The value of trust

Many say the most valuable business and personal asset is your reputation. But even more fundamental than reputation is trust.

Trust is the basis for all business dealings. We all have to trust our suppliers will deliver products that are fit for their purpose, and trust our customers will pay in full and on time.

WebCentral betrayed their customers’ trust last week when it failed to talk to them after a storage breakdown knocked 50% of their services offline for three days.

It’s tough to criticise a service provider when hardware breaks, as stuff happens – but not talking to your customers and retail partners is unforgivable.

In the absence of any information, the small business owners who make up the bulk of WebCentral’s customers turned to the web to find why their email wasn’t working.

There was no information to be found on the WebCentral website or that of their parent company, Melbourne IT, so many frustrated customers found sharing experiences on the Whirlpool website was the only way to keep up with what went wrong.

This might be a PR cost cutting strategy for WebCentral’s management, but it meant their message was now out of their hands, and web forum participants, some with less than the full collection of marbles, can be seen to be as authoritative as anyone from the company.

In SmartCompany last week, Whirlpool’s founder Simon Wright made some interesting observations about when your customer base turns on you and how businesses deal with that, citing the notorious 2Clix case as being “lawyer SEO”.

WebCentral will find the same thing happens with their search engine results. At present the first page of a Google search for “webcentral” has four results referring to its outages.

The most bizarre thing about the responses of WebCentral and Melbourne IT is that their only official media statement following the outage was an announcement of a software-as-a-service offering.

SaaS relies on trust – customers have to trust the provider will deliver the promised service, protect their data and, most importantly, be reliable. It’s difficult to see how customers can trust WebCentral on any of those counts.

For business and consumers, “bad news SEO” is a great form of research. A quick browse through some basic search engine results will often show if a potential supplier has a problem and how they deal with issues.

Dealing with problems quickly, honestly and openly is the main lesson from WebCentral’s outage. This has always been the best policy in business, and the web rewards those that are honest and open.

We all make mistakes, and sometimes things simply break. You owe it to your customers and your staff to be upfront and honest when stuff like this happens.

Paul Wallbank is a speaker, writer and broadcaster on technology and business. He grew PC Rescue into a national IT company and set up the IT Queries website. Paul has a regular ABC spot on technology matters.

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