Building Customer Trust: 13 Key Considerations
One of the things that stands out in building trust is that when you make a promise, you should always seek to keep it. This statement holds true, regardless of whether it refers to an individual or a brand.
In the case of businesses, building customer trust is part of cultivating brand loyalty. Since this is such a vital part of a company's marketing, the enterprise must take great care when doing things that might impact how the customer sees and trusts the brand.
To help businesses on their path to cultivating better brand loyalty among its customers, 13 members of Forbes Communications Council explore a few key considerations that can impact a customer's trust in a brand, and what businesses should remember about these actions.
1. Get Introspective
Do an internal audit and understand (and acknowledge) what your strengths and weaknesses are. This can be accomplished by reviewing customer feedback, internal processes and gaining feedback from team members. Then, promise only what you can deliver and work on improving weak areas allowing for bigger promises in the future. - Brooke Hipp, ACM LLP
2. Do As You Say
Don’t make a promise unless you are fully committed to keeping it, and if for some reason you can’t deliver, own it. Acknowledge the promise you made, admit that you were not able to keep it, apologize and aim to do better in the future. Excuses won’t do anyone any good, and they make it look like you’re trying to avoid accountability, making a client less likely to trust you. - Jackie Freyman, Moors & Cabot
3. Become Value-Centric
Customer trust is based on alignment -- alignment between what represents value to them and what the company is promising to deliver. It is key to consider and define what is value to your clients and make sure you genuinely deliver impactful products, services and interactions that are relevant and convergent with those interests. To reach this definition, a quantitative survey will do the task. - Pablo Turletti, ROI Marketing Institute
4. Test, Launch, Iterate, Repeat
Before an organization makes a promise, they should test it to ensure they can deliver. You can also roll it out slowly. For example, do small beta tests to test the process (via small campaigns or A/B tests), so that you can work out bugs easily before going full steam ahead. Finally, always take accountability when things go wrong, and do the work to continually iterate to improve and deliver. - Andrea Hurtado, rbb Communications
5. Ensure Integrated Marketing Communications
While there may always be a kind of psychological timelessness to the cliche of underpromising and overdelivering, many businesses neglect ensuring integrated marketing communications across all customer touch points. Diagrams, demos and copy all create direct and indirect expectations, and inconsistencies across them can sever the potential for building trust in the future. - Cameron Conaway, Solace
6. Be Deliberate And Explicit
Ambiguous communication and misconstrued assumptions lead to customer distrust. Be open, ask questions, rephrase your customers’ questions and assertions to eliminate any misunderstanding. If delivery does not go according to plan, communicate updates early and explain delays. Showing some vulnerabilities once in a while will prove to your customers that you are trustworthy. - Isabelle Dumont, Cowbell Cyber
7. Challenge Your Customers
People buy from people they like and trust. Research shows that buyers like and trust people they learn from, people that challenge them. Don’t be afraid to challenge your customers in an educational way, especially if they are taking a potentially wrong approach, or if you can’t promise to meet their demands for very good reasons. - Jennifer Kyriakakis, MATRIXX Software
8. Ask For Feedback Regularly
Send out customer surveys on a regular basis and look for opportunities to improve. When you use feedback to make real changes, you show your customers that you value their input. This also allows you to make improvements that have a positive impact on your entire customer base. - Crystal McFerran, The 20
9. Be Honest And Transparent
Consumers are smart, and in the digital age honesty and transparency are key! Everyone makes mistakes and stumbles when taking on new endeavors. It's important to take the customer along the journey of fulfilling promises. Let them experience the ups and downs with you. Humanize your brand and gain a loyal customer. It's all part of the storytelling and the only way to build true trust. - Daniel Plumlee, Walnut Ridge Rv
10. Consider The Value Of Customer Reviews
Businesses should consider customer reviews as they work to deliver on promises and build customer trust. Customer reviews can help you identify examples of when you failed to deliver and what happened. Understanding where you’re falling short will help you improve your processes to build more customer trust and deliver better on promises. - Jeff Grover, Best Company
11. Let Your Passion Drive You
Having an unwavering commitment to your job is essential. It provides the honesty and integrity needed to enable trust, client intimacy and overall success. Our relationship with our customers is one of the most prized relationships we have and it begins with our personal narrative and deep passion for our work. - Jaimie Anzelone, Sitehands
12. Stop Promising What You Can’t Deliver
Make sure you are realistic in what you promise. The promise should align to the high-level business values. Make sure the promise is something a consumer can clearly see has been delivered or not. - James Gilbert, CloudCherry
13. Consider Your Entire Community
When businesses make a promise, they’re not just making it to their customers, but to their customers’ entire network of friends, family and acquaintances. Brands must ensure they can deliver on their promises, knowing that their communities will likely share their experience on social and keep them in check through other digital and word-of-mouth mediums. - Andrew Caravella, Sprout Social
Originally published at Forbes.com