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Is It OK for My Boss to Use a Fake Identity With Customers?
From The Ethicist column of the New York Times.
Is It OK for My Boss to Use a Fake Identity With Customers?
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
I work at a small technology company that services small-business owners. My boss, who is the founder and owner of the company, often speaks directly to customers and potential customers on the phone. It could be a sales call; it could be to check in on an existing customer account to provide support; or various other reasons. She does not say her real name or title at the company, however. Instead, she uses a fake name and title that she invented. I think the reason is that she wants to project an image of the company that is larger than it really is and does not want the customer to know that they are speaking directly to the founder.
She also does this in an open space where other employees can hear her, and I worry it may be setting a bad example.
Is this OK? I’m thinking about whether to tell her that she has to use her real name when talking to customers on the phone? Name Withheld
This form of imposture has a pedigree — or a past, anyway. In “The Devil and Miss Jones,” the 1941 film, a business tycoon goes undercover in order to root out the union agitators on his payroll. In the long-running CBS series “Undercover Boss,” high-level executives have a more benign motive: The conceit is that they want to see how the workplace really operates and get in touch with employee concerns. Apparently, bosses just need to be bossed in order to find their soul. The social contradictions of capitalism: solved!
In the offscreen world, Under Armour’s former chief executive Kevin Plank used to talk about how he had two business cards when he was starting his sports-apparel business. One identified him as the company’s president; another as a mere sales manager. Visiting prospective buyers, he wanted to make out that the company was bigger than it was — and that some honcho in the home office was stopping him from offering the lower price a vendor might be asking for. In the company’s glory days, people heard about the two cards and applauded an entrepreneur’s scrappy ingenuity. My hunch is that the tale ceased to get much of an airing after a federal inquiry was announced into Under Armour’s possible accounting irregularities.
So how sketchy is your boss’s behavior? Is it worse than when Rahul at your bank’s Bengaluru call center identifies himself to you as Randy? In my view, it is. Rahul has been instructed to do so in order to make American callers more comfortable and maybe disguise the fact that the call center has been offshored to somewhere far, far away. (He has probably also received training in “accent neutralization.”) But that’s surely a venial sin, especially if you think of it as a response to the prejudices of some of the people he’s responding to. The main point of the deception isn’t to mislead callers about his name. It’s to deflect them from thinking about where he is. And where he is will seldom be relevant to the subject of the call.
Your boss, by contrast, is concealing things that might be of legitimate interest to callers — namely, that they’re talking to the boss and that she’s not running a very big operation. Here’s a test: How much would it matter to the people on the other end of the line if they found out what was happening? With Rahul a.k.a. Randy, they’re mostly not going to mind. With your company, on the other hand, they might feel some unease. Can you rely on someone who tries to mislead you about who she is? The deception she’s perpetrating on some of her customers, though minor in the scheme of things, is still wrong.
As for the example it sets for your colleagues? She’s the kind of person, they’ll already have inferred, who thinks that at least some small acts of misrepresentation are OK if it suits her. Now, would she also pretend that, say, a piece of software was further along in the development process than it really was? Or produce a bogus excuse for why a deadline was missed?
Maybe, maybe not. You and your co-workers have lots more evidence about what kind of person she is, and you might have reason to think she’s basically honest, with this one exception. Honesty has many different dimensions; a body of research in social psychology suggests that we go wrong when we imagine it to be a “global character trait.” The scrupulous accountant might be lying to his wife about his philandering; the student who cheats on exams may be utterly upfront with his friends; and so on.
And I’ll give your boss one thing. The very fact that you’re thinking about telling her to change her ways says something positive about the workplace that she has created. It may not be ruled by absolute honesty, but — in ways not to be taken for granted — it plainly isn’t ruled by fear either.
Is It OK for My Boss to Use a Fake Identity With Customers?
By Kwame Anthony Appiah
I work at a small technology company that services small-business owners. My boss, who is the founder and owner of the company, often speaks directly to customers and potential customers on the phone. It could be a sales call; it could be to check in on an existing customer account to provide support; or various other reasons. She does not say her real name or title at the company, however. Instead, she uses a fake name and title that she invented. I think the reason is that she wants to project an image of the company that is larger than it really is and does not want the customer to know that they are speaking directly to the founder.
She also does this in an open space where other employees can hear her, and I worry it may be setting a bad example.
Is this OK? I’m thinking about whether to tell her that she has to use her real name when talking to customers on the phone? Name Withheld
This form of imposture has a pedigree — or a past, anyway. In “The Devil and Miss Jones,” the 1941 film, a business tycoon goes undercover in order to root out the union agitators on his payroll. In the long-running CBS series “Undercover Boss,” high-level executives have a more benign motive: The conceit is that they want to see how the workplace really operates and get in touch with employee concerns. Apparently, bosses just need to be bossed in order to find their soul. The social contradictions of capitalism: solved!
In the offscreen world, Under Armour’s former chief executive Kevin Plank used to talk about how he had two business cards when he was starting his sports-apparel business. One identified him as the company’s president; another as a mere sales manager. Visiting prospective buyers, he wanted to make out that the company was bigger than it was — and that some honcho in the home office was stopping him from offering the lower price a vendor might be asking for. In the company’s glory days, people heard about the two cards and applauded an entrepreneur’s scrappy ingenuity. My hunch is that the tale ceased to get much of an airing after a federal inquiry was announced into Under Armour’s possible accounting irregularities.
