If you haven't had the experience of a debt collector chasing your tail, I am with you, up until recently. Not because of the economic downturn, but because of a failure of a large company to service a contract yet, despite being in breach, it chose to demand the contract to be paid out in full by me.

Here is the woeful story of a business that does not know how to behave:

I have had my alarm monitoring system with ADT since 2002. Nary a complaint, all paid up in full. I moved to my new offices in June and signed a contract with ADT for the new premises 1 week in advance of the move. On move day the monitoring equipment was installed. Bell had not yet hooked up the lines so I arranged for the ADT engineer to return to test the system. That was not so easy, but I did get him to come back. After two hours on the premises he left having failed to hook up the system. He would have to return and try again. Which he did the following week. He still could not connect the signal to the monitoring station. I had spent quite a bit of time on the phone trying to contact customer services through a remote call centre somewhere in the US, and found that calling the tech engineer on his cell phone was his preferred way of communicating. Another tech engineer showed up, tried and failed again. I had been running over two weeks without a security monitoring system in place. I called up the customer service centre to cancel the service. One hour later the local sales office called me to win back my business. Too little too late, I signed up with a new monitoring service. In less than 24 hours another ADT engineer came to remove their hardware (really efficient), and 4 hours after that I had a full monitoring system working with all the gear through another service provider at less cost.

One month later ADT requested my cancellation notice in writing. 2 months after that they send me a bill for $1,500 in cancellation fees based on a cancellation clause in their contract.

I wrote back informing them of their breach of service provision and to read their own contract. 6 months after that their accounting department called to chase down the $1,500 debt. After hearing my complaint they told me I would have to contact their customer service centre to register a dispute. The Collections Dept. suggested that I was under an obligation to give them more time to fix the problem. I told them that I couldn't leave my office unsecured indefinitely, two weeks and 3 engineers was sufficient evidence to walk away and, as far as contacting customer service, they should take care of their own business, I am no longer a customer, it's not my problem.

On March 18th, I received a mysterious caller refusing to identify herself. I don't deal with those calls, but I did notice in my Spam filter an aggressive email from Denise, chasing down this debt with the full authority of Law & Order. I informed her, by way of email, of the details, suggested she avoid further embarrassment and to drop the matter.

I don't doubt that I will be dragged into court at some point over this. ADT has no conscience for its customer obligations and is simply responding to a set of rules within a system of bureaucracy that says, "When customer does X we do Y".

In the class I teach at York University, Introduction to Business we hold a class on Business Ethics, where Rule-based ethics are defined as those that do not examine consequences, rather they define processes based on a certain set of ethical criteria. Of the many problems associated with Rules-based Ethics are work routinization: where staff do not value distinctions in cases, they merely stick to the rules; and de-coupling, where the rules themselves become an excuse for unethical behaviour. I believe I am suffering the consequences of both. I suspect that large, process-driven organizations perversely introduce unethical behaviour within the boundaries of the rules of their business process, because they have become powerful and are used to feeding off that power. Also that their staff are not trained to have discretionary authority, so they do not consider anything other than the routine practices they are taught. The Accounting Dept should have referred this back to customer service. Instead they moved me to the GET HIM pile.

This is a classic case of a goals-centric organization. Well, they are doing battle with the Count of Customer-Centricity. Tally ho!