What is Trust?
Trust is the glue that holds the business relationship together and is expressed repeatedly in your actions. This includes what you do and do not do. Simple things are key, such as returning phone calls immediately and being consistent in your words and actions. In this way, trust is an absolutely essential part of sales, as well as business is general. If trust is not present, customers will not buy.
Building trust results in customer loyalty, which results in more profitable customers and greater chance for marketing and sales success. Most businesses struggle because trust is not yet present in a loyal customer base. Their customers range from merely satisfied to unhappy. Your challenge is to move people into the loyal customer category. This means building trust.
- Value the Relationship with Your Customers
Show compassion in your actions affecting the relationship. Be honest, credible and keep your integrity (if you say something, make sure you do it, on time.) Show you have the competence to act for the mutual benefit of your relationship.
It’s essential to exhibit these character, because trust diminishes the perceived risk and vulnerability in a partnership, leading to increased customer satisfaction and reduced churn. If you don’t act in your customer’s best interests, lie to hide your flaws and make heaps of dumb mistakes, your customer will realize you can’t be trusted, and abandon your business relationship.
- Be Consistent
Consistency is one of the simplest, yet most under-utilized techniques in existence for building trust and loyalty with your customers. Companies that are proposing in the new global economy recognize that consistency is the key to customer satisfaction. They understand that winning customers and building loyalty doesn’t happen overnight and that building strong customer relationships requires a consistent and ongoing effort to retain their customer’s hard-won loyalty.
- Have Real Dialog
Every piece of content you create and each meeting you have should be constructed within a real conversation, not a sales pitch. Your content and conversations needs to geared towards solving problems for the customers.
- Be Professional
A Customer Service Representative who acts in a professional manner will gain the respect, trust, and loyalty of customers. Customer Service Representatives are in constant connection with the customer base and therefore, needs to act accordingly to gain customer confidence.
Professionalism is not required for customers only. Professionalism must be displayed at all times and to all groups of people. If you display professional behavior to your boss only, your co-workers will start to see that you are not honest, and you are not able to provide appropriate relationships to all that you work with. Professionalism to each group shows your true self, your commitment to the field and your high standards in work and ethics. Everyone that you encounter deserve to be treated professionally.
- Show Real Integrity
In the business world today, integrity is something that we hope to find in the companies that we interact with. The successful companies are those that have integrity as one of their core values. This characteristic comes through in the way the do business and the way that they treat their customers. Customers appreciate the organizations that work in their best interest. Working in the best interest of the customer is the typical business model that most organizations strive to live by. It’s common principle that if you treat me well, I’ll treat you well by continuing to do business with you.
Building trust with your customers is very much like building trust with a new friend or employee. If you are consistent in the interactions, your customers can begin to expect similar experience every time they come to your business. This leads to trust in your business, service and products. When a customer trusts your business, they are more likely to make a purchase with you in the future, before ever visiting a competitor. In fact, when recommending a business, consumers are more likely to recommend a trusted business, and 82% more likely yo continue shopping with a business they trust.