So how sketchy is your boss’s behavior? Is it worse than when Rahul at your bank’s Bengaluru call center identifies himself to you as Randy? In my view, it is. Rahul has been instructed to do so in order to make American callers more comfortable and maybe disguise the fact that the call center has been offshored to somewhere far, far away. (He has probably also received training in “accent neutralization.”) But that’s surely a venial sin, especially if you think of it as a response to the prejudices of some of the people he’s responding to. The main point of the deception isn’t to mislead callers about his name. It’s to deflect them from thinking about where he is. And where he is will seldom be relevant to the subject of the call.
Your boss, by contrast, is concealing things that might be of legitimate interest to callers — namely, that they’re talking to the boss and that she’s not running a very big operation. Here’s a test: How much would it matter to the people on the other end of the line if they found out what was happening? With Rahul a.k.a. Randy, they’re mostly not going to mind. With your company, on the other hand, they might feel some unease. Can you rely on someone who tries to mislead you about who she is? The deception she’s perpetrating on some of her customers, though minor in the scheme of things, is still wrong.
As for the example it sets for your colleagues? She’s the kind of person, they’ll already have inferred, who thinks that at least some small acts of misrepresentation are OK if it suits her. Now, would she also pretend that, say, a piece of software was further along in the development process than it really was? Or produce a bogus excuse for why a deadline was missed?
Maybe, maybe not. You and your co-workers have lots more evidence about what kind of person she is, and you might have reason to think she’s basically honest, with this one exception. Honesty has many different dimensions; a body of research in social psychology suggests that we go wrong when we imagine it to be a “global character trait.” The scrupulous accountant might be lying to his wife about his philandering; the student who cheats on exams may be utterly upfront with his friends; and so on.
And I’ll give your boss one thing. The very fact that you’re thinking about telling her to change her ways says something positive about the workplace that she has created. It may not be ruled by absolute honesty, but — in ways not to be taken for granted — it plainly isn’t ruled by fear either.
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That said, the whole "making the company seem bigger" is a problem because small companies have their employees wearing too many hats anyway, and if one person has a name for several roles, the person who is simultaneously Jane and Alice and Crystal would have a very difficult time explaining why all three of her personas take a long time to finish things.
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The relationship between a barista and customer is superficial: quick and transactional. I have never worked as a barista, but I am confident they do not genuinely care what my name is. They just want an identifier to write on the cup, and that's what I give them.
LW's situation is different because their boss (presumably) has or is entering a longer and deeper relationship with the customers. Customers may care about the size and capacity of the companies they do business with. Misrepresentation in such a relationship has the potential for blowback. Customers and business partners could easily be turned off by someone they perceive as less than honest. LW's boss would be better served by being forthright.
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You'd think my name would be easy to spell (Connie) but it's not (people wanna spell it Coney?) so I consistently call myself Supergirl. Or, occasionally, Batman.
But man, I hate giving a name at all. It all feels so weirdly intrusive and forced. Just assign me a number, I can handle it!
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I used to say 'Melanie' because I don't like giving out my real name that's going to get yelled across a public place, until the time someone wrote "Melony" on a cup and. I just. I can't. If I weren't quite so zaftig, maybe.
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1) I have a pretty unusual name and would rather use a Nom De Guerre for work than ave people look me up.
2) My boss has encouraged me, the entirety of the Customer Service Department, to give myself several different names when talking to customers. I admit it enteratains me sometimes, such as when I wrote customers that the entire department was sick last week. WE all were!
I am large, I contain multitudes. ahahahaha.
(It's probably not so honest to be doing this, to be honest.)
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I was working a place and was required to use several different names when answering the phone. I suspect it had to do with people calling and looking for 'Rebecca' just to keep talking but didn't want to talk to 'Diamond'.
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ETA I had more thoughts! My roommate and I were discussing whether the the Randy/Rahul example may be drawn from Kwame's own experiences. I don't think it was meant to be neutral so much as to show where the impetus came from in each case.
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(Rahul, himself, is just trying to earn a paycheck. It's the company that is morally culpable here.)
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However, in that case, their colleagues are a) all doing the same thing and b) know the names everyone is using, so they can fill out notes/refer/update records appropriately.
I can see how the founder of the company might not want people pushing through the phone queue or whatever with a "But I was just talking to the founder last week, why can't you put me through on her direct line?" (especially if, say, she was filling in taking customer calls because of a sudden emergency or whatever) but in that case, talking about it openly with staff would be a much better thing.
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Doing tech support, we were not allowed to go outside of the scope of support - if someone calls the free help line and gets personalized help with HTML because Rose happens to be good at it, when they call in and get Mary who is not good at it, they're going to keep calling back until they get Rose. I easily see how someone calling sales and getting the founder could make themselves a nuisance.
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Basically, I need more context, and if I were the letter writer I might ask my boss what her reasoning was before deciding it was an inherently poor choice.
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