During my last work experience in financial planning company, I was responsible for
training employees about how to promote portfolios to customers. In the sales function,
there are many technics to influence customers, I train employees about these technics
to improve their performance. Often time as a manager, I need to tell my subordinates
how to sugarcoat the story to their customers while sugarcoating to my subordinates as
well. For example, in 2018, there was a huge trend for annuity insurance products in
the industry, the company selected several high-quality products but decided to focus
on one so that everyone would pursue the same specific goal and there could be a
positive synergy in the workplace.
I prefer third-party company because it does not have the constraint to only sell products
of within the company, in which case I get to choose the most suitable portfolios that
are best for my customer. However, it turns out even in the third-party company, there
are products that company wants to promote harder because of their higher returns or
political missions. We can manipulate influence on customers taking advantage of
information asymmetry, this imposes an ethical issue in my understanding.
Stakeholders besides me in this scenario are my company, my superior, my subordinates,
and our customers. The company is better off with this strategy because the final sales
volume was extraordinary, almost the best one among our competitor companies, and
my superior was also satisfied with the outcome. However, my subordinates
encompassed with hesitations because some of the customers showed them other
products and at that point some employees realized our suggesting product is not the
best and only one in the market. Then I justified that even in this case, we did not do
harm to our customers because there were worse products sold by less eligible
salespeople and that we had comprehensive customer service which could compensate.
Customers are the most vulnerable stakeholder in this scenario because most of them
do not have enough or transparent information to make decision and can only depend
on us for advice.
This situation raised some conflicts inside me because I value integrity and treating
people with sincerity very much; however, in that position, I decided to go along with
the situation out of rational reasoning, resulting in my guilty to my subordinates and
customers. Using the 3E framework: economically,