How to Ensure Customers Trust You
Trust, as they say, is earned. It takes very little to lose it but can be quite a big deal to secure it. That’s especially so in commerce, where customers rule and companies all compete to be the one they decide to place their trust in.
What’s needed is a surefire set of steps by which a company can attract and keep customers’ trust. A guidance program that will encourage customers to trust you as they would the reliable family labrador. On the other hand, you don’t want to be too predictable. There’s got to be a degree of freshness or things can get very staid.
Let’s see what you can do.
Why is Trust a Big Deal?
If you’re a customer looking to part with some money in return for goods, you won’t thrill at the idea of engaging with a business that looks frankly untrustworthy. There might be issues with the goods actually turning up when they should. There might be issues with the quality of the goods. There might be issues with the follow-up service level.
In the face of this, the customer may well decide that they don’t want to carry out the transaction with the company after all. And here’s the important bit: they can go elsewhere.
Hardly anyone does business in a one-horse town anymore. Unless you’re selling a product or service that isn’t available online, you’re vulnerable to competitive pressures. In other words, if you’re not presenting as a reliable and trustworthy prospect, there are plenty of others out there who will.
The good news is that if you can up your trustworthiness, you will benefit hugely. Research has suggested that 81% of consumers felt that trust was a deciding factor when it comes to making purchasing decisions.
Not only does customers’ trust influence a purchase, but it also makes it more likely that customers will stick with you even if you make the odd misstep. This is even more the case with Gen-Z customers.
So, trust is where it’s at. Let’s get some. Here’s how.
1. Create a Loyalty Program
Community is a big deal when it comes to building trust. People like to belong. You can cater to this tendency by creating an exciting and fresh customer loyalty program that rewards customers for their decision to shop with you. The longer the relationship, the better the rewards.
This creates loyal customers: why should the customer go elsewhere if your company looks after them so well? What you’re doing is setting up a quid pro quo of purchase benefits. The customer, then, trusts you to carry on doing this.
2. Improve Your Customer Service
Customer service tends to be the defining experience in terms of interaction with your company. Sure, customers trust elements of clever marketing and psychologically sound use of color. But, whether you’re trying to sell an ai domain name or an AI assistant, it’s the nuts and bolts of excellent customer service that really determine how your company comes across.
This is true throughout your customer service department. Individual attention to the customer can have truly dramatic effects. For this reason, personalization is becoming increasingly vital as a means of securing trust.
When customers place their faith in a business, it’s now becoming the norm that they expect a degree of acknowledgment in the shape of the company registering them as an individual and paying attention to their particular needs and appetites, as well as their preferred means of communication.
The need is then clear: a company intent on securing trust needs to make sure that it has the gear to make personalization possible.
Marketers, for example, need an email builder that can personalize. Contact center agents and salespeople need a CRM that gives them a customer’s first name and previous purchases. This delivers an individually shaped customer experience, resulting in more satisfied customers.
3. Publish Reviews
Customer reviews are remarkably important when it comes to influencing a purchase decision.
This might be because customers trust other customers, as they feel they have an affinity with them. They don’t know much about them, but what they do know is that they’re both engaged in buying, say, an sg domain, so there must be an element of similarity there.
Consequently, they are to be heeded when they post an online review of a particular business. This is what social proof is based on.
The point is that, quite often, a customer won’t have much information to go on that isn’t produced by the retailer. If there’s what looks like an objective appraisal available, a customer will take this on board. So, the clever business owner gets those reviews out there. All the better if they’re positive reviews.
4. Meet Security Concerns Head On
One of the biggest concerns right now is data security. For good reason: data breaches are as damaging as they are ubiquitous. If a customer has any worries in this area, it’s possible that they will avoid a company that’s not addressing this area in their output.
If a company, on the other hand, can show in its content that security is a top priority and give a few examples of what it’s doing about it, this will help with assuaging concerns and turning potential customers into a sound customer base.
Make sure that your team is able to deal with any incoming queries about security practices and that everybody stays on top of the latest developments and policies. Include some reference to it in your script for outbound calls. The more homogenous and up-to-date your outfit seems, the more trustworthy it will become.
Trust or Bust
We’ve only just begun with ways to increase trust. You can try all manner of other methods, such as taking a stand on big issues (such as social or environmental concerns) or being a market leader in employee relations. But what we have here are four actionable steps you can promptly take which will have a dramatic effect on how your company is perceived.
The thing with trying to secure trust is that it helps if you mean what you’re trying to project. Cynical marketing strategy efforts can be very easy for consumer skepticism to latch on to. Customers can be pretty canny. You can trust them to spot a fake.
