On Customer Trust

[Dr Moore]

Friends and colleagues,

I hope you and your families are all well and safe. Spring is in the air, Covid-19 continues to erode in potency through mutation, Dean Robbers roams our campus halls sporting his new bowler hat, and there are some indications that core CPI inflation may have peaked in March. I'm growing cautiously optimistic about the remainder of 2022. I say that as a second derivative expression of hope, while acknowledging difficult times ahead for the horrific humanitarian situation in Ukraine, as well as for ending the global pandemic.

Speaking of good things and bad things, I want to share the following 2017 HBR article, which was sent by a colleague. The article, How Service Companies Can Earn Customer Trust and Keep It, brought to mind the one thing that unites us all in this forum: Mormonism.

https://hbr.org/2017/04/how-service-com ... nd-keep-it

The article begins with a case study in destroying customer trust -- United Airlines forcibly removing a ticketed passenger to make space for an employee. Ouch! From this example, author Leonard Berry shares 3 conditions "under which any service company can cause customers to lose confidence in it."

Condition 1: The failure is egregious.
...
Condition 2: The incident fits a pattern of failure.
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Condition 3: The attempted recovery is weak, yielding a double failure.
...

(At this point, I invite you to read the full article. It's like 12 concise but content-rich paragraphs, a very quick read, 2-3 minutes.)

Berry then offers a few lessons to service businesses that aspire to earn and maintain customer trust.

To the extent possible, solve service problems before they reach the customer.
...
Honor customer' "perceived contract," not the company's legal contract.
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Identify and commit to a few crucial "nondelegable" decisions that must be kicked up to a senior manager.
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Be generous with customers when you absolutely must break your service promise to them.
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Include an explanation with an apology for a service failure.
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Use realistic slogans.
...

Now, in our lifetimes, the information age has produced a wonderful change in the value businesses place on customer service and trust. There is simply no choice anymore. In my earlier years, it was commonplace for businesses to ruthlessly trade off customer experience for a few pennies of profit. I practically grew up on horror stories about bad customer service, from hours on the phone trying to cancel cable, impossible returns processes for defective appliances, or bad contractors placing liens on homes to force homeowners to pay for shoddy work.

Yes, those things still happen today, but with increasingly high risk of catastrophic consequences. Audio and video recordings, or photos of text message threads and email chains, illustrating violations of customer trust can go viral in minutes, costing millions or even billions in corporate profit. The information age has made it very hard indeed to succeed at failure. Dial into any company's quarterly earnings conference calls for investors, and you will hear an earful about "customer success," "customer journeys," "customer trust," and "the age of the customer." This mantra is everywhere, because businesses have learned that the cost to gain and keep customer trust is far smaller than the cost of losing that trust. Go figure.

Indeed, it is a great time to be a consumer. I believe we will never go back to the old ways.

Which brings me to the article above, and why it reminded me of Mormonism. If nothing else, the church is in the service business. Which means, the church is in the trust business. Ergo, lessons on customer trust absolutely do apply to the church, its administration and leadership.

Consider first, the three conditions for automatic loss of trust above. Do those things happen in the church today?

First, consider the egregious failure of excommunicating members who speak out? Does it fit all 3 criteria above? (1) It is an egregious thing to do to someone who speaks truth to power. (2) Unfortunately, this activity fits a pattern of behavior going back to Joseph Smith. (3) And the recovery is weak, because it blames the failure on the customer. As the article says, "when customers see that a company won't own up to its mistakes, they are likely to assume that the firm cares little about serving them well and does not deserver their loyalty."

Second, consider the egregious failure to be truthful about the inconvenient aspects of its history, scriptures, people and policies. That's a lot to unpack, and probably this consideration should be broken up into many sub-units on egregious failure. (1) It is egregious to hide true facts from members and prospective members, because hiding the truth amounts to deception, no matter how well intentioned. (2) In so many ways, there has been a pattern of failure to be truthful about inconvenient facts, spanning decades. (3) I would argue that the attempted recovery from all of this hiding has been weak, again because the failure in all cases is blamed on the customer (member). It is the customer's fault for looking at non-approved sources. It is the customer's fault for criticizing the leaders, even if the criticism is true. It is the customer's fault for stopping daily study and immersion in correlated material and scriptures. It is the customer's fault for speaking out and shining light on deception and inconsistency. It is the customer's fault for not choosing to believe first and interpret all facts through the lens of belief. And on and on.

