I just tweeted the following:
#Twitter: on #privacy & #trustworthiness – does a #trustcharter exist that companies can sign up to? & if it doesn’t, how about making one?
What do I mean by a “trust charter”? A while ago I suggested we create a kind of boycott application with a constructive intention, designed to level the killing-field of corporate behaviours so big companies might be encouraged to act more constructively with society, and in consonance with wider needs than just those of traditional shareholders and top executives.
A “trust charter” might serve to build on such an instinct, but making sign-up voluntary after, say, a campaign run on social networks to encourage the process. The charter itself could, for example, cover the following subjects:
- data handling and processing – how deeply a company mines its data and how respectful it is with such knowledge
- customer service before and after sales – how open, honest and frank the organisation acts (remembering the kinds of things that have happened in the banking sector in relation to payment protection insurance)
- communication and response times when things go wrong and right – how customer-friendly the organisation is
- how it operates in a competitive marketplace – whether, for example, it has an explicit policy in relation to bribery, coercion of distributors etc
- what it really spends on political lobbying – either directly, or indirectly through third-party institutions
Like a set of fair-trade principles, if you like – but designed to allow us to pick out from the huge crowd of alternatives companies which not only deliver on the “whats” of customer experience but also on the “hows” of process and procedures.
So what do you think? Is this something we could work on together in order to benefit both a business- and people-friendly future?
____________________
Footnote: I am minded to think of these matters as a result of my recent experiences with Amazon’s customer-relations infrastructures. Much improved over the past two years or so, it’s now easy to find a real person at the end of a telephone, and to get rapid answers to issues with deliveries. Online business isn’t just a question of integrating warehouses with clicks and computers. It’s also a matter of building the bricks and mortar of human confidence. A process which – in times of economic crisis – seriously needs to take place between businesses and a broader society.
