter that follows…

Sent via email:

TO: The Honorable James “Jase” Bolger, Speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives

Dear Mr. Speaker:

I am writing to urge you and your colleagues to abandon the current drive to place additional limits on abortion rights in the State of Michigan. While I understand the importance of reaching out to your support base during an election year, this sort of political grandstanding has no place and no purpose in the current climate. No one who isn't already a firm supporter of the Pro-Life movement is going to extend any additional support to any politician supporting these measures, whereas moderates and those who support limited government will very likely take offense at such measures and may withdraw their support. Meanwhile, the very existence of such legislation is galvanizing voters on the left, energizing the campaigns of any political candidate who opposes such measures and increasing voter turnout among their supporters.

Even worse, in my opinion, is that expending effort on this legislation is taking your time, and that of your colleagues, away from the substantive issues of the day. Limiting access to abortion or other medical services will not decrease unemployment, will not lower taxes or decrease the deficit, will not improve education, will not alleviate poverty, will not lower the crime rate, will not create new jobs, will not improve homeland security or our national defense, and will not provide for any additional infrastructure improvement or healthcare reform. All it will do, in fact, is increase the popularity of conservative politicians with a modest segment of the electorate that would never have supported liberal candidates in the first place. Or, if you prefer, there is absolutely no benefit to pursuing this legislation, for its supporters or for the people of Michigan, but there is the potential for wasted effort, wasted opportunity, political gridlock, and additional partisan animosity and distrust.

As a businessman and a business teacher, as well as a taxpayer and registered voter, I would like to suggest that there are better uses for your time and our money, and urge you to abandon this initiative as soon as possible.

Thank you for listening; I appreciate your time.

Sincerely,

Max P. Belin, MS, MBA

It’s probably worth noting that the legislation in the package will not survive the inevitable court challenges, even if passes in the first place; it goes against the Roe v. Wade precedent so blatantly that even bloggers who have never been to law school can recognize the principles involved. Nor will the attempt to frame the legislation as “protection of women” be of much use; the proposed laws would make abortion after 20 weeks a felony, regardless of the health of the mother, and with no exceptions for rape or incest. They would also raise the costs of reproductive healthcare for all women in Michigan (even those who are merely seeking prenatal vitamins and parenting classes), and throw up huge rafts of red tape – very good for discouraging women from seeking an abortion, but not very palatable to a political party that claims to want smaller and less intrusive government…

The more I looked at the situation, the more this appeared to be blatant political grandstanding; acts intended to please the “Base” audience, but one which even moderate Republicans – and those who actually believe in small government and limited government interference – would find distasteful, if not actually insulting. Bismarck called politics “The art of the possible,” but enacting these laws isn’t possible, and even if it was, it would accomplish nothing that Michigan needs right now – and might result in any number of outcomes that would make things even worse. And while I imagine that the Speaker already knows all of this, I expect that a lot of the emails and letters he is getting that oppose this legislation are from various Liberals all demanding that he and his colleagues cease and desist, if not actually admit the error of their ways. I thought there should be at least one from a middle-aged business teacher, with two Master’s degrees in business and no agenda at all, to point out that even if these measures are politically adroit, they’re strategically unsound…

I’ll let you know if I get a reply…

Lack of Imagination

I was reading a case on the Consumerist website last week about someone who had booked a hotel through Hotels.com in Croatia, only to arrive at the address specified and find no trace of a hotel. By itself this wasn’t a complete business failure; the company does not own any of the hotels it offers to book for you, and their site has plenty of disclaimers about what happens if they book you into a hotel that is unavailable on the day you’re supposed to check in. Where the situation became truly farcical – and what led to the inevitable mockery by thousands of scruffy bloggers as well as everyone who visits the Consumerist site – is that when the failure was reported to them, Hotels.com had no procedure in place for verifying the existence of the hotel, getting the customer to a different property for the night, refunding the booking fees, or anything else that might have satisfied the customer and defused the situation…

As a result, the customer wound up being put on hold for hours at a time while the company insisted that the hotel in question really existed, even though no one there ever answers the phone. This would be asinine enough if the customer had just called in and questioned the transaction from home, but Hotels.com was actually doing this while their patron was standing in front of the abandoned building, reporting the lack of a hotel being present. And while the customer did eventually get their money back for the booking that didn’t exist, they had to spend hours fighting with the company, and have still not been compensated for the International cell phone call they made on the night of the dud booking when they were trying to find the non-existent hotel…