Third, consider the egregious failure to protect, serve and delight the full emotional well being of the marginalized. The blacks. Women. LGBTQIA. Children. (1) It is egregious because needless harm was done in the name of God to people whose only fault was joining or being born into Mormonism. (2) It is a pattern of failure in multiple epochs. And (3), the recovery is weak because no official apologies have ever been given, and activists are still being punished with excommunication and silencing. We continue to see an incredibly weak recovery from failures to serve the marginalized, and persistent irony of an organization that decries the "wicked world" yet resists social progress on human rights at every turn.

Now, as to the lessons learned and suggestions for earning and maintaining customer (member) trust, there is even more to unpack there as relates to the model of church leadership in a customer service context. I will leave just one here, but trust that your comments will uncover more. My favorite among the prescriptions is to "honor customers' perceived contract, not the company's legal contract." This has such broad applicability for Mormonism and Mopologetics. I want to stress that this isn't a "spirit of the law" thing. It's about empathy for the customer's (member's) perception, and organizational leadership that is committed to honoring that expectation. We could discuss at length the "perceived contracts" regarding the reliability of historical narratives in correlated curriculum, the interpreted meanings of public statements regarding church finances, honesty in Book of Abraham apologetics and BYU-sponsored Book of Abraham research, academic integrity on the part of Mopologetic enterprises, implicit belief that the Q15 have seen Jesus, the issue of prophetic infallibility and the process of revelation in church leadership, data-driven examination of efficacy of priesthood blessings, what it means to have an "unpaid clergy" ... and I am sure there are many more "perceived contracts" within the church, for which the official line has in some way retreated to legalistic gymnastics and customer-blaming, rather than embracing what it means to be in the trust business.

All thoughts welcome.

[Philo Sofee]

This is absolutely insightful and wonderful! Thank you very much for sharing this stellar post Dr. Moore! I very enthiuastically enjoyed every word.

[Analytics]

Interesting thoughts--thank you for sharing.

My sense is that the church offers very little value for the cost and provides a terrible customer experience. Pay 10% of your income in exchange for patronizing lectures that offend your intellectual integrity? No way.

For most faithful members, I'm not sure this model really captures the dynamic of their relationship with the Church. The faithful don't see themselves as customers of the Church. It's more like they see themselves as members of a co-op; the customers and the employees are the same people.

But are they really?

About 25 years ago, I was in a leadership position in a smallish branch, and the members of our branch unanimously agreed we'd be happier if church started at 9:30 rather than 9:00. We made that decision to tweak when the meeting started and told the stake president. He vetoed our decision: church starts at 9:00 sharp. That's corporate policy. The wishes of the actual members of the congregation be damned.

That was a little thing, but I wonder how much it crystalized in my mind that it wasn't really our church--it was somebody else's. We were just pawns in somebody else's game.

[Doctor Scratch]

Interesting observations, Dr. Moore. I think that the Mopologists--and likely many TBMs--would probably take issue with your characterization of the Church as a "service" or as "customer-oriented." I think your analysis is basically right, and that the Church *has* betrayed people's trust in a lot of ways, but I think the Mopologists see themselves as basically "striving" towards the Celestial Kingdom, or the fantasy world of Added Upon, and the notion that this is like a "business" would be offensive to them.

[Philo Sofee]

Interesting thoughts--thank you for sharing.

My sense is that the church offers very little value for the cost and provides a terrible customer experience. Pay 10% of your income in exchange for patronizing lectures that offend your intellectual integrity? No way.

For most faithful members, I'm not sure this model really captures the dynamic of their relationship with the Church. The faithful don't see themselves as customers of the Church. It's more like they see themselves as members of a co-op; the customers and the employees are the same people.

