Ethical Dilemma Analysis
Individual Ethical Dilemma Analysis
My company is in the business to provide home products and services to home builders and property management companies. For our property management division, we obtain business through various marketing channels such as industry trade shows. Early on in our startup, we noticed that many of our competitors are not honest with their billing practices. A competitor may give one of our customers a price per square foot or square yard, but then they intentionally overestimate the amount of material that they use, thereby raising their overall price and profit margin. Since this is quite confusing to many customers, it is a widely used practice that many floor covering companies get away with. When we first realized that this was occurring, we had to make a decision: do we embrace this already accepted practice or do we try to “rock the boat,” working to convince our customer base that many of our competitors were not being honest with their billing practices? This makes this an ethical dilemma for me as now I have the decision of whether we will continue to follow the status quo, overbilling for goods and services, or am I going to change the way that the whole industry views yardage integrity. The values that are in conflict are as follows: Competence. If we are competent in our ability to estimate, we can easily see that our competitors are over billing for their goods and services. We know this from many of our current customers sharing with us their previous measurements. We always are able to save our customers the amount of product used. So either our competitors are incompetent, or they are intentionally fudging their numbers just to earn a few extra margin points. Customer Satisfaction. Our competitors were satisfying their customers in the sense that they installed a quality product at a fair price and delivered this in a timely manner. What the customer didn’t know is what hurt them, though. Due
My company is in the business to provide home products and services to home builders and property management companies. For our property management division, we obtain business through various marketing channels such as industry trade shows. Early on in our startup, we noticed that many of our competitors are not honest with their billing practices. A competitor may give one of our customers a price per square foot or square yard, but then they intentionally overestimate the amount of material that they use, thereby raising their overall price and profit margin. Since this is quite confusing to many customers, it is a widely used practice that many floor covering companies get away with. When we first realized that this was occurring, we had to make a decision: do we embrace this already accepted practice or do we try to “rock the boat,” working to convince our customer base that many of our competitors were not being honest with their billing practices? This makes this an ethical dilemma for me as now I have the decision of whether we will continue to follow the status quo, overbilling for goods and services, or am I going to change the way that the whole industry views yardage integrity. The values that are in conflict are as follows: Competence. If we are competent in our ability to estimate, we can easily see that our competitors are over billing for their goods and services. We know this from many of our current customers sharing with us their previous measurements. We always are able to save our customers the amount of product used. So either our competitors are incompetent, or they are intentionally fudging their numbers just to earn a few extra margin points. Customer Satisfaction. Our competitors were satisfying their customers in the sense that they installed a quality product at a fair price and delivered this in a timely manner. What the customer didn’t know is what hurt them, though. Due