It seems like it is happening more frequently… those “accidental” billing errors imposed by companies… and I’m not referring to the pizza joint on the corner, but rather large and well known businesses that seem to think nothing of tacking on bogus charges, perhaps with the hope that only a small percentage of customers will notice, and the rest will mistakenly pay these fees, much to the delight of the corporate coffer watchers and quarterly earnings manipulators.
In the past two weeks I have been on the receiving end of three corporate “scams.” Scam is an ugly and slanderous word, and I wouldn’t use it if I didn’t think it was accurate.
The first involved an estimated bill by a utility company (the actual bill was half, resulting in bill reduction of almost $300). The second offender was a “rent-a-car” company that imposed “phantom” gas charges, but could not produce any evidence of the actual gas used. The third was a large hotel chain that thought nothing of tacking on $32.00 in “honor bar” fees (you know- the jar of peanuts or package of M&M’s in the hotel room refrigerator), when, in reality, the honor bar was never accessed.
In the first and third instance, the extra fees were cancelled without a single question… almost too easily. In the second case, two minutes of online research turned up an undercover investigation of this company’s deceptive and bogus gas charge practices. (I’m still working on resolving this one, as it is a bit more complicated. I did not rent the car directly. It was a service loaner from a “high end” auto manufacturer who was fixing my SUV. The interesting twist on this story is that the auto company released my personal credit card info to the rental company…but that’s a story for another discussion.)
And this brings me to Trust Across America’s metrics. As a followup to an article I wrote on the Role of Trust in Sustainabile Business, www.triplepundit.com/2011/07/role-trust-sustainable-business/, I decided to do a tiny study (of these 3 public companies) to see if there is a correlation between “good trust and good business” and what I found should not be surprising. Two of the three companies have below average aggregated trust scores. The third is slightly above average, but has a very low score in corporate integrity. All three have at least one link that breaks the chain. The weak links are concentrated in corporate integrity and transparency- two of our five FACTS trust drivers- and certainly no surprise.
In conclusion, these are not companies that understand the benefits of trustworthy business behavior, nor have they adopted a culture of trust. In fact, they may believe that trust is not relevant to conducting good business. Unfortunately for them, as our world becomes more transparent, it will be more and more difficult for companies like these to sustain their business model. Oh well. I certainly won’t be sorry to see them go.
Trust Across America’s mission is to highlight companies that do the right thing. This blog post is as close as we will come to reporting a scam. But let us know about your own corporate interactions, be they good or bad. Feel free to use actual names. We will be happy to provide some personal insight back to you regarding the company’s trust metrics. They must be public companies, and in our database.
www.trustacrossamerica.com/documents/offerings-reports/facts-audit.pdf
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