But are they really?

About 25 years ago, I was in a leadership position in a smallish branch, and the members of our branch unanimously agreed we'd be happier if church started at 9:30 rather than 9:00. We made that decision to tweak when the meeting started and told the stake president. He vetoed our decision: church starts at 9:00 sharp. That's corporate policy. The wishes of the actual members of the congregation be damned.

That was a little thing, but I wonder how much it crystalized in my mind that it wasn't really our church--it was somebody else's. We were just pawns in somebody else's game.

Oh my good Lord that is positively awful! Yeah, I see how you arrive at that sentiment. What an idiot church leader on this one!

[Gadianton]

Some old 60 Minutes interview footage with Aleksandr Dugin from years ago that was never used has made its way to the Internet. Dugin, who teaches several territories outside of Russia are properly Russian independent of what the people living there think of it, lamented that Putin has been moving too slowly in his annexation campaign. When Putin's authoritarianism was mention, Dugin said that Putin had failed to be authoritarian enough, and that he and the people of Russia beg him to be more authoritarian and realize the destiny of Russia.

Hugh Nibley used to say that unhappiness came from having one foot in Zion and one foot in Babylon. You have to make a decision. If the Church is offering a service, it's got an uphill battle. I think it's fair to characterize the very corporate church as a service provider. Neil A. Maxwell once put in those terms in an interview, saying that the Saints got a lot in exchange for their tithing by way of covenants and blessings and so on. I have a hard time imagining how the Church as a service provider will ever be successful. Yes, it's failed to provide much or do much of anything in the last few decades, it just sort of coasts along, allowing members to fill in the picture of what the Church is doing for them with their own fantasies about it. There's a lot of cultural influence pushing members to fabricate the wonderful things the Church has done for them.

If the Church were ever to take the reigns again, how would it improve? One possibility is to quit being a service provider, and become the authoritarian nightmare that it's meant to be. A case can be made that people are built to suffer and do better with simplicity -- working collective farms and so on, as Nibley imagined. Instead of Rusty trying to make himself into a meme and embarrassing himself, maybe it's time to crack the whip? The only problem is there needs to be a universal directive. Not frivolous temple work and so on. You know, at one time the Saints got kicked between cities and states, and trekked west and built Salt Lake. The Saints need a prophet who will throw them into the fires of persecution and wear out their lives in the service of his directives.

[Dr Moore]

My sense is that the church offers very little value for the cost and provides a terrible customer experience. Pay 10% of your income in exchange for patronizing lectures that offend your intellectual integrity? No way.

That's a little cynical, but I hear what you're saying.

For most faithful members, I'm not sure this model really captures the dynamic of their relationship with the Church. The faithful don't see themselves as customers of the Church. It's more like they see themselves as members of a co-op; the customers and the employees are the same people.

But are they really?

About 25 years ago, I was in a leadership position in a smallish branch, and the members of our branch unanimously agreed we'd be happier if church started at 9:30 rather than 9:00. We made that decision to tweak when the meeting started and told the stake president. He vetoed our decision: church starts at 9:00 sharp. That's corporate policy. The wishes of the actual members of the congregation be damned.

That was a little thing, but I wonder how much it crystalized in my mind that it wasn't really our church--it was somebody else's. We were just pawns in somebody else's game.

Interesting points. I believe you are getting at one of the network effects in Mormonism, and similar network effects are found in all sorts of businesses. That is, situations or effects "in which the value of a product, service, or platform depends on the number of buyers, sellers, or users who leverage it." In this case, many members view their association with one another in voluntary service and membership in the kingdom as a sort of co-op, or shared responsibility for one another's temporal and spiritual salvation.

But I would call that just what I think it is -- a network effect that springs out of the Church's business of teaching doctrines, facilitating covenant-making, and providing infrastructure for sustaining the organization. When I refer to members, or prospective members, as customers, I do so with this relationship in mind. The Church provides teachings, covenants and infrastructure in exchange for various types commitments (money, time, behavior, etc). If you strip away the community and network effects, what you have at the core of Mormonism is a trust business.

