Employee Engagement Practices

I really enjoy SmartBrief on Leadership to get a good daily dose of small business news. In fact, I've mentioned them in no less than four past blog posts.

But they disappointed me slightly when they linked to this article by Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management. Here's SmartBrief's summary of the Kellogg article:

When your service reps need to keep a customer waiting, it's best for everyone if they're vague about the likely delay, according to new research. Telling customers only that a delay is likely to be "short" or "long" allows them to make an informed decision about whether to stick around -- but helps retain customers who might have left if they'd been given a more precise estimate, researchers found. "The firm should always try to retain some level of ... ambiguity about the real state of the system," says the study's co-author.

The research here might back this conclusion, but in the real world I just don't buy it. As a client of several vendors in my work at Winning Workplaces, I have been burned at times when they were vague with me.

Yes, in those instances a little more short-term income was made billing us for work done when we didn't know the whole picture of what was going on. But by not being clear with us with where they stood, some of them shot themselves in the foot when it came time to renew the annual contract, and they could no longer count on us as a long-term relationship – and as a long-term revenue source.

So I think that, as with employee engagement practices for building trust in the workplace, in customer relations, honesty and detail make for the best policy. And vague should not be in vogue.

What do you think?