8 Steps to Achieving Trustability and Make More Sales!

Trustability is a highly disruptive competitive strategy because it runs so counter to the way most businesses conduct their operations. However, it is not a complex concept, and it is not difﬁcult to imagine how trustability could operate in any given business category, in the same way it works for Amazon, for USAA, for Ally Bank, and a few other customer service leaders. We only need to put ourselves in the customer’s shoes.

A research (“Measuring the Value of Trust in Healthcare,” 2012.) indicates healthcare insurance customers would be willing to pay an average of $25 more a month to do business with a company they trust. And with the right analytics it may actually be possible to know which of a ﬁrm’s customers trust it and which do not. In other words, a company should be able to identify individual trusters, distrusters, and neutrals, giving it the ability to treat different customers differently and greatly improving the efﬁciency with which a company can implement policies designed to promote trust.

The overall conclusion of our research is that although the ﬁnancial beneﬁts of earning the trust of customers may or may not show up in current-period results, there can be little doubt that trustworthiness and its higher standard, trustability, have the potential to return signiﬁcant beneﬁts over the long term. We are lucky that trustability is a very big tool, because the proﬁtability issue is a very big nut to crack. Trustability will inevitably develop in commerce and Ecommerce.

Even if it were to cost billions of dollars in real money, trustability is still going to become a dominant characteristic of business competition because the rise in consumer expectations with respect to trust and trustworthiness is being fueled by the steady, irresistible drumbeat of technological progress.

The world will inevitably become ever more interactive and transparent, and competitive pressure will compel companies to adjust their business models to be more trustable.
So, it really is fortunate for businesses that trustability, when examined closely, is in fact ﬁnancially advantageous, even though in many situations it may cost money up front in the form of forgone proﬁts or newly incurred expenses, as many business improvements do.
If current-period earnings were the only criterion by which Amazon ever evaluated its ﬁnancial performance, it would never do anything so “stupid” or “irrational” as refusing to make a proﬁt from a willing (if forgetful) customer. But the fact is that by delivering a genuinely trustable customer experience, the company gains something far more ﬁnancially valuable than the proﬁt they could have made because of your own forgetfulness.

In addition to the increased likelihood that you will recommend Amazon to friends and colleagues, they will be solidifying your loyalty and continued patronage (after all, you will now want to buy all your books from Amazon so they can prevent you from accidental repeat purchases, right?).
A trustable company has to be managed with the discipline and foresight to focus on creating long-term value by earning the trust and conﬁdence of customers rather than going for the instant gratiﬁcation of a temporary sales bump.

Being able to delay gratiﬁcation in order to achieve a more important objective is a key factor in anyone’s emotional maturity. It’ is one of the key markers used to assess how “grown-up” a child is.
So in that sense, a trustable company could simply be thought of as more “emotionally mature” than a nontrustable company. More of a grown-up company. But grow up soon, because technology will not wait.

Eight Steps to Achieving Trustability :

1 - Think long term.

You cannot be trustable if you are entirely focused on the short term. And customer relationships are the link between short-term actions and long-term value at a business. If you do not have the ability to embrace the long term, then do not even think about trying to become more trustable, because eventually your ﬂawed arithmetic and off-center metrics will do you in. You will never be able to build a business model focused on “doing the right thing” for customers if you cannot justify it to your shareholders. Period.

2 - Share.

People want to contribute and share with others. That’ is what human beings like to do, and if you want your business to be trustable, then you will ﬁnd ways to share too. Your business needs to contribute, so share your ideas, your technology, and your data. Make your intellectual property more freely available, in order to stimulate faster innovation. Said another way: Trust others the way you want them to trust you. And remember that the currency of the sharing economy is trust, not money. So be careful when navigating between the social domain and the commercial.

3 - Show a “human face”.

Empathy is not just a business strategy for demonstrating trustability. Empathy is a basic human instinct, and for a business, empathy is what developing “customer insight” is all about, in the ﬁrst place. In addition to empathy, if you want to show a “human face” to the world, acting as another human being would, then you have to admit your fallibility when it is appropriate. No one is perfect, and this goes double for a business.
So, accept your vulnerability. It will never be possible to control all outcomes.

4 - Rely on evidence.

As technology promotes more and more interaction and transparency, businesses will have to ﬁgure out how to cope with a supernova of information. If you want to be trustable, then you have to be able to evaluate this information for its objectivity and accuracy. Do not ignore judgment and intuition, but pay attention to numbers and data. And take the steps required to deal with the inevitability of random events: Pay more attention to numbers and statistical best practices, measure inputs in addition to outcomes and results, and plan more carefully for alternatives and multiple scenarios.

5 - Ensure a high-quality product and service.

Delivered on time, well executed, and reasonably priced. Product competence is a requirement, not an option. No one will trust any company, no matter how good they think its intentions are, if the product or service has ﬂaws. Mistakes can be forgiven, but the fewer the better, and continued incompetence is a sign that a company just does not care enough about its good intentions to take the steps necessary to ensure they are carried out.

6 - Improve Continuously.

Continuously improve your IT systems and maintain up-to-date customer analytics, business intelligence, and customer experience mapping capabilities. No one will trust a business that does not have reasonably good customer data and analytics. It’ is an important part of customer competence. You do not want to be that company that asks a customer for information that you already ought to have, or tries to sell a customer a product they have already bought. Your customers remember you, and you have an obligation to remember them, at least to a reasonable extent. You will need good IT; there is no other way.

7 - Maintain robust voice-of-customer feedback and interconnected mechanics.

A good customer relationship, based on trust, is reciprocal. What the customer is telling you is every bit as important as what your marketing and branding messages are trying to communicate to the customer. And remember that “omnichannel” is no longer a buzzword; it’s a key strategic way of life. Hear and see a customer as one customer across time, across channels, across products, and across different customer identiﬁcation points.

8 - Enable and engage your employees.

Build a culture of trustability. As good as your systems are, and as competent as your product and service are, things will still go wrong sometimes (there’s that “human fallibility” thing again). No company will ever be able to routinize and automate everything, so you have to ensure that when something does go wrong, your employees are both capable and motivated enough to address the problem with little or no top-down direction. Your company’s culture has to be based on using trust as a platform for stewarding individual customer relationships and experiences.