If you are happy fooling your customers, You are the biggest fool.

You may have seen people bosting how they fooled their customers. Trying to fool a customer is nothing less than a 'fraud'. More you try to fool your customers the more you will get exposed and the more harm you bring to your brand, your organization.

I have witnessed sales guys pushing their customers buying into something that will add no value to their business. These sales guys celebrate the day and boast about their sales-tricks. When that customer realizes that they have been tricked ( fooled ) by the sales guy whom they trusted as an advisor, they will never do business with that person, that brand ever again. No matter where that sales person goes and what he sells in the future, the door at this customer place is closed forever. What a loss ! loss of business, loss of trust most importantly loss of respect.

I renewed my car insurance last year, sales guy and his manager were both very polite, humble and nice. I went ahead and closed the deal with them. Right after the payments were done both the sales guy and his manager disappeared. They were supposed to include RSA in their service but they didn't give any details. I kept calling them and they kept avoiding me. The same company called me again this year, I replied to their message that I don't deal with frauds. Surprisingly no response to that message, probably they are used to it. This is what happens when you master the mistake of fooling your customers. You start losing your customers and you know there is no coming back, one day you shut the shutters. Many people take this fooling business as a short-cut, some organizations start encouraging this sort of behavior as a 'smart thing' to do.

From where I come from, Over 20 years of my experience working with Japanese and German organizations, I am proud to say that this practice is non-compliant, it has zero tolerance. Customer is in the center of our business, we are here to serve our customers, we are successful only because of these customers. This is so strongly engraved from the top to the bottom of our organization, it reminds me of a phrase in Sanskrit ??? ???? ??? ????? which in English means 'as the king, so are the people'. Watch this video for a better understanding of this phrase. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FN2e5cuiQK4

Of course we have very good examples, experiences of how some companies go the extra mile to treat their customers better, to make them feel good about their service. This year, my company sponsored me a brand new Mercedes, thrilled to have it. But the story of how I decided on Mercedes is very interesting. A brand new, very attractive Mercedes showroom came up in my neighborhood. Rian, my 6 yr old son would take me there almost every weekend, the sales guys there would entertain us every time we visited them. My son would push every possible button available in every car, no one at the showroom would make any face, not in front of us at least :). The sales manager Swapnil, a thorough gentleman, would always share his offers with me, tell me about the new models etcetera but he would never try to trick me. I had made my decision that if at all I buy any luxury car, I would buy from that man. At the beginning of this year Swapnil handed the keys to Rian who is 8 year old now :).

Moral of the story is STOP fooling around if you want to SUCCEED in your career, STAY in your business for long.

Cheers !

Anil