Martha and I are working now on our next book, which will be published by Penguin early in 2012. The title of the book is EXTREME TRUST. Basically, here's our thesis:
Interactions among people are increasing at the pace of Moore's Law, becoming faster, cheaper, and more pervasive. But rising interconnectedness leads to more transparency and increases the level of trustworthiness we demand from others. Businesses will be particularly affected by this because today they earn substantial profits by taking advantage of inattentive, passive, misinformed, or error-prone customers. In the transparent future, when a company doesn't proactively protect the interests of its customers it will soon be exposed and competed out of business. This is a different, more extreme kind of trust being demanded of businesses, and we call it "trustability," or proactive trustworthiness.
A few weeks ago we authored an article for Perspectives 2011, a trade journal catering to the telecommunications industry (you have to register to get access, but registration is free, and the article is found on page 45). In our article we proposed several policies as examples of things that very few telecom companies do today, but that (we predict) many more will do in the future, as trustability becomes more and more of a minimum standard for customer service:
- A trustable telecom operator will automatically assign customers to the most economic calling plans based on their calling, texting, and data usage. A "best practice" will be to retroactively assign the most economic calling plan for each customer, crediting the customer with a rebate where appropriate. Very few operators today do this, of course, and those that do often use it as an excuse to extend a postpaid contract.
- If a customer is about to subscribe to mobile or landline service from a home or business address that is prone to poor network coverage or slow broadband connectivity, a genuinely trustable telecom company will advise them in advance of this weakness in their offering, perhaps providing a discount or other benefit until such time as service in their home area is improved.
- A trustable telecom operator will almost certainly have an unconditional money-back guarantee available to cover any and all customer complaints. In the same way today's best online merchants offer unconditional refunds, tomorrow's telecom operator will use such a policy to ensure that customers always receive the service they expect.
But there must be much more than we've just mentioned.
HELP US PLEASE! We need MORE examples for our book! We'll focus on other vertical industries in later blog postings, but right now we'd really like to hear from you if you can think of any additional kinds of policies or practices in the telecommunications industry that would epitomize trustability, or proactive trustworthiness. Either post your comment on this blog or send an email directly to Martha or me: dpeppers@1to1.com or rogers@1to1.com. And thanks!