What purpose does lying serve in a business sense?

The first question I ask, mostly to myself, is this. What purpose does lying serve when in business? Why would you, a successful business who interacts with customers every day, lie to the very customers who pay your bills and make your CEO wealthy?

I used to work for HP (Hewlett-Packard) doing telephone support for the HP Pavilion desktop PCs. I worked there during the launch of Windows XP and for a few years after before quitting. Sadly my departure was not very epic, not like my father who emailed a picture of his ass to everyone in the company. But this is not about my father's ass.

Working at this company was horrible. We were expected to present bad news as good news, explain in technical terms why something was the way it was because that way the customer was less likely to ask questions. "Why did my hard drive break? Why can't I get all my pictures back?" "Well, sir. The dynamic-configurations within your hard drive's magnetic discs became misaligned which causes corruption of data." Or my personal favorite: "his can happen for numerous reasons, the most common of which being if you or anyone who uses your computer visits websites of... questionable taste."

That is something my coworker actually said to a customer. The guy on the phone for the second statement didn't understand at first and my coworker followed up with "Well I'm not supposed to say it exactly because it can be offensive.. but hard drives are known to die if you browse too much.. pornography."

It turns out this customer had a 13-year old son who he proceeded to shout to come to the computer room. He then beat his son with the telephone while still on with support. By the end of the thrashing the father came back to the phone and stated that he was ready to "do whatever it takes to get this damn thing working again". The child was heard in the background sobbing about how he never downloaded any porn into the computer. We were both pretty disgruntled and so we thought this was hilarious at the time. A week later my coworker was fired and I was having every one of my calls recorded to make sure I was behaving myself.

Several months later something happened. One of HP's repair centres, conveniently located near the border to Mexico, suffered a massive theft. It seems the illegal mexicans HP employed to fix computers had stolen between 900 and 1200 computers from their repair depot. They had been piling up for months and not been getting fixed and HP never thought to investigate why there were so many delays. Turns out these guys were stealing the computers, hopping them over the border, and then the guys themselves escaped to Mexico with about $10,000 in computer hardware.

HP sent out a corporate email to all the tech support with important guidelines on how to deal with the customers who would be calling about their computers. We were ordered by HP to tell the customers "faulty parts are believed to have been installed in your computer, if you give me your contact information one of our quality agents will be in touch with you in the next 48 hours to discuss a replacement." HP had ordered its employees to lie to the customers.

Not being the kind of guy who enjoys telling a lie, I was lucky enough to receive one such call. The woman asked me why her computer was delayed, I put in her repair number and got a popup reminder in my software that this was one of the stolen computers and the script. I chose not to follow the script.

"Ma'am, I have to apologize but it seems that your computer was sent to a depot that recently had a major theft. Your computer was one of the computers stolen by the criminals."

"WHAT? What happened?"

"Well, it's believed at this time that someone working in the repair depot stole approximately 1000 computers from valued HP customers and we didn't catch it in time. But I want to make sure you know HP is going to do what's right. In the next 48 hours you will get a phone call from our quality department who will discuss your replacement options."

"Well Jess, why can't you do that with me now?"

"Because I do not work in the quality department. They are much better at convincing you to accept the cheapest computer they offer."

"I'm sorry, what? Jess, can you say that again?"

"The Quality agent is going to look at the computer you bought and offer you a computer approximately equal to that one. But his primary job is to make HP spend as little as possible here and he will try to get you to accept the lowest computer possible. He is going to ask you what you use the computer for, what you want your computer to be able to do, etc. He will likely offer you a low-end model of computer and then say something about how he is going to "throw in" an extra large hard drive so you walk away with a bonus for your trouble."

"Well that doesn't seem so bad, as long as I get a working computer.."

"Ma'am, HP let 1000 computers get stolen. All your pictures, music, movies, and files are gone. You have to start all over again. You deserve compensation for your loss and HP will do everything in their power to ensure you don't get it - or at least that it doesn't cost them any money. Remember that every one of those computers was insured - and if customers accept a computer equal or lower to their old computer HP will actually make money off this because of how computer parts reduce in value so rapidly."

"Well Jess, what do you suggest I do then?"

"Get angry. When they call you and talk about the computer you should open up with something about how could they possibly have screwed up so severely. Let the quality agent tell you about the faulty parts they claim they put in the computers, we were told to lie to you about it, and then tell him you know the truth and you can't believe HP would lie like that. Make sure you do not cuss or ever mention a lawyer or they will hang up on you. Demand to speak to the head of the quality department - he doesn't want to talk to you. But as soon as you demand to speak to him the value of your claim will go up signifigantly. You could easily walk away with the best computer money can buy from this - and why not if they're willing to give it?"

"Wow, Jess. It sounds like you hate your job.. why are you still working there?"

"After today I probably won't be.."

Joke's on them, that call wasn't recorded and I got away with it. I tracked the woman's case and she did exactly what I said. She flipped out without ever cussing or talking about her lawyer. In the end they gave her the best computer HP could build at the time plus a free three year extended warranty - somewhere around $4500 in total at the time. The best part? She paid about $600 for her computer - bought it at Wal-Mart.

The point I was trying to make with all of this was the woman was grateful that I told her the truth. She thanked me and told me I was wonderful. As a customer I would never buy from a company who lied to my face - there is just no excuse for it. If you employ illegals who steal your computers then have the balls to tell me you screwed up. I'll respect you if you can admit you did something stupid, we all do it. But if you try to cover it up and lie about it and I find out you're going to lose me, and maybe other people as a customer forever.

There are so many other examples of companies that are dishonest to their customers, and I just don't get it. I don't understand the purpose or the reason why you would ever lie to a customer. If you do something that would put you out of business should the customers find out then you probably deserve to go out of business.

The greed of the human race is the key fault in all of this. If HP didn't value money above customers they would have been honest and they would have done right by all of those affected by the theft. While it's not necessarily wrong to want to earn money, I think customers need to be respected rather than simply considered a bar on a graph. Maybe I'm alone in this. Maybe honesty is what drives people out of business. Who knows? Maybe I'll never find out.