Do you ever buy from a brand or a company that you do not trust?

You know the answer to it very well.

Well, that is exactly one important factor that your customers think about before buying from your company.

It may feel like just another factor but believe it or not, it’s the biggest factor on which your business is dependent.

A customer’s decision to buy from you or avail your services totally depends on the factor of trust. Customers often decide to not make a purchase from a company they have just heard about or are not aware of because of which they do not trust that brand.

The ‘trust factor’ is not something that can be achieved spontaneously but requires time and effort. It does not hold one definition. Gaining trust is a mix of a lot of components that make the customer believe in you or your brand.

Trust comes from a combination of things like:

  • When the customer believes that your product matches his desired expectations
  • When the customer believes that your product quality is at par with his expectations
  • When the customer believes that you have the costumer’s best interest at heart
  • When the customer believes in what your brand has to say
  • When the customer is assured of the product completely

All in all, in the end, it is all about the fact that the customer believes in you.

Building trust is not a day’s affair. It takes valour as much as it takes time. You’ll better understand the true meaning of this through brands that have built trust over the years but lost it all over one bad product or one bad move. There is no ‘undo’ for a negative association of a brand in the customer’s minds. It’s not something that can be forced upon people but needs to be earned naturally.

Let us understand why building trust with customers is so important for a company.

Importance of Building Trust with Customers

Now that you know what Trust Building is for companies and the amount of time and effort it requires, let’s look at some reasons why it should be the number one factor to be ticked in a company’s checklist while setting its operations. If a company is able to build faith within their consumer’s minds, that implies that it has set a strong base for his business. It helps you in the following ways:

1. Separates you from the rest

In this technology-driven world, each and every company is trying to provide your customers with cutting edge services that are modern and eases each and every problem that your consumer faces.

How do you expect to separate yourself from the others providing the same services?

Building trust takes a lot of effort but it is worth that effort and time invested because once your customer starts trusting your brand, he will not want to switch to any of your competitors despite getting better offers. This is the power that it holds. Once you gain your customer’s trust, it ensures you that your brand has a separate value in your customer’s head.

2. Builds Customer Loyalty

Trust is the foundation for Customer Loyalty. Retaining old customers is as important as acquiring new ones. Trust is the base for customer retention. Once a brand has built customer loyalty for his product, it helps your business grow immensely. A study shows that existing customers tend to spend 33% more than the new ones.

Retaining customers is not an easy task. The best way to go about retaining customers, in the long run, is only by the means of building trust.

With trust comes Customer Loyalty – naturally!

3. Provides you with support even in your Low Times

To achieve a level wherein your wrong move is also overlooked by your customers is one of the most difficult targets that a business can aim for. Despite that, this stage is such that it can solely be achieved through building trust. Once that is achieved, your business would know no bounds because you have the power (your customer’s support) with you.

If you know your customers support you through it all, it helps you have a positive outlook, to try and explore different domains, to truly satisfy your customers and serve them in the best way possible, to experiment and progress.

4. Helps you scale easier as ‘Building Trust = Building Goodwill’

Once a company has gained the trust and has built a name for itself through that trust, it is easier for that company to scale its operations. What do you think is the reason behind this?

A customer once starts to have faith in a brand name is highly likely to be willing to try or become a regular buyer of a new product (even if it’s in a different domain) launched in the market by that brand.

That’s wherein trust comes into play to build the goodwill for your brand. Once that goodwill is created, you can easily use your customer base to build your business even bigger.

5. Turns your Leads into Paying Customers

The ultimate aim of a business is to create customers.

More customers = More revenue and hence, more profits.

Trust for your brand name or your company’s name can turn your lead into a buying customer. Leads, when marketed right by the companies, can be nurtured in the best possible manner through informative emails regarding the brand. If you happen to succeed at delivering value to your leads, then these leads turn out to be your paying customers in the future. Majority of the time, that happens when they start trusting you and your brand.

It helps your company grow multi-folds and helps you succeed in your business journey.

The Importance of Building trust is known by all organizations but the real deal-breaker is to achieve that ‘trust factor’ and bridge that trust gap with your customers.

