Promises, promises, promises

However, when the people I spoke to made a promise, I expected them to keep it.

Now scale the resulting disappointment in the brand from a simple broken promise to check the inventory of a product and get back to me, up to the business-wide promises contained in even your most basic piece of corporate communications, and you start to get a sense of the impact the problem can and does have.

What could the people at the Patagonia store done differently? They could hardly have told me they weren’t going to get back to me – or could they? Patagonia’s culture is marked by it’s somewhat casual “let my people go surfing” ethos, so perhaps an honest “I don’t know, could you call us back next week after I’ve been to the warehouse” would at least have set an expectation that they could meet.

I have been on a bit of a mission to find examples of companies who appear to be trying to apply more conscious and deliberate thought to their promises, however even the ones I found still smack of lip service.

For example, the Joomla developer support desk boldly lays out its promise on its site, with specifics to try and convey a sense of confidence that they have thought about it.

However, with somewhat ambiguous language peppered throughout, the statements make sure they have plenty of wriggle room – exactly what is “a timely manner”?

ANZ bank goes to great lengths in their Annual Customer Charter to put specific actions and measures against their promises.

It’s a nice piece of communications that I am sure they feel all warm and fuzzy about, but when one of your stated promises is “quick, friendly and reliable service” and you still allow customers to be allegedly bullied by outsourced debt collection agencies, I am not sure you can claim your promise has been achieved, as the most recent report does.

Jetstar is sticking to its “low fares good times” promise in its Customer Guarantee despite the fact that the economics of making both pieces of the promise work are somewhat at odds with each other and also almost impossible to be held to. I’m pretty sure that not many people would define getting stranded in an airport for a week as their idea of a “good time” if you know what I mean.

I’d love to lay out an example or two of a company that is keeping (most) of its promises. I am sure they are out there, I just haven’t really found any.

The bar seems to rise and fall wildly between a compulsion to either over-promise or go out of the way to try and not promise at all.

So where to from here? How do we roll back the clock and rebuild some faith and trust in the promises we hear? I think it starts with each of us being deliberate in the promises we make, keeping the ones we do and holding ourselves accountable when we don’t.

It extends to businesses being deliberate and conscious about what they say and think beyond the words, to both the intent and whether the promises they are making are promises that can be kept – before they make them.

This would be a radical departure from the more common approach today of making a promise and then scrambling like mad to try and find a way to keep it. No need to name names but you can probably think or more than one example (cough, Telstra, cough).

From the boardroom to the mail room the cascading relationships that promises set in motion need to be acknowledged and built down into the operations of business – and I’ll get the ball rolling with the following five suggestions.

1. Try the promises log exercise for yourself or even for your whole company.
2. On the big decisions, add the question “what promise are we making?” to your decision frameworks and then work backwards to make sure you can actually keep it BEFORE you make it public.
3. Make conscious promising an element of your culture internally, build it as a principle of how you do business by regularly doing one and two. Include it in employee training so they never “forget” to return a phone call they have promised to make.
4. Think about the language you are using. If you are trying to add wriggle room to something that is a promise, ask why? Ask what you would have to change so you could make it specific and by being specific be measurable?
5. Rein in marketing promises so they reflect reality. If the reality isn’t good enough to talk about go back to the drawing board and fix that.

Keeping your promises is the difference between a business and a brand that people loyally support and one that they merely tolerate. So now I’ve got you thinking about your promises, get mindful, be deliberate and rigorous and hold yourself accountable.

It’s a place to start.