Billy Joel sang “Honesty is such a lonely word, everyone is
so untrue. Honesty is hardly ever heard and mostly what I need from you.”
Who was Billy Joel?
Piano man?
Married to Christy Brinkley? (Until she saw a photo of them
together and realized…he is Billy Joel, and she is Christy Brinkley -joke).
Still nothing?
Really?
Wow… when did my music become classic rock?
Maybe I’m in a musical rut…
Anyway back to my original topic at hand, honesty.
I had a client once who asked me to spec and order a new
desktop for them. I asked them what they were going to use it for. Then I spec’d
out the appropriate machine, delivered and installed it.
However, about a week later they were trying to burn a CD.
It seemed that the CD ROM in the new machine was read only.
I hadn’t noticed that when I ordered it.
So, I visited them again, replaced the CD ROM with the
correct type and they were up and running.
When the customer asked me what the charge would be for the
CD ROM I said, “There is no charge for this, I should have caught it when I
ordered the PC originally.”
They were completely amazed at this. Being business owners
themselves they understood that I ate the cost of the time and materials just
to make this right.
After that anything project we did for them was never
questioned, they simply signed off on it saying. “If you say we need this we’ll
just do it. “
Sometime after this our company was moving away from a break
fix model to managed services. Guess who the first to sign up was?
Guess who
gave us a glowing recommendation to use to get other clients to sign up?
All these positive results came for fifteen minutes of my
time and the cost of a CD ROM.
Or was it something more than time and materials?
I don’t like taking my car in to get serviced because I
don’t understand all the issues well enough to know what a real problem is. I’m
well aware that there are good honest mechanics out there, but also there are
ones that will try to cheat me.
It’s refreshing to find someone who is trustworthy.
And that trustworthiness is rewarded with loyalty and
spontaneous word of mouth advertising.
Technical expertise is important in our field today. To keep
up to date we need to constantly study and learn. This takes hard work and
effort on our part.
But honesty is a simple choice.
And as far as classic rock goes, I’ll leave you with this thought.
Comment if you get me!
“Next phase, new wave,
dance craze, anyways…It's still rock and roll to me!”