Now, I’m not suggesting that this one lost booking is going to hurt the company; it’s quite possible that even the Internet mockery that has resulted and all of the hundreds (or millions; it’s hard to tell) of net citizens who will never do business with Hotels.com will have no effect on the company’s fortunes. But if this sort of thing keeps happening it will eventually harm the company’s reputation beyond any hope of the new series of animated cartoons being able to gloss things over, and eventually the company will destroy itself (and all of the people who work for it, sell things to it or own it) simply because whoever is running operations is not only too lazy to verify that all properties listed not only exist but respond to their customers, but also too lazy to train the customer service personnel on how to handle such a crisis…

Consider, for example, the steps it would take to deal with this sort of situation. Assuming that a toll-free number that works all over the world is outside your budget, simply giving your customer service people the ability to call someone back – and the authority to do so – will cut off both the International on-hold problem and the attendant costs (and demand for reimbursement). Having a policy of checking on the existence and quality of hotels you work with would cut down on the number of non-existent properties you book; so would having contract language that specifies how long your business partners have to respond to your calls – and the penalties they will pay if they don’t. And it certainly wouldn’t take much to develop relationships with back-up and substitute properties, so that if all else fails you can divert abandoned customers to somewhere that does exist…

If none of those things are possible (or economically viable; I don’t know how much tourist traffic goes to Split, Croatia in a given year), then at the very least you could have warnings on your website and disclaimers in your contract language regarding hotels in parts of the world for which you can’t guarantee performance – or, in extreme cases, existence. This won’t stop the occasional problem from slipping through the cracks, or keep the occasional lazy or stupid customer from looking in the wrong place for their hotel property, but it will go a long way towards ending this type of mistake and its attendant Internet mockery…

Of course, the key measure to take is giving your customer service personnel the ability to handle such cases in the first place, as well as the tools to do so. But that’s a discussion for another day…

The Ethics of Obfuscation

There was a lot of reaction a few weeks ago when a company that makes razor blades came out with information about how long its products last in use – for the first time in history. For most of the time safety razors have existed manufacturers have avoided saying anything about how many times you could use one before it became too dull or otherwise failed to function, and there was no motivation for them to do so. If the company listed a number that was too high not only would they lower the number of blades purchased (and their sales figures), but they also ran the very real chance of being sued by somebody who was “injured” trying to use a product too many times. But if they listed a number that was too low they were damaging the image of their product (you only get HOW MANY uses out of each one? What a piece of junk!) as well as raising the effective cost to the consumer by limiting how many shaves you get for your dollar. All things considered, it just made more sense not to comment and let people find out for themselves…

In recent years, however, the cost of razor blades has risen to the point where this strategy is no longer entirely effective. People may not care whether a $1 product gives them five uses as opposed to four – it’s a five-cent difference per use, and one dollar a week is a mostly trivial amount anyway. But when that amount rises to $4 per cartridge we are now talking a dollar per use, or potentially $365 per year, and those disposable razors that cost fifty cents each are starting to look a lot more attractive – even if they turn out to be single-use items, you’re still saving 50% each day. If the company wants to continue charging that amount per unit, they need to introduce some form of additional value to the customer, and since they are already claiming to provide a superior product (e.g. a more comfortable and effective shave) they can’t just claim the product is worth the extra money and hope for the best…

With the introduction of a television spot claiming that its top-of-the-line razors can last up to five weeks, Gillette has finally crossed over that line – although we should note that the ad does say “up to” five weeks, and does not discuss whether the spokesman (seen traveling around the world during the commercial) actually used it every day for five weeks or just when the cameras were rolling. The question that came to my mind wasn’t so much whether these claims were too vague to challenge (they are) but whether this sort of obfuscation was ethical in the first place? Or is it an unavoidable side-effect of offering products in this category in the first place?