Did you know?

According to recent research, 55% of the customers do not trust the companies now as they used to. It has fallen well below the level that could be achieved earlier.

Let us look at some effective ways to bridge the Trust Gap with Customers

3 Ways to Bridge the Trust Gap with Customers

To stay ahead of the curve and to beat the competition from all sides, it is important for a company to cater to all it’s customer’s needs and build that trust.

It all comes down to 3 major aspects that the company should aim to fulfil. If your company is able to tick on these from your checklist, you are quite there.

1. Always focus on delivering value for your customer through your Products or Services

Customers would not stick to you unless they trust you to constantly deliver value to them through your products and services. As a rule of thumb, you should always be able to create 3 to 10x more value for your customer than what you charge them.

Do not just talk about creating value but focus on delivering value to your customers at every opportunity – marketing, sales, customer service, or anything else. Think about Apple – it not only delivers great products but also products that deliver great value to its customers.

Some of the ways you can constantly deliver value to your customer include:

  • High-quality products and services. There are no shortcuts to this. Always be delivering quality. A great quality product needs less marketing efforts and markets itself through word of mouth. It creates a chain effect wherein you keep expanding your customer base and their expectations from your company. The key to building trust is to be consistently adhering to providing quality and not stop that chain from expanding.
  • Customer Service. A good product or service always comes with great customer support. A complementary great customer service ultimately assures the customer that he need not worry if anything goes wrong with his product/ service and that he can rely on the company’s promise to serve him better in case of any problems.

Once your customer is assured of your quality, he becomes loyal to you.

2. Be as honest and transparent as you can

The key to earning your customer’s trust is by treating them as insiders in your company. The mantra to get to your customer’s heart is ‘being open’. As humans, we tend to be close to ones who are open to us. Customers stick to you in the long term if they are well aware of your company’s mission, vision, the direction in which your company is heading.

Some of the ways you can achieve transparency with your customers are in the following ways:

  • Ensure that your customer knows about your past, present, and the way you are going to build the future. Be open about such information and give them a story that they can associate your company with. It’s a great way to be transparent and build trust with your customers.
  • Convey what your company’s road map holds for them and what you are planning to make out of your company. Create a dashboard for your users to access whenever they want to know about the roadmap. This way, they can self serve all the information that they want to be updated about.
  • Create a social media presence. A social media presence is the best way to make your company be visibly active. It helps you include your customer as an inside member. It gives a different viewpoint and gives insights into the company in the best way possible.

The customers really appreciate it when they know that the company they are associated with is being completely honest with them. It gives them an incentive as wanting to be associated like one of its own.

The key to building that trust with your customers is by giving them a position like one of your members and that is the way your customers are going to return you for your honesty by going a long way in your journey and contributing to your success.

3. Bring Credibility to the table during your Low Times too

Companies are no fewer humans. A company makes mistakes in its journey, but those mistakes can be overlooked by the customers when they are given some sort of assurity and credibility.

When a customer buys from you or signs up with you, they do so because they believe that the company is reliable and credible. There is a sense of safety that the customer feels. In such a case, the customer and the service provider come in an unsaid agreement wherein they both support each other by collaborating to resolve the issue while keeping each other in the loop throughout the process.

When a brand, in its low times, provides credibility, that builds trust for the brand in the customer’s heads. A sense of security can be a way of building trust.

Conclusion

The way forward for any business today is by impressing your customers and bridging the trust gap with them. All that customers ask of the companies today is complete transparent business processes and honesty for the products or the services the companies are offering in the market.

To sustain yourself in this game, you need to continuously revise your marketing and sales strategies to make sure that the 3 aspects discussed in the article above are taken care of while devising your growth plan.

Once you have got it all ticked off your list, it’s only going to help your business attain that trust and faith with your customers and will propel your business to greater heights.

These are just a few of the tried and tested ways that we believe have worked for us in our journey.

We would love to hear from you about what has been the secret behind your success in building trust with your customers.

We are always open to discussions and we always look forward to hearing from you, so let us know your thoughts on our blog in the comments section below 🙂