How to build customer trust and keep it

What is customer trust?

Customer trust is the belief that your customers have in your business values, your ability to deliver on promises, the quality of your products and your follow-through on customer service. Customer trust is the faith that the connection between customer and brand is beneficial to both parties, and that this connection can be expected to remain mutually favorable.

When a customer trusts your organization, they’re more likely to repurchase products and services and to refer your business to their connections. Trust is the “glue” that holds social relationships together – and the same is true of the customer-business relationship.

When a customer trusts a brand, they are drawn to it to interact, make purchases and more. This trust is built when you offer excellent customer service, anticipate customer needs, follow through on loyalty programs, and repeatedly demonstrate your value.

As with any connection between two people, a customer-business relationship built on trust can weather bad experiences and missed expectations – up to a point. Making sure you don’t abuse customer trust is as important as building it in the first place. Around 87% of executives think consumers have a high level of trust in their brands, but in reality, only 30% of consumers believe they do.

Customer trust vs. customer loyalty

When a customer trusts a brand, they’re more likely to come back to that business to repurchase. By trusting that organization, they’re more likely to be loyal – returning repeatedly because they know the experience will be dependable.

By building customer trust, you are encouraging your existing customers to return to buy when they need products or services, rather than seeking out alternatives.  Your team is essentially building relationships with consumers, with long-term success measured in how long customers are retained and how much they spend over their lifetime with your business. When you establish customer trust, your customer retention rate should increase, as customers see the value in your offerings and return to repurchase.

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Why is customer trust important?

When there is good customer trust in your organization, customer behavior might include:

• Voluntarily interacting with your brand
• Coming back for repeat purchases
• Choosing your company over another, even over a more convenient option
• Listening to your messaging
• Changing their behaviors based on your recommendations
• Forgiving your brand more easily when mistakes are made
• Recommending your company to others

Increasingly, customers are being asked to trust organizations with ever-more personal information. Building artificial intelligence (AI) models, for example, requires large quantities of unsolicited customer information to create an effective tool. The responsibility to manage customer data safely is increasingly necessary to ensure that both customers and businesses are protected. Making sure that your loyal customers know they can trust you can go a long way to assuaging fears about data being protected.

Creating a framework for developing customer trust

Factors that might affect customer trust include:

• The customer’s personal characteristics, such as expertise and past history with the business
• The qualities of the trustee – has the brand won industry recognition or awards for its approach?
• What is the communication from the business like? Is it dependable and useful?
• The social identification the customer makes with the business. Are their values the same as the customer’s?

Earning customer trust

When it comes to winning customer trust, there are two factors to consider: cognitive-based trust and affect-based trust. Cognitive-based trust is won when customers believe that your enterprise is competent and able to provide the services and products they promise, and affect-based trust is when customers emotionally trust your brand to meet needs and care about their wellbeing.

You can win both facets of trust by consistently demonstrating that you meet and exceed customer expectations. Here are some methods for ensuring your audience views you in the best light:

Demonstrating ability

Are your customers confident that your organization has the capacity to perform well? Do customers believe the claims that you make for your products and services? Demonstrating excellent quality on a consistent basis helps to build trust and positive expectations.

Demonstrating integrity

Integrity is an increasingly important trait to demonstrate to your customers. In a world where customers worry about data mining and privacy, showing that you can be trusted to take care of their personal information and follow through on promises helps to assuage fears. Creating a set of principles your customers value, and consistently showing that you follow them across all aspects of your business, is vital.

Showing benevolence

Is your company trusted to do the right thing? When customers complain, are your customer service team members being considerate of their feelings of frustration? Showing benevolence and owning mistakes can help your audience to see you in a more favorable – and more trusted – light.

Providing excellent customer service

Above all, your customer service should be top-notch. Whether your customers have a query or a complaint, being empathetic and understanding helps to develop a stronger connection between brand and audience.

Best practices for earning customer trust

Creating customer trust requires a multi-faceted approach that touches all areas of the business. Here are some best practices to consider for creating a solid relationship between customer and brand.

Act consistently

As in any relationship, demonstrating consistency can help to foster trust. When a business states its values and mission, it should demonstrate its consistent commitment to these statements.

For example, if a business states that its guarantee is to deliver within a certain timeframe, then deliveries need to consistently be made to that timeframe to ensure customers’ trust isn’t broken. If this condition can’t be met, customers need to be informed of the mitigating circumstances, ahead of time if possible, to avoid disappointment. Keeping promises, and clearly setting expectations and making amends when they can’t be kept, helps to engender trust.

Don’t oversell – set, meet and exceed expectations

Businesses can often promise the world, but fall short when it comes to fulfilling them. A better approach is to set realistic expectations with customers, and then meet and exceed them for better loyalty.

