Ethical Issues in Relations Between Business and Customers Essay Example

and customer relations may apply to the way in which a business conveys its products and services to customers and the manner in which it handles customer complaints. It also deals with the manner in which businesses address ethical considerations related to the health and welfare of their customers. For the successful development of business and society as a whole, this situation should be changed. Top organizations and their managers do, presenting their moral and ethical standards and rules in the form of codes.

Ethical relationships concerning your company's interaction with customers can have a direct impact on the success of your company. Ethical customer relationships should include honesty with customers, delivering a good product or service and backing the product or service. A company policy that encourages positive relationships with customers can help position your company as a trusted one. While unethical behavior, such as making false claims, may gain you, immediate customers, this same behavior will lose those customers for you in the long run.

An example of the relationship between business ethics and customer relations is a situation where a company falsely represents its products or services to its customers. The example is when a company that makes an orange juice says to people that it is a “fresh” juice in the package, without explaining to customers that the juice had been extracted from the orange and preserved under special conditions for almost a year. The implication here is that the oranges may have been squeezed when they were still fresh, but the process of storing the juice for so long makes their claims of freshness highly unethical.

This

is especially true when customers buy the product believing that the oranges had just been squeezed within that week or month. Another example is when a company treats any complaint from the consumers. In many shops and restaurants, there is a book of complaints and suggestions, which, for ethical standards should be read by managers at the end of each working day. If management does not take into account the customers' complaints, this might lead to the initiation of a lawsuit on the part of the injured customer.

Following is a list of industry-wide ethical issues. The problem with these is that they are not only routine and frequent, but they are also more widespread, i. e. throughout the whole industry rather than being confined to a particular business.

Bribing powerful officials in order to get bids and tenders accepted and bribing competitor employees to get informational leaks is a serious ethical issue in business. In fact, it is a crime that is legally punishable in most countries today.

Although there are ethical issues like discrimination that apply to all areas of business, each business area has its own ethical concerns. For example, business people who act as consultants must ensure they are giving sound advice. In the area of small business, some major ethical issues result from hiring, firing and dealing with employees. For example, conflicts of interest may cause ethical issues in small businesses, especially if they are family-run. When personal family issues interfere with business decisions, this is a conflict of interest and an ethical concern. Business practices like sourcing of materials, quality of inputs in production, compromising on

certain aspects like product quality, safety, etc. and deception in packaging, quantity, or size also fall in the purview of business ethics.

Some industries consciously omit the details of the side effects of the usage of their products from the product packaging while some indulge in controversial practices like animal testing and these too are some of the ethical issues in businesses. Forcing labor to work at below minimum wages, sweatshop work conditions, violation of worker rights and not complying with health, safety and environmental standards are some common current ethical issues. Here are some company-specific ethical issues. These should be dealt with pretty strictly as to serve an example to the rest.

Showing honesty, integrity, and openness in consumer relationships.

Whether to accept moral responsibility of on-site mishaps, spills, and disasters and whether to make product recalls if certain harmful information about them comes to light, are ethical issues that all businesses must be prepared for. Some stronger ethical issues are related to practices that are not easily detected, like releasing products that have built-in obsolescence (to generate further demand for future products) and indulging in accounting manipulations to generate secret reserves or to show higher or lower profits as per convenience. In addition employees and business owners must consider the ethical issues involved with their relationships between suppliers and customers. Business owners in particular must consider whether it is ethical to do business with suppliers who have unethical practices.

When dealing with customers or clients, business people must ensure that they use their information correctly, do not falsely advertise a product or service, and do not intentionally do sub-standard

work. All of the above suggests that ethics is a moral category that covers many forms of activity of the firm, and cannot be stated with a certain set of rules of behavior and communication. As a concept is much more capacious, ethics takes its final form as business ethics. Business ethics has many definitions.

In general it can be described as the foundation of the Code of Conduct adopted in the business environment. Using the standards and rules of business etiquette, we can predict the behavior of colleagues and ourselves become predictable, which helps to efficiently organize the management process. It is particularly important to study all the components of business ethics in international business, because in addition to common norms and rules it contains a great variety of national and cultural corrections very important in a business relationship.

How not get lost in this sea of national differences?

How to avoid smiles caused by blind imitation of foreign manners?

Top aides here - tact and loyalty to the national mentality and business ethics. There are many more ethical issues in business and some of them are so common that they even crop up on a daily basis. Making ethical choices is sometimes the hardest thing, especially when the one losing out is you or your business, yet, for the greater good and for the sake of differentiating humanity from animal kind, one has to look at business as well as personal ethics and evaluate them from time to time.

For example, if all businesses just looked at current profits and production and ignored the call of the environment,

the person losing out on all this is man and his society. Looking at all the ethical issues in business and finding the optimal solutions for them, by taking well-thought-out and rational decisions based on all possible parameters will help everyone, the society, the consumer, the environment, and more importantly, even the business.