Delivering Knock Your Socks Off Service, 5th Edition

9Honesty Is the Only Policy

“A man always has two reasons for doing anything—a good reason, and the real reason.”

—J. P. Morgan, financier

When it comes to customer service, honesty isn’t the best policy, it is the only policy. Lying to or misleading customers invariably leads to far worse problems than looking them straight in the eye and telling them something unpleasant they need to hear right now.

There are two very good reasons for facing your customer with the bad news.

First, tall tales inevitably catch up with you, and often in the most unexpected ways. Tom Connellan, president of the Orlando-based Connellan Group, tells the story of a shipping clerk (let’s call him Ralph) in a company in Michigan who had discovered a cute and, to his ...