Companies know that building relationships with clients is essential to their success. Increasing customer trust is one strategy to strengthen those relationships.
By establishing a strong rapport with your customers, they come to rely on your products and services and become long-term supporters of your company.
To foster such a relationship, businesses must appreciate and understand their clients and offer reliable, relevant experiences.
Creating customer trust lays the groundwork for the long-term success of your business.
In this blog post, we discuss the importance of gaining the trust of your customers and offer a checklist of the 10 crucial actions you can take to do so.
What is customer trust?
Customer trust is the confidence and belief that customers have in a brand, product, or service. It’s established when customers feel assured that a company will consistently meet their expectations, deliver quality, and act with integrity.
Trust is built over time through positive experiences that demonstrate reliability, transparency, and a commitment to fulfilling promises.
It’s a critical element in fostering long-term relationships, encouraging customer loyalty, and supporting a brand’s reputation.
How to build trust with customers
Building customer trust is a crucial aspect of maintaining successful and long-lasting relationships. Here are 10 strategies to help you build trust with your customers:
How to build customer trust
- Create an excellent product
- Provide exceptional customer service
- Create a loyalty program
- Be honest and transparent
- Prioritize your customers
- Seek customer feedback and act on it
- Treat your customers as you would a friend
- Address conflicts clearly
- Share customer reviews and testimonials
- Preserve your company’s reputation
Create an excellent product
Consider the requirements of your intended customers and develop products that cater to their needs.
The process of crafting your product into a superior one instills a sense of confidence in customers toward your company, thereby fostering a deeper level of trust.
You should ensure that your products are enjoyable for your customers to use, as this can increase the likelihood that they will stick with your business going forward.
Provide exceptional customer service
Prioritizing exceptional customer service is a fundamental component of trust-building.
This can be done by:
- Offering consistent, responsive, and personalized interactions that demonstrate a genuine commitment to meeting customer needs.
- Responding consistently when clients contact you with queries and concerns.
- Making sure your agents handle support tickets while keeping in mind that there are people who need help on the other end of the ticket number.
- Establishing a set of policies and procedures that guide your agents to proper responses to FAQs and the resources necessary to solve complicated problems.
Businesses that prioritize customer service as a core value are more likely to establish and maintain trust with their customer base.
Create a loyalty program
Loyalty programs increase sales and customer lifetime value. A loyalty program pushes businesses to reward and retain clients to build exciting connections.
According to a study by Zippia, 75% of consumers would change brands for a superior loyalty program.
By providing loyalty programs to current clients who are already invested in your products, you can strengthen your relationship with them and show them how much you value their business.
You can experiment with different programs to find which ones work best for your consumers, leading to a long-term, mutually beneficial partnership.
Be honest and transparent
Gaining the customer trust requires being open and honest. It’s no secret that customers feel more personally connected to a company that is truthful and transparent.
According to a Sprout Social study, 89% of people believe that a business can restore trust if it acknowledges its mistakes and is transparent about how it plans to rectify the situation.
Being transparent with your clients shows them that your business is trustworthy, which in turn can increase their loyalty.
Furthermore, this transparency can increase customers’ engagement by providing them with information about how your business is run.
Transparency with customers can be achieved by:
- Being clear about the features and benefits of your products, services, and policies.
- Addressing issues or mistakes promptly and openly.
- Presenting the prices of your products without any obfuscation.
Prioritize your customers
Customer trust will develop if you keep them at the core of your operations. Your employees’ empathy and desire to meet your consumers’ needs will determine how effectively your company builds credibility.
Credibility can be achieved by:
- Making certain that your firm has a customer-centric.
- Continuously assessing customer service and adapting to better meet the demands of clients.
- Urging every staff member to consider how best they may serve customers in their position.
- Interacting with customers on the platforms that they prefer.
Seek customer feedback and act on it
Companies can use Customer feedback surveys to better understand what clients enjoyed and disliked about their experiences with products and services.
It’s important to gather feedback from both happy and dissatisfied customers to build an insightful, balanced assessment.
Customer feedback is crucial to helping firms make decisions about improvements to products and services.
Treat your customers as you would a friend
Like friendships, customer relationships are based on mutual respect and trust and require time to develop.
