Your customers have a certain amount of trust for you, determined by how much they trusted you at the beginning of the relationship and what you’ve done since. To ruthlessly simplify:

Customer’s level of trust today = Customer’s original level of trust + The change in the customer’s level of trust since the start of the relationship

In other words… T = T_o + ΔT

Every lie you tell takes away from ΔT. If you tell a customer that their call is important, then leave them on hold for another 20 minutes, ΔT decreases. If you fail to honor a direct promise (“I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do about that, sir”) ΔT plummets.

If your company is respected and earns a high level of trust from customers automatically (High T_o), you can afford a couple hits to ΔT before the customer’s trust goes negative. Start-ups (Low T_o) are generally more honest because they don’t have that luxury.

T_o can change quickly. Financial giants with close proximity to the subprime collapse have seen their T_o go from huge to nonexistent, or even negative. They can no longer afford to spend the customer’s automatic initial trust on opaque account statements or black-box funds. They now have to focus on building ΔT to compensate. They have to work like start-ups, asking for trust instead of taking advantage of it.