American motivational speaker Zig Ziglar once said: “If people like you they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you they’ll do business with you.” That’s great advice and it happens to be true. A high-quality product or service is only half the story. If you can earn the trust of your customers with five-star service, you might just secure their loyalty too.
Customers now expect brands to behave like regular people and not stodgy corporations with canned responses. More specifically, customers expect authenticity from brands, and they want to be able to trust them.
Customer trust and loyalty are essential for building a successful business. When you realise that just a 5% increase in customer retention can boost your profits by as much as 95% the rewards for gaining and maintaining customer trust are massive.
Here are our top tips on how to gain customer trust and confidence.
1. Offer Excellent Customer Service
The level of customer service you provide has a major impact on customer loyalty and retention. This means it’s essential to have dedicated support staff and to set high standards for the speed and quality of your service.
Great customer service is one of the most, if not the most, important ways businesses gain customer trust and confidence is through customer service. It’s the most immediate place for interaction between both parties and, in turn, the biggest show-and-prove moment for a business to demonstrate value and legitimacy.
2. Be honest and transparent
If you want to gain your customers’ trust, there are no shortcuts, you’re going to have to earn it. How do you do that? Well, a great starting point is to be open and transparent about your products and what potential customers can expect of you as a company.
This should start right from their first interaction with your brand. Avoid misleading sales copy and gimmicky marketing campaigns, and don’t attempt to grab your audience’s attention with exaggerated claims about your products or services.
Instead, aim to be as clear as possible about what you have to offer, and establish accurate customer expectations from the start.
Give your customers all the information they need – including clear pricing and even limitations – to help them make an informed decision. The more clued up a customer feels, the more likely they are to give you repeat business.
3. Share positive reviews and testimonials.
Consumers tend to trust their fellow customers more than the businesses they’re buying from. Real customers’ experiences are often seen as more objective and hold more weight than a company’s clear-cut marketing.
That’s why it serves you to promote and project satisfied customers’ positive experiences by asking for reviews and sharing testimonials. If you have real customers vouching for your product, service, or customer experience, you can add a certain legitimacy to your offering and messaging.
4. Ask for and act on feedback.
Don’t be afraid to ask for feedback from your customers. Understanding their experience with your business helps you shape and mould it for the future.
Hear what they have to say, and if something they bring up strikes a chord with you — or enough customers are raising similar points or issues — do something about it. Improve your business based on your customers’ insight.
It’s an excellent way to demonstrate that your relationship goes both ways — helping develop trust by letting your customers know you’re willing to hear them out.
5. Put a face to the name.
In your efforts to help your customers to feel connected to your brand, it’s useful to show them the people behind the products. That’s where you can build empathy and a relationship.
Remember to give your customers meaningful human interactions wherever possible to cement the relationship.
6. Be reachable and attentive.
When a customer contacts you with an issue with your product or service, it’s in your best interest to get in touch with them as quickly as possible. This is great in letting your customers know they matter.
Be reliably reachable. Don’t keep them on hold too long. And when they do connect with your support team, make sure the help they get is thorough, thoughtful, patient, and respectful.
Providing them with readily accessible and great customer service will show them that you value their business well beyond their initial purchase. If customers know you care, they’ll be more inclined to trust you.
Trust is the cornerstone to all customer experiences. It can’t be built in a day, but it can be destroyed quickly. Focusing on each customer individually instead of rushing to get things done can help create a long-term relationship of trust.
