Legally Justified but Totally Wrong

A cellphone service contract stated in the fine print that if the customer passed away, the entire amount remaining in the contract would immediately become payable, plus a cancellation fee. This must have seemed sensible from the company's legal point of view; the phone cost is spread over the 3-year term and there are administrative costs to cancel the contract.

The reality, and the impact on real people, is a different story. A very good man I know died recently, and when his wife made one of the many necessary but difficult calls to cancel his cellphone contract, she was informed that it would cost over $600 to do so. He had been a customer for over ten years, she was also a customer, as were their two children, yet the company insisted on the payment.

The wife had the tenacity to persist, and after numerous calls and letters to increasingly senior managers, someone finally had the good sense to waive the fee.

When you create your policies and procedures, your legalities and disclaimers, realize that the people you'll be dealing with will be real people. Before aggresively pursuing profit and cost recovery, this company should have considered the impact on those real people, their customers.

Why? Firstly, because it is simply the right thing to do as moral and compassionate human beings. Secondly, from a purely commercial point of view, because your reputation in the market could be (and should be) seriously damaged by such a blatantly unfeeling policy. If you aren't willing to risk having something like this splashed over the front page, maybe you should worry less about the legalities of your position and think more about what's right and what's wrong.