You can build a solid foundation of trust with your clients by treating them like friends.
The best ways to improve customer relationships are to:
- Recognize devoted followers and express your gratitude, whether through small gestures or simply by consistently attending to them.
- Demonstrate empathy to show clients that your business cares for them and wants to help them succeed.
- Practice being hospitable and approachable.
- Communicate with your clients regularly via the platforms they prefer, such as social media, email, live chat, and website comments.
Address conflicts clearly
To gain customer trust, you must own up to your mistakes and make amends.
Errors happen. When they do, accept them and deal with them directly. Don’t downplay or ignore a mistake just because it would be inconvenient to address.
Especially don’t downplay a situation where you believe your clients’ data may have been compromised.
Companies can further establish trust with customers by speaking with them directly, rather than relying solely on logged supports issues and tickets.
Provide clear, concise answers to any inquiries from customers so that they feel heard by your service team.
Share customer reviews and testimonials
Companies can share customer testimonials, reviews, and case studies on their blog, social media accounts, and website to boost buyer confidence.
According to a BrightLocal study, 76% of customers regularly check internet reviews when selecting a local business to patronize.
Furthermore, 46% of consumers believe that online business reviews are as trustworthy as personal recommendations from friends or family.
These statistics show that new customers will have more trust in your brand when reviews from other customers vouch for your company.
Get in touch with clients who you know have had positive experiences with your business and ask them to be included in a blog post or testimonial video.
Don’t hesitate to include accounts of scenarios where a customer found the product lacking and the company updated the product to respond to the feedback.
Building a collection of such endorsements not only shows potential customers how reliable your company is but also shows that you value customer feedback.
Preserve your company’s reputation
Gaining customer trust requires maintaining a positive company reputation.
This involves numerous factors, such as employing and developing outstanding personnel and producing high-quality products.
To preserve your company’s good name and the confidence your clients have in you, make sure you consistently live up to client expectations.
Additionally, because the customer service department is typically the one that customers interact with directly, providing excellent customer service is essential to maintaining your brand’s reputation.
Remember, a single negative experience has the power to ruin a customer’s perception of a brand.
Why it is important to build trust with customers for business
Having customers that trust you is vital to the long-term success of your business. Here are just a few of the advantages to building customer trust:
Builds customer loyalty
When a customer trusts a brand, he or she is more likely to choose its products or services repeatedly and over competing brands.
Customers who feel your business strives to give them the finest customer experience will be brand ambassadors.
Boost your brand’s reputation
Trustworthy businesses have better reputations. Positive word-of-mouth and recommendations from satisfied customers can attract new customers and enhance a brand’s image.
Increases revenue
Customers are inclined to engage in repeated transactions and make larger purchases when they have confidence in a company’s products or services. More and larger transactions grow the company’s bottom line.
Improves customer engagement
By actively participating in conversations, listening to feedback, and sharing experiences from customers, businesses strengthen their customer relationships.
Both sides benefit from active engagement: the business gains valuable insight into its products and services, and customers feel valued and cared for.
Fosters long-term relationships
Trust is a fragile yet essential element in fostering long-term relationships. According to a study conducted by Mercuri International, 99% of business leaders believe that trust is essential to establishing enduring relationships with customers.
Customer trust and long-term relationships can be built through:
- Effective communication
- Consistent support
- Understanding customers’ unique needs
- Consistent effort
- Acting with integrity
- Genuine commitment to meeting and surpassing customer expectations
Trusting customers offer valuable perspectives
When customers trust that their feedback is taken seriously, they are more likely to share it. This input is invaluable to improving a business’s products, services, and support.
How can you build customer trust?
The two primary characteristics of a strong customer base are trust and loyalty. Customer trust has to be earned and maintained, just like in any other relationship. Start gaining the trust of your customers in the prospecting phase.
Don’t wait until they have completed a purchase.
Setting a baseline of open communication and excellent customer service goes a long way to building long-term relationships and high customer lifetime values.
The right customer service and support software can significantly ease your trust-building efforts. Schedule a live demo to see how BoldDesk can help your company build deep customer trust. Start a free trial to explore its many features. If you have any questions about the product and its capabilities, feel free to contact the BoldDesk support team.
