Radical Transparency

In my last post, “IT Buyers Search for the Truth and Come Up Empty Handed,” I talked about the lack of trust companies have with their technology vendors these days. And I posed the question related to vendors being transparent with customers: what are we so afraid of?

I had an experience recently that was so unusual, so fantastic, so transparent that I wanted to write about it here.

I am the CEO and Founder of a start-up called Wisegate. We are in stealth mode, are working with a tight budget and needed a web conference service. I found GoToMeeting had a free 30-day trial so I signed up.

The month of using the service was fine (easy to use, good experience) but that is not the story here. Four days before my free trial ended they sent me an email telling me my free trial would end in 4-days and telling me how to cancel the service. They did this right up front in the email, no small print, no convoluted machinations required to cancel.

That is transparent behavior! I was so impressed and felt like I could trust them to make it easy should I need to cancel in the future that I stayed with the service and did not cancel.  Since then I have told quite a few people about this experience which I can only call radical transparency.

This is a great example of how behaving in an honest, open manner can grow business. No fear required.