We all make mistakes – nobody is perfect, right? Well, I recently read an article about a bit of a blunder from a startup I wanted to share with you, not to highlight the company’s mistake, but to share a great lesson for enterprises. This story really got me thinking about the importance of transparency and honestly when it comes to our customers.
As reported to Medium, the former customers of a cleaning service called Homejoy that had gone out of business received an email from a company called Fly Maids, stating they were Homejoy’s new “partner” service and inviting them to give their services a try. Seems harmless enough thus far, right?
Well, the invite took a turn for the worst when these former Homejoy customers visited the Fly Maids website and found their name, address and credit card information pre-loaded into the site. To make matters worse, many customers found the Fly Maids website so similar to a competing cleaning service’s site they began to think the entire thing was a huge scam and suspect their credit card information had been compromised.
Turns out that behind the scenes, one of the co-founders of Homejoy had acquired the company’s domain and customer data then founded Fly Maids to continue to service Homejoy’s customers. The problem? He decided not to tell these facts to the Homejoy customers he was prospecting as not to influence their decisions to engage Fly Maids for their cleaning services based on their previous experience with Homejoy. First off, I’m not really sure why you wouldn’t want to take advantage of a customer’s previous experience with you…unless, of course, it was a bad experience. And secondly, how could you not expect to freak someone out by pre-loading his or her credit card information to your website? And thirdly, which is a topic for another article, how scary is it that someone can purchase your credit card information from a company that has gone out of business?!
The backlash was so bad that Fly Maids has taken down their site and assured former Homejoy customers the company has deleted all of their credit card information. So, what is the lesson here? I believe this is a great lesson in transparency and honesty for enterprises.
When you are about to launch a campaign or are planning your sales and marketing strategy, be mindful if you are ever at a point where you are about to, maliciously or not, take a step in which you are going to try to keep your customers from finding out about something. If there is one thing that customers don’t want from you, it’s a surprise. If you are about to do something sneaky, think twice. As I always say, just be square with people, no matter what. Make sure that you are always the one who is above board, straightforward and never working behind the scenes. Your customers will always appreciate your honesty.
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