Posted on 18-3-2004

Loyalty, Just Another Commodity
By Alan Marston

Telecom NZ was in damage control yesterday as it tried to cope with the
torrent of calls from customers demanding a discount on their toll calls.
Most had been previously unaware that they qualified for a discount which
the telecommunications giant had been using to entice people from
competitors.

Some customers of Telecom had been told they could not get the discount
because they were existing customers. A worker at a call centre had told
the NZ Herald newspaper that Wednesday morning an internal email was sent
out to staff telling them to dissuade people from getting the discount.
They were only to give it out if the customer was insistent and threatened
to move to another company. The staff were also told that the number of
discounts they gave out were being monitored. Telecom's PR frontperson
John Goulter confirmed an email was sent to staff but he said it was to
remind them to talk through the options with the customer to make sure
they had the best package for them.

I believe that `talk through' is spin, the corporate world's word for
lying. When asked if staff were told to only give out a discount when
customers threatened to leave, he said: "No they weren't." More spin in my
opinion, perhaps the words in the email were not exactly that of the
question. Faith in what corporates say is what they mean is at an alltime
low and going down fast, for good reason. To me the real point of the
scene surrounding the above debacle is how the ancient life-giving and
community building ethics of loyalty and trust have, in the modern market
economy, been totally corrupted by their being turned into just another
commodity to be bought and sold.

Apart from money-value the market has no values. Yet human social systems
stand or fall - and the people with them - on values that set up and
maintain life-giving relationships. Business is a social system, it too
has an internal gravity of people-people relationships that hold it
together and make it work. The gravity of social systems is the
universally attractive force of trust.

The pure commerce that is the corporate ethos attempts to market trust, it
is succeeding, apart from hiccups like the one yesterday. People
everywhere are getting discounts for disloyalty but the price we all pay
for that is social breakdown and a lower quality of life.

Loyalty is very precious, if it is sold it transmutes into its opposite
and loses all life-giving value.