Building customer trust is a complex process that requires time and patience to achieve. When you get customer trust right, your customers become ambassadors for your brand. In turn, other customers are likely to buy your products based on their recommendations. More consistent customer interactions can only enhance sales.
Where to start?
The foundation of any trust relationship is empathy. It is the ability to recognize and understand your consumers' difficulties. Your entire organizational policy should be centered around the consumer's perspective. Remember who you want to serve. Without customers, there will be no success and ultimately no business.
When building strategies and recruiting new employees, make sure to choose people who are empathetic to the customer's perspective. Those who can consider situations from both sides are key in building trust and bridging the gap between customers and the organization.
Practicing Empathy
Understanding other people's experiences can be a challenge. How do we put ourselves in the position of others who have very different life experiences from our own? Sometimes the best approach is to take a practical and direct approach. Take the example of Barclays Bank. They have trained their employees with age simulation suits (which are burdened with reduced visibility) to provide an experience for someone with vision and mobility issues trying to access their services. These suits can even cause temporary joint pain!
Building your organizational experience around the people who are the hardest to engage is a sincere and rewarding way to build trust with customers. The elderly and people with disabilities should be treated equally entitled to access your products or services without facing unnecessary barriers such as poor access.
Training empathy and awareness is not easy. How can you simulate the pain that the elderly and people with disabilities sometimes experience? However, if you strive to do your best for all your customers, not just the easy-to-serve ones, the results from customer loyalty and trust can be significant.
The right thing at the right time
Organizations that ignore customer trust have become increasingly common. Even worse are organizations that only act with politeness and morality when it suits them. Consumers often forget how much power they have over the organizations and institutions that serve them.
Activism can be polarizing. That’s why understanding your organization's core values and goals is crucial. Embracing a purpose or advocating for social justice should be woven into the structure of what you do, not just a mere platitude for moral influence.
BooHoo fashion store is an example of a failure in building customer trust. After the BLM movement on social media, the company committed to supporting more diversity and inclusion. At the same time, they were also linked to illegal sweatshops behind the scenes.
One of the biggest metrics for customer engagement is how much customers trust the organization to do the right thing. This doesn't mean you have to take the torch for every issue, that is not always possible. But you can design your strategy around issues that represent your organization's values and goals. If you are a coffee company, you can commit to sustainable products and fair trade. If you are a clothing company, you can commit to reducing fast fashion and banning slavery practices.
Tell the Truth
Customers and service users are not fools. They will be able to distinguish what is genuine and what is not. If your organization makes a mistake, be honest with customers about it. Trust is built through a cycle of trial and error, growth, and expansion.
Too often, a toxic corporate culture prevents people from acknowledging their mistakes, punishing one mistake excessively rather than the consistency or frequency of mistakes. One mistake is not a problem, but rather a learning experience.
When you punish harshly for the first mistake, it will not correct the offending behavior, but only teach more subversive behavior. When there is no room to grow, employees are less willing to step into the line of fire and have a growth moment.
And it is the customers who always pay for this learned behavior. If your employees are so afraid of making mistakes that they shift the blame to the customers, trust will be permanently damaged. Building a better future. Customer trust is a complex subject. It requires understanding, empathy, and honesty.
Link : https://agustox21.wordpress.com/2023/07/03/how-to-build-unshakeable-customer-trust/