[Dr Moore]

If the Church were ever to take the reigns again, how would it improve? One possibility is to quit being a service provider, and become the authoritarian nightmare that it's meant to be. A case can be made that people are built to suffer and do better with simplicity -- working collective farms and so on, as Nibley imagined. Instead of Rusty trying to make himself into a meme and embarrassing himself, maybe it's time to crack the whip? The only problem is there needs to be a universal directive. Not frivolous temple work and so on. You know, at one time the Saints got kicked between cities and states, and trekked west and built Salt Lake. The Saints need a prophet who will throw them into the fires of persecution and wear out their lives in the service of his directives.

Fascinating idea. I think this strategy of doubling down authoritarianism works well only when the leadership is capable of controlling information. Like, maybe it would work inside Putin's Russia. And, it may have worked for bros. Joseph and Brigham. But it won't work for Nelson. That strategy is too transparent and easily unmasked. There are too many families with one or more outspoken members nowadays, that it just isn't possible to control the narrative by amping up authoritarianism. The more Nelson, or his successors, double down on whip-cracking, even if there was some universal directive (say, build those 100+ announced temples?), the smaller the tent becomes, and even so there will always be people on the edge of the tent looking out.

Information is too powerful. Now, that isn't to say Nelson et al won't try. We seem to get a dose of that whip-cracking every now and then, whether directed at BYU faculty, or general members, or even toward the youth. But it's a loser.

But I wonder, what if a new universal directive came along, and it was good. Like, really good, as in, we need to put $100 billion to work on humanitarian causes. Maybe then... Maybe.

[Dr Moore]

Interesting observations, Dr. Moore. I think that the Mopologists--and likely many TBMs--would probably take issue with your characterization of the Church as a "service" or as "customer-oriented." I think your analysis is basically right, and that the Church *has* betrayed people's trust in a lot of ways, but I think the Mopologists see themselves as basically "striving" towards the Celestial Kingdom, or the fantasy world of Added Upon, and the notion that this is like a "business" would be offensive to them.

The Mopologists are trust murderers. What they do is fatal to the cause. And sadly, they collectively can't really even see their contribution to the problem because they exult in shaming and dismissing customers who quit the brand. That behavior, which you have fastidiously documented for decades, is a trust-killing feedback loop -- a pattern of behavior that continues to enable the brethren to offer weak recoveries from their pattern of failure (to earn trust) time and time again.

Pick any pet Mopologetic issue, and it is trivial to show that the Mopologetic enterprise facilitates repeated violations of trust on marginal customer support tickets (you know, the next set of members in faith crisis, asking hard questions), and a sad situation in which the leaders feel justified in not only not apologizing, but in telling members they are wrong for not believing harder, and blaming the members for thinking critically. In other words, the customer is always wrong unless the customer keeps buying more.

[Kishkumen]

I have to say that I am ambivalent regarding this whole model. I have no doubt that people expect responsiveness from their "service providers," but this does represent a sea change in the way people think about their religions and churches. Is it necessarily a good change? I am not sure. Hey, I may want to be a Pythagorean, but I don't want to learn math and geometry, and I definitely don't want to be a vegetarian.

The reality is that there were many people who claimed to be Pythagorean without doing what Pythagoras would have required of his inner circle, but the point in being a Pythagorean was to lead a life that led to certain results, not just to have a nice customer experience and be able to call yourself a Pythagorean. Sure, I can be a fake Klingon, attend Star Trek conventions, and dress up, but isn't that quite a different thing in important ways?

I am all for saying that the LDS Church has made a series of bad judgment calls, and maybe it simply is the reality that customer satisfaction rules the day, but then I will continue to think that the point of being Mormon or Christian or Pythagorean, if it is to mean something substantive in the way it transforms individuals, families, and communities, can't just be a series of curated experiences to suit the tastes of the public. It has to deliver on what it promises in terms of personal transformation.

If one does not want to do the stuff that comes with living a certain life, there are always other options, and people willing to accommodate.