The 'customer disconnect' opportunity. (Marketing Solutions).

Not too long ago we switched our home telephone carrier, making the obligatory call to our provider to disconnect all three lines.

The carrier stopped billing us for two lines but continued to bill us for the third. Seemed like an honest mistake at first. When the errant bill showed up, we called. After 30 minutes and two transfers, we received a promise that the bill would be cancelled.

When we continued to get a monthly bill, we wrote a letter. No change. I then went through a 30-minute process to talk with a manager. After much discussion, he agreed to cancel the bill.

One hitch. He could cancel the bill through the last period, but in the new billing cycle, we would receive a fractional billing for the accrual of this period because he could not prevent it from billing for this period. I would have to call again and go through this long "hold" process to get it eliminated. If I did not do it soon after the bill arrived, it would all occur again.

He agreed that I did not owe it, but I could not persuade him to be accountable for acting on our agreement. I had to be the "tickler" for this huge technology company regarding canceling a inaccurate bill. Simply ending the relationship took months--and, as of this writing, I am still receiving a small bill each month!

What started out looking like a simple error now feels like the company's sales and revenue strategy--at my expense.

While Enron, Arthur Andersen and WorldCom are eroding trust in the investor world, there is a parallel erosion in the customer world. Just a handful of companies have blatantly eroded customer trust, but hyped marketing claims, hidden fees and poor service all have a similar impact. Every time a major company creates distrust through its actions with customers, it erodes the level of trust that customers have with all providers.

When customers perceive they live in a world where the motives of providers cannot be trusted, they ardently seek relationships they can trust. It's more than a desire to avoid getting "taken"--more than a wish to avoid dealing with sleazy people. In a world where time has become a premium, distrust is inefficient. Kenneth Arrow, Nobel laureate, told The Wall Street Journal, "Trust is an important lubricant of a social system."

Customers burned by their phone company, broadband provider or broker will look for three things when they seek trustful relationships:

* Can I deal with someone I know? It is hard to rip off the same people you run into at your kids' baseball game, the local charity or at church. Like Cheers, where everyone knows your name.

* Who is calling the shots and how far away are they? Sometimes you just want to know that you have access to whoever makes the key decisions and decides how you get are treated. Being local matters. Central planning/decision making was a miserable failure in the Soviet Union--customers have experienced a similar fate from the corporate world.

* Is this company interested in the long-term relationship? Are the sales or service representatives interested in meeting my overall needs, or am I just a way for them to get their weekly sales points or incentives?

In the last 25 years, banks have never been in a better position to grow the value of their customer relationships. A crisis in trust is an opportunity for trusted banks. But the temptation will be to hype the trust issue with advertising: 'You can TRUST us!" The opportunity is to have customers experience trust in their interactions. Now is not the time to hype trust It is the time to substantively deliver and build trust.

Robert Hall is president of EnAct, a business of the Carreker Corp., which is based in Dallas, with offices in Atlanta, London, Sydney and Toronto. He con be reached at [phone], [e-mail].