How Business Ethics Benefit Your Bottom Line

What do you do when the monthly phone bill reaches $200,000?  It may well depend on whether you’re on the issuing or the receiving end of the bill. But for one smart phone user, the answer demonstrated the difference between business law and business ethics. 

T-Mobile Does the Right Thing

When Celine Aarons included her two brothers, who are deaf and mute, on her family cell phone plan she never dreamed her usual $175 a month bill would balloon to over $200,000.  But that is exactly what happened when one of her brothers went on a two week vacation to Canada and left his data roaming on while sending more than 2,000 text messages and downloading a bunch of videos.

Having recently upgraded my own cell phone, I can certainly sympathize with Ms. Aarons and her brother.  While my bill did not get as high as hers, I did chew through my usual monthly data usage in less than a week because I didn’t realize certain programs continued to run in the background, even after I thought they were shut down.  New gadgets are always a learning curve and some of those curves are steeper and more expensive than others.  

From a legal perspective, the service provider in the Aarons’ case, T-Mobile, was well within its legal rights to assert its contractual obligations and collect the money owed (see attorney on the video).  Like most contractual loopholes, the one T-Mobile could have exploited was in reality a misunderstanding that was one part contractual obligation and one part ignorance of how all those cell phone buttons work. How you think they work doesn’t always match reality and can unintentionally trigger excessive fees. 

To T-Mobile’s credit, the company did not exploit that loophole.  Instead of saying a contract is a contract and “you better pay up,” they recognized how misuse of the product due to user error was the culprit. 

T-Mobile did the ethical thing and heavily discounted the bill, giving Ms. Aaron’s six months to pay. They did what’s fair and what’s morally right, even though their legal rights dictated a different outcome.

Of course what would be even better is if there was more transparency up front that gave users detailed information about how a phone’s functionality impacts data usage.  It’s great when the sales people tout all the new smart phone features, but as a practical matter what good are they if using them will blow up your monthly bill?  Is it possible to know before it’s too late?

Better Information Equals Happier Customers

Appliances come with energy consumption information.  Packaged food products come with nutritional facts.  New cars come with city and highway mileage information.  Why can’t smart phones come with better data plan consumption information?  It would then be much easier to choose the right plan instead of learning the hard way. 

Providing additional information would be the right thing to do -- not because it’s required by law, but because it’s fair and ethical.  Looking at your business through the lens of business ethics offers an opportunity to anticipate and meet a customer need (i.e. better information) before it turns into a problem (upset customers, time spent by customer service fielding the call and adjusting the bill). 

What this means, even for small businesses, is that focusing on business ethics can improve the way you manage customer expectations.  It can save you time and money as well as create a more satisfying customer experience.

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Hanna Hasl-Kelchner is a business legal strategist, author, speaker and trainer who teaches and coaches business people on how to avoid lawsuits.  She is the author of The Business Guide to Legal Literacy: What Every Manager Should Know About the Law and forthcoming Champions: Knock out strategies for health, wealth and success from today’s leading experts.  Follow Hanna on Twitter @nononsenselawyr. Subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed to get the latest updates.