Most people associate business responsibility in their mind with care for the earth. Others consider it to include social justice and societal impacts. But rarely do they include a place for responsibility to the customer except as safety and reliability of products. Most product development time is spent to figure out what the business can sell the customer via market research or product development teams extending existing offerings. But responsibility is a much more encompassing phenomena, and includes customers as well. If we started with the effects on customers of products and services, then many of the social concerns would not arise and in fact, much good would be done in the world. The financial industry is a place where it is possible to lead the market by putting customers into the equation. And the financial crisis of the last two years shows how society can be affected when we do not start there.
Dan Mascai, in Fast Company wrote a piece in the October 2010 issue, which offers a great example of a business, in the financial industry engaging in what I call Customer Social Responsibility. Alexa von Tobel, a Morgan Stanley analyst after graduating from Harvard, started a business based on her own insecurities. Even though she was working in one of the biggest investment advisory firms she noticed she did not feel comfortable about her own finances. This led von Tobel to found LearnVest. It targets women under forty, who are very often out-earning their male counterparts around the nation. And yet they have no idea how to stay out of or manage debt much less how to plan for retirement. It is a stressor a major proportion for this group. But the few services available were not hip, as Mascai reports, or speaking to them as intelligent adults. And it did not bring confidence and predictability into their financial lives.
You might say that this is just finding a niche market and has nothing to do with responsibility. However, the current problem came from exploiting another niche— those with poorer credit ratings and lack of knowledge of the financial system. It is not finding the niche but what you do with the discovery that determines responsibility. Even this new product for women with money, could become exploitive if LearnVest forgets what brought them into the business. The services they provide are tied directly to the experience of making a women’s financial life work better for her—over time.
Many businesses start from such an idea but as they grow they forget and focus themselves to finding ways to grow the business that lose touch with the customer’s life. They forget they were asking how they could help their life work and feel more meaningful. Without this level consciousness and connection to the life of a person, not as a demographic, but as a person with a family, a job, a business, a report and generally a full life, of which the product you offer only matters when it makes life better. Otherwise it is promoting consumption for its own sake and diminishes a life.
Customer Social Responsibility is the commitment of a business to take on responsibility for the quality of a customer’s live by enriching it and making it more meaningful by what they offering in products or services. To be in a fully reciprocal relationship with the customer then gives the business a right to receive a fee or payment for the product or service. Otherwise, they are not in reciprocity with the customer, which is how responsibility works. It is a systemic process that ensures all parties benefit.
If the mortgage and financial industries had this thought, Customer Social Responsibility before they created the financial products of the last few years, non of us would be in the mess we are in.