Business integrity

As a writer and professional service provider, I consider my job as helping my clients. I write webcopy or documents for their business, of course, but more than that I use my skills and knowledge to help them. I consider that my clients want my expertise, not just some words on a piece of paper.

So for example, if a client asks me to write a media release on something that I know is not news worthy and is extremely unlikely to get published, I tell them so and might suggest another way I could help them more effectively.

Whenever I approach suppliers, for myself or on behalf of a client, I always make my request along the lines of “Please do x, y and z  – unless you can suggest a better alternative”. I trust suppliers to know more than me and hope we can work together to get the best result.

I hate seeing suppliers that are more concerned with making money than doing what is best for their clients. And let’s face it, it isn’t good business practice either – clients are less likely to come back or recommend you if you don’t do the right thing by them.

One of my clients has been approached by a marketing company with a lot of suggestions. Now, this company does produce some nice work and they are very friendly and helpful.

However, it concerns me that they are more interested in taking over the product marketing than in what is best for the product. For instance, they are suggesting changes to the website to make it more like x and z sites. I did a quick Google search – my client’s site shows on page one of a search for the appropriate term, the x site shows on page 2 and z doesn’t show before page 5. My client’s site get new visitors to the site everyday now, which is pretty good for a site less than 6 months old. And being so young, a branding change now would have limited benefit in my opinion.

To me, they would be servicing my client better to agree the site is doing well and here are some ways to promote it further rather than match it to less popular sites.

Do you have examples of businesses using good integrity in their dealings with clients? I’d love to hear them 🙂