In general, there is no way for the manufacturer to gauge how many uses a given customer will get from one shaving cartridge. Beard hairs vary in thickness and hardness, and users who shave their whole face will get fewer uses from those who wear a goatee, or from those who just use the razor to keep their neck clean. This time frame becomes even more ambiguous for those customers who also shave their legs or backs, or who have a significant other who borrows their razor to do so. And even if all hair was identical, and all users had the same amount of it to manage, the question of what constitutes too dull to shave with is a matter of taste, and different customers will put up with different amounts of discomfort and/or razor burn. It might be possible for the manufacturer to recommend guidelines, or for the industry to establish standards for comparison, but none of the companies involved have any motivation for doing so – and the real question is more general anyway…

Does any company offering a consumer product for sale have an ethical responsibility to inform its customers how many uses they can expect to get before the product requires replacement? Granted that this is not always possible – and even when it is, a precise figure may not be realistic – does the manufacturer have any obligation to provide performance and/or life cycle information to the consumer? Does our answer change if the company has in-house test data that provides a reasonable estimate of the product’s durability? Or does a free market require us to allow any company to market whatever safe and effective products it wants to, and let the consumer draw his or her own conclusions about product life and relative value?

It’s worth thinking about…

Apples and Corn Chips

I was reading some of the news stories about the success of the new “Doritos Locos Tacos” product from Taco Bell and reflecting that there were at least two things worth considering about this report – depending on how one happens to feel about fast-food operations, product development, and possibly business reporting or history. There may even be a few points here about expert knowledge, really bad logical fallacies and demographic research, which struck me as being quite a lot to say about a food product so preposterous on the face of it that it could be (and occasionally was) mistaken for a Saturday Night Live skit when it first appeared…

First of all, there’s the performance of the product. The “Doritos Locos Tacos” are actually just Taco Bell’s standard crunchy taco product served in a flavored shell – in this case, the flavoring used on Frito-Lay’s popular “Nacho Cheese Doritos” corn chip product. It’s one of those concepts that is so simple it probably took a genius to think of it in the first place, and it has resulted in the company’s most successful product in its 50-year history: Taco Bell is claiming to have sold over 100 million of the things in the first ten weeks they were on the market – or roughly as many hamburgers as McDonald’s sold in the first 18 years they were in operation, according to the OrangeCounty (California) Register. Surprisingly, this isn’t quite as impressive as it sounds…

Consider the difference between the two firms during the periods indicated: Taco Bell has been in operation for fifty years, and has been a franchised fast-food operation for most of them; at the time of product launch three months ago it had more than 6,000 locations world-wide, serving more than 2 billion customers a year and bringing in somewhere on the order of $1.9 billion in revenue annually. By contrast, in 1958 there were only 34 McDonald’s locations extant, all of them in the United States; Ray Kroc had started the franchise/expansion program that would build it into the dominant brand we know today, but comparing the two organizations is silly, and so is the fact that the Register is just printing that claim without fact-checking anything. Whether the fact that Taco Bell is headquartered in the same community as the Register (and purchases a lot of advertising space in the paper) had anything to do with this report is something you’ll have to judge for yourself, of course…

I think the most important point to this story, though, is the reaction I noted in a lot of people when the product was first tested last year. People in either of the primary demographics (Doritos or Taco Bell) went for it like the proverbial pack of rats, while everyone outside the primary demographics (most people over 30, in fact) thought it was the stupidest (and most nauseating) idea they had heard in years. Fortunately for their profitability, the senior management team at Taco Bell decided to try the concept out on customers in the appropriate demographic groups and probably realized that they had a winner on their hands before the first focus-group study was half-finished. If the product development team has just dismissed the thing as “something I’d never want to eat” they’d have missed out on selling 100 million products at $1.29, which by my count is $129 million in sales on one product alone, in just ten weeks…

That sort of failure of imagination – making decisions about a product based on what you want, rather than what your customers actually want – is sometimes called the “I Am The World” fallacy, and it remains one of the easiest ways to destroy a good company that doesn’t involve hiring your brother in law to run your operations. So the next time somebody brings you an idea that sounds like a stoner made it up late at night after a trip to the fast-food stand, you might want to hear them out before you make any decisions…

Or at least run the thing past a panel of probable customers…

With a 14-Foot Pole?

