Many things contribute to successful businesses, and trust is one of them. Therefore, we want to see how to build trust with customers.
A quote by Hilary Hilton Ziglar, who was an American author, salesman, and motivational speaker, states that:
“If people like you, they will listen to you, but if people trust you, they will do business with you.”
Getting customers to do business with you involves establishing a relationship or a rapport that helps you understand your customers better and vice versa.
The relationship does not only allow customers to like you.
Instead, it builds up; an integral factor that allows them to do business with you seamlessly without any form of objections.
Therefore, we will be elaborating on how to build trust with customers.
Also, we will see the importance or advantages of building trust with customers.
Additionally, we will also consider the disadvantages of not building trust with customers.
Finally, we will discuss how businesses and companies can build trust with customers in this blog