Why we don’t spam our customers

We came across this Tweet from @beingpractical yesterday:

Dear eCom sites & Retail chains, buying from u is NOT my consent 2 email/sms spam. Pl learn from @cleartrip @bookmyshow @redbus_in @flipkart

— Pravin (@beingpractical) August 4, 2011

At Cleartrip, we do not spam our customers, so, it’s quite heartening to see that our stand is actually appreciated, even if it’s just by a small number of people.

Cleartrip exists in a fairly cutthroat industry, but we do our best to stay true to our principles and act ethically. Every single one of our competitors is a spammer–they bombard their customers and users with their own junk emails, even going as far as sending junk messages from third parties to their customers. Why do they do this?

Because it makes money.

There are many third parties who are willing to pay large sums of money to deliver email offers and communication to our customers. We could make many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by spamming our customers. We refuse to take that money. We know that very few customers actively appreciate our ethics — it’s not exactly a hot customer acquisition strategy — but we still refuse to take the money.

Why don’t we want the money?

When we make customer-facing decisions at Cleartrip, we have a simple question we ask ourselves: “Would you like it if someone did this to you?” If the answer to that question is “No”, then we won’t do it to our customers. We’ve found this simple question to be an invaluable tool in making decisions in our company as it cuts right through to the heart of the matter, without the need for endless debate.