How to build customer trust (Part 1)

There is sufficient evidence of the business case for building customer trust, making the focus not one of whether to commit resources to building trust, but rather how to most effectively commit resources to building customer trust. Trust is a complex subject and there is no simple formula for building trust.

This is the first of a series of articles that will give you some critical pointers and a framework in order to effectively build customer trust (and avoid customer distrust).  We start with the first fundamental.

Corporate Competence

No one trusts a company that keeps letting them down.  It’s hard to trust when a company’s products or services don’t always work. To stand half a chance of building customer trust, having a firm foundation of business competence is essential.  Recognising the negative impact of customer trust erosion, some of our clients have identified where they are weak on a particular business practice or process. For example, one client concerned that they weren’t handling complaints as well as they could came to us to turn the situation around. They now have clear tracking of complaint turnaround times, trends, volumes and more that not only monitors their complaint handing but also provides them with a gold-mine of insight to attract and retain more customers.

Other clients aren’t sure where incompetencies exist across their many divisions or regions. Executive reports seem to hide these details. Knowing that no company is ever perfect and that pockets of incompetence or poor quality exist from time to time, over 85 companies are using the Brilliance Conduct Improvement tool to help them. This tool serves as a constant business practice checker, as it were. Where competence is strong, scores are high and evidence can be loaded into the system. Where improvements need to be made, delegation and deadline dates are captured in the system which in turn sends out relevant reminders. What’s more, executives now receive simple consolidated executive reports giving them a company-wide status score across all business practices directly or indirectly affecting the customer.

The point is not the system, but their commitment to drive corporate competence because they know that the cost of poor customer trust is too high. Smart companies like these have worked out that by the time a firm sees the consequences of tattered customer trust in their sales stats or customer surveys, too much damage has already been done. It makes good business sense to rather ensure a proactive trust building approach.

Competent companies gain customer respect. Competent companies know how to provide great quality products and services in a consistent manner. Will quality alone beat the competition? Probably not. But without it, it’s game over. Without basic competence in place, the effectiveness of any other attempts to build customer trust is significantly diminished.