Again, to use the delivery example, it’s better to give customers a realistic expectation of service, rather than overpromising.

Demonstrate care and empathy

Customers want to be treated like people, not just another number on a spreadsheet. Showing care and empathy can go a long way to create a level of trust between consumer and business.

For example, if a customer has a negative experience and is frustrated with the service they have received, an expression of condolences and an offer of restitution can help customers to feel heard.

Be clear and transparent

Transparency in communications plays a large part in whether customers feel they can trust brands. When messaging is confused or is perceived to be a falsehood, it can put off customers from engaging with and trusting a brand.

For example, if a brand states that they never fail to deliver on time, but are well-known for failing to meet deadlines, customers will not trust future messaging that reiterates punctuality.

Ensure platform experiences reinforce customer trust

It’s not just how you treat your customers that will determine whether they trust you. All the interactions that they have with your brand across all your platforms will color their view of your business and whether they can trust you.

Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, describes the two-tier way that people make cognitive decisions. System 1 is quick, intuitive and automatic, giving us the ability to make rapid decisions. System 2 is a conscious effort to analyze and come to a conclusion, which feels slower because it is on purpose.

What does this mean for customer trust? If we often make quick, biased decisions at a subconscious level, it means that we need to provide cues for trust that are almost subliminal in nature.

For example, if your business utilizes human-centric design with clear user experience considerations in mind, customers are more likely to instinctively trust your brand. Broken links, spelling mistakes, confusing layouts and more factors can cause customers to distrust your brand on a subconscious level.

Ways to resolve this include ensuring that user experiences on your platforms are clear, concise and working. Outlining expectations with copy, making your website design simple and user-friendly, researching what your customers like to see and experience and implementing those factors – all of these approaches can help to increase trust and reduce anxiety.

Provide tailored customer service

One way to win over potential customers is to provide a tailored customer journey. By offering products that are relevant to them, making it easier for them to interact on the channels they prefer, and using a marketing strategy that they feel is aimed directly at them, you can help to establish trust that you understand your customers deeply.

Empower your customer service department

Your customer service department is a key point of contact between your customers and your business. Often, customer loyalty can be won by an issue or query being resolved in a satisfying way, meaning that your customer service team needs to be empowered to provide the best service possible.

You can enable your team by providing them with data-led insights on the customers they are helping, and allowing them to use their discretion to provide upgrades, discounts and other benefits to mitigate the fallout from a negative experience. Training your team to act with empathy towards customers experiencing an issue can go a long way to maintaining customer trust.

Build trust before customers ever interact

Advertising can be a great way to make customers aware of your brand – but it can also set up expectations for service and delivery. You can create trust by ensuring that your outreach promises match the experiences that your customers have when they finally do make a purchase or sign up to a service. By following through on promises, your customers learn that they can trust your business.

How to measure customer trust

Trust is a valuable core metric to evaluate customer relationships. It can indicate your brand’s reputation, as well as showing the results of your efforts in building long term relationships with consumers. Using trust as a metric can help you to get to the heart of your customers’ sentiment and emotion.

Simple ways to evaluate customer trust include:

Using a CSAT score

A high customer satisfaction score can help to indicate that your audience feels positively about your business, and that can indicate that trust levels are high. A CSAT score, evaluated through surveys, can pinpoint how customers are feeling at particular points in their journey with your brand.

Additionally, queries with open text responses can help you to gauge customer trust in your audience’s own words. For example, you could ask:

• How confident are you that we are going to protect your personal information?
• Do you feel we are transparent at a business level?
• To what degree do you trust us to take care of your needs?

Tracking your NPS score

A Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty, a good indicator of whether a customer trusts your business to take care of their needs, follow through on promises and protect their interests. NPS scores can be measured with a single question survey, with a higher score indicating better levels of trust.

Getting feedback on an interaction level

Evaluating trust does not have to be on a macro level – it can also be judged on a simple interaction level. Whether delivered when a customer first logs into your website or after a customer service interaction, you can take the temperature of your customer’s experience and their feelings about your brand.

You can ask questions such as:

• How much trust do you have in the information the agent provided to you during this call?
• Do you trust that the information you have provided will be kept safe?

Offer exceptional customer service with Qualtrics®

Qualtrics can help you to encourage trust by providing customer experiences that resonate. From reducing friction and optimizing digital experiences to responding promptly to customer feedback, Qualtrics XM® for Customer Experience can help you to direct users through a satisfying experience for increased customer trust. Qualtrics can help you by bringing together all your digital feedback, collating data into actionable insights, and enabling your team to build customer trust.