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.
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