A fundamental part of any relationship between a company and its customers is trust. Trust is the foundation of any type of loyalty and brand advocacy, and should therefore be taken incredibly seriously. Customers interact and buy from people they like and trust.
Being liked is relatively easy in the grand scheme of things. Having a good image reputation will encourage customers to like you. Similar to meeting a new person, being nice and respectful will help them to like you.
Being trusted is much harder. You have to earn their trust through your ability to provide a really top-notch service and creating the best possible customer experience. Delivering that experience is the key to unlocking customer trust.
Like buses, socks and gloves, customer trust and customer loyalty come as an inseparable pair. If you can gain a customer’s trust, you are likely to achieve customer loyalty from them, leading to positive word of mouth.
Here are our tips to creating that all important customer trust:
- Be nice
Customers don’t just want and deserve your respect, they expect it. Manners go a long way, so be sure to be extra polite when interacting with your customers.
- Be reliable
Customers not only want you to be nice to them, they want you to provide a good service too. If you tell them that their issue will be resolved by Monday morning, make sure that it is. This will bring some validity to the things that you say, and give the customer some confidence that you’re reliable in what you do. Having said this, don’t over-promise. You’ll just end up failing to deliver and disappointing your customers.
- Be consistent
When calling a customer help centre, people don’t expect to get the exact same service from different agents on different occasions. People aren’t clones or robots and customers understand that. What they want is a consistently high level of helpfulness.
- Perfect your processes
Little things in your customer experience can be irritating to your customers, and you might not even know about them. Things like having to repeat your address when you’re transferred to a different department is annoying and can hamper the customer experience. Try to smooth out and perfect your processes before they go live.
Call us on 0800 0931 830 with any queries or email [email protected] for any extra information.