I should probably stop picking on various airlines for their baggage handling weakness; it’s almost inevitable that when you are moving tens of millions of items every day, you’re going to lose a few of them – either literally, because something got stolen, thrown in the trash or just dumped somewhere off the airport grounds, or virtually, because your computers can’t find the tracking number anywhere in the system. This doesn’t make the security breaches any more excusable, however; if someone can break into a secure area in order to steal something, they could easily do so in order to plant a bomb or sabotage an airplane. It doesn’t make employee theft any less serious, either; all companies do have some amount of theft by employees, but anyone who would risk both their job and imprisonment for a few hundred dollars worth of random junk is probably also stupid enough to smuggle something aboard an airliner in exchange for a few quick dollars…

Even worse, from a business standpoint, is that for the most part your customers do not care how well you have served anyone other than them. It does not matter to most people if you only lost 1 bag out of the 10,000,000 you processed today; your success rate may be 99.9999% overall, but to that specific customer your success rate is zero. You can overcome most of the problem by providing good service to that customer, in terms of people who are helpful and competent in helping to find the missing luggage, arranging to get it to the customer before anything untoward can happen, providing compensation for any issues that arise because you lost their bags, refunding any baggage charges they have incurred, and (most importantly of all) never doing this to them again. But none of these things typically happen, and even if they do, it would still do very little to appease people whose dogs mysteriously “escaped” taking their carriers with them, people whose property was destroyed despite being in armored cases, or pole vaulters whose 14-foot poles the airline has managed to lose…

You can pick up the story off the MSNBC News site if you want to, but the basic idea is that a Central Washington University student named Kati Davis was travelling from Seattle to Colorado Springs for the NCAA Division II Track and Field Championships last month when Delta managed to lose her equipment – specifically the 14-foot poles used in the pole vault competition. In fairness, the airline did eventually find the poles again, but not after sending them to Salt Lake City and then leaving them in Atlanta for two days before finally sending them to Denver. As a result, Ms. Davis had to use borrowed equipment during the actual track meet, and her performance suffered accordingly. The fact that she had paid a fee of $200 to get her equipment shipped, and that it took five calls to the airline and a lot of being given the runaround before anything happened, just makes things worse…

Now, the fact is that Delta actually has one of the best baggage handling records of any major airline – and, in fact, has consistently been the best, cheapest and safest way to transport animals by air, as well. But the lost (stolen) animals outrages of the past year or so have badly damaged their reputation, and if there are any further cases of championship-level athletes being screwed over things will get worse in a hurry. I’m not suggesting that any company can have a perfect customer service record, or that doing so is even a realistic goal for a company operating on such a scale. But everyone who has ever worked customer service knows that the key to maintaining good customer relations is to take care of your customers and make things right when they go wrong – and in this case they didn’t even try…

The Ethics of Online Reviews

About a year ago I wrote a post about the ethics involved with online ratings of professionals, and specifically doctors, being used to intentionally tarnish the reputation of the individual being rated for no known reason. Some of the cases appear to have been disgruntled former customers, but there appear to have been a significant number of instances where the poster couldn’t possibly have known the target of his or her ire, and was simply using the comments to cause random harm – the electronic equivalent of vandalism. Some of the worst cases were clearly competing businesses trying to gain customers at the expense of the competition by trashing them in the online comments – a particularly vicious tactic when the target is an inexperienced or unsophisticated Internet user and can’t fight back. But what worried me most at the time was the potential to move beyond dirty tricks and malicious mischief, and go into actual extortion…

A story this past week in the Sacramento Bee tells about several such cases affecting restaurants in the city; people demanding free food, drink or other benefits from the establishment in exchange for not writing negative reviews on Yelp or other online services. I’m not going to comment on the ethics of this practice, since I don’t believe there is much basis for discussion (extortion is extortion, whatever the threat you’re using happens to be, and should be prosecuted as such), and I don’t think there’s much point in debating the ethics of services like Yelp, since people could use social networking sites, purpose-built web pages or even email to get the same effects if they wanted to. I think the real question is what can we do about such bogus reviews, and specifically is there anything we can do that wouldn’t be worse than what we have now?

