Uber Violates Company Policy & Provides Poor Customer Service

       

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      In recent news, a popular transportation company, Uber, has lost some respect as head honcho of the company recommended spending nearly $1 million to find gossip on a journalist who spoke out against the company’s system. In addition, Uber has been in the light as drivers have been tracking customers’ rides, which violates the company’s oath of keeping locations private. Hence, there’s no doubt that customer service is falling below acceptability, so customer satisfaction is dropping quickly as well.

       In our Module 8 PowerPoint notes, Professor Albada defines deception as “knowingly transmitting messages that are meant to mislead another person by fostering false impressions, beliefs, or understandings or by actively concealing the truth.”

       Although Uber has remained a popular transportation company thus far, customer gratification is wavering as the company partakes in negative customer service behaviors. Through violating the company’s promise of privacy and security, the drivers are continuing to deceive the customers. This is a highly damaging act that will most likely break the customers’ trust and drive them away from Uber. According to the article, “there are calls to boycott the company on Twitter, and many have vowed to go to its smaller rival Lyft.”

       As the Module 8 notes stated, some common reasons for deception are to survive, to accomplish a goal, to protect an image, to avoid negative repercussions, to establish a relationship and to maintain a relationship. However, there’s no doubt that the reveal of Uber’s acts has harmed its chances to establish and maintain customer relationships. Also, the company’s image has now been tarnished, which will make it more difficult to avoid negative consequences.

       “You want to create a culture that creates positive reputational capital for the company, particularly if you are a startup," said Maclyn Clouse, University of Denver's Daniels College of Business.

       Due to Uber being such a large, upcoming company, it has managed to escape some of the direct repercussions. Through means of distortion, which is making something smaller or larger than it is, the company has been able to display its actions as less harmful than they actually are. Even so, Uber is walking a fine line in which it must regain comfortable footing with positive customer service as its support.  

- Megan 

"Does bad behavior really hurt business?." Daily Democrat. The Associated Press, 23 Nov. 2014. Web. 3 Dec. 2014.