The Challenge

The transparent Company – Part 4

Published by Esteban Glas on March 23rd, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: Business, Web, Web Marketing

A Step Forward.

Now, I have already went trough the most relevant points regarding the transparent company. Now I’ll try to establish the kind of corporate mindset that is needed to take the move in this direction.

For starters an open mind set is required. Any radical changes require those in charge to have an open mind towards change and evolution. This is important for every company, as a sort of mantra, but that is a matter for another post.

A second condition is a willingness to give away some secrecy. While opening up some things must get out of the core of the company, and be shared with the public eye. For instance the whole customer support back-end process will have to be crystal-clear, with different roles and policies that would otherwise stay behind the curtains well exposed.

I think most companies today have learned that they should be customer-centric (with customers being either individuals, partners, small business or huge corporations) more than ever before. An unhappy customer can create a big deal of negative press through blogs, YouTube, forums or other social media. Surely enough all companies will get hit one time or the other by an angry customer spreading his message. No one can make all people 100% happy all of the time, but if a company shows its efforts towards solving issues and shows it’s shame when they are unable to do so in a particular case people will tend to look at how many positives and negatives there are (such as when you buy on e-bay and look for the sellers reputation) and make their own call.

If you are the only company with such an approach you will be having the exclusive, and that is good altogether. If your competition takes the same approach, you’d better be making them happy, and if successful, it’ll pay more than a million dollar ad campaign.

Some concessions must also be made. It is no easy task to expose a company’s shortcomings and problems; people have a tendency to look at the negative side of things; you might have a thousand positive reviews and only one negative rant, guess what will be most popular? Yet, I believe (sorry to use the word “believe”, but having no background on a full open and transparent policy I have no certainties) such open approach and such unfiltered way of exposing this kind of reviews might have a very positive effect, even when what is shown is not positive 100%.

It also takes money. It is an investment; and any bold approach such as this will surely generate quite some resistance from the most conservative members of a company. It might also be quite challenging to accurately measure ROI, since it is based on many “social” and “perceptive” variables. That being said it might be interesting to measure support and sales before and after implementation.

The transparent company idea would also require a long time to “grow roots” upon implementation. It would take quite some input to effectively build a knowledge base, and even longer to generate confidence from the customers and associates. Besides, doing something of the sort would be under close scrutiny by the competition and media, I’d say any slip on the road might prove to be almost fatal if the system has not mature enough amongst customers. Once everything is settled and the approach is well recognized it might be bullet proof, but while growing it would be as delicate as a crystal glass.

IF a company were to take such approach, it should be decided to go all the way. There would be no room hesitation.

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