In some cases it might be possible to remove the element of anonymity from the equation, by requiring the users leaving the comments to register and provide some connection to their real-world identity, the way Amazon does with their customer comments section. This doesn’t keep people from using multiple fake accounts to generate dozens of bogus reviews in order to plug their own products, but it lowers the number of people who would be willing to do so in order to get a free meal – creating multiple fake user accounts is time consuming and is also illegal in several parts of the world. Moreover, a badly crafted attack using multiple fakes is easy to spot (and remove), and a well-crafted one will take more time and effort than you’d spend if you just paid for the goods yourself…

On the other hand, many people are unwilling to give honest reviews of something if they know there’s a chance that the subject of their remarks can identify them and seek revenge. This would lead to fewer honest reviews being published as well, and there is also a significant potential for abuse of such a requirement – businesses that are substandard and do deserve negative reviews might attempt to intimidate users into leaving more positive comments or keeping quiet. There’s also the possibility of rating sites themselves trying to extort money from businesses by promising to suppress negative reviews (or threatening to delete positive ones) if they aren’t paid off. Yelp has already been accused of this practice, and even if they are completely innocent, it’s only a matter of time before some online rating service does cross this line…

Legislative remedies aren’t really possible, since this is a free speech issue, and even if they were there would be no way to enforce such laws without requiring people to identify themselves before leaving reviews – which is also an invasion of privacy issue, in addition to the drawbacks noted above. In the end, this is going to come down to the decisions (and ethics) of individual business people. So I have to ask: if the potential for abusing online comments is so extreme as to constitute extortion, can we in good conscience offer or make use of such a service? Do we, as business people, have an ethical responsibility to other businesses (or to the stakeholders in our own business) to prevent this sort of cyber-crime from happening? Or do we, as citizens of a free republic, have an ethical responsibility to defend free speech for everyone, even though we know that some people will use online comments to harm others?

It’s worth thinking about…

That’s Disgusting!

Anyone who has ever stayed overnight in a hotel or motel has probably experienced a moment of disquiet on walking into their room for the first time. In a high-end facility it’s easy to convince yourself that the Housekeeping staff has laundered every piece of cloth in the place and sterilized everything else until you could do surgery on the coffee table or assemble electronic components in the sink. But even those exceptional cases you know for a certainty that hundreds, if not thousands, of strangers have slept in the same place in which you’re about to, and in middle-price and economy properties you’re counting on the efforts of a single hideously over-worked and under-paid employee to take care of everything in the measly amount of time the company allows per room. It’s almost enough to make you want to take a black light and inspect the room – and, if fact, Best Western has started doing just that…

A story running today on the CNN Travel page explains that Best Western International has just announced a new cleaning program that will include ultraviolet sterilization procedures for just about everything in their rooms that can’t be washed, comprehensive washing of everything that can be washed (not just sheets and towels but pillows, blankets, and so on) for each new guest, and the use of black light inspections to detect “biological matter and other particles.” The company insists that its facilities have always been this clean, but since the technology now exists to guarantee that every room meets their standard every time, it’s only sensible to deploy the equipment. Pilot projects have demonstrated that this program adds significantly to guest satisfaction for a minimal increase in operational costs…

What makes this initiative interesting in a business sense is how much value it adds for the customer relative to the cost incurred. We’ve talked in this space about attempts to add value in hotel properties that do nothing of the kind (e.g. business centers and restaurants that are not open when needed) or that actively subtract from the value of the room (wi-fi services that cost extra, complimentary breakfasts that a diabetic can’t eat, etc.), but one of the universal requirements of hotel guests is that the room (and its contents) be clean, or at least clean enough to use without anxiety about what previous guests may have done there. If Best Western’s new "I Care Clean" program can increase their customer base by even a single percent it should pay for itself in a matter of days, if not hours, and there’s no telling how much business it might generate from improved customer relations…

And who’s even mentioned the potential savings in Health Department fines that will be avoided by the new cleaning and inspection program yet?

The whole idea behind the “value added” strategy is to increase the value provided for the customer at the lowest possible cost to the company. If Best Western can provide rooms that are cleaner than you would find at a Four Star hotel for a fraction of the cost, they have an excellent argument for why you should give them your business as opposed to any competitor. If they can do so at minimal additional cost to themselves, they should also succeed financially. Of course, just buying the gear isn’t enough; they’ve also got to train the Housekeeping staff to use it – and make sure that local management follows through. As with most value added programs, it’s not enough to just say you’re implementing one; you have to actually produce the value when the customer arrives. But this one seems like it might be worth keeping an eye on. And if you own a business, you might consider whether you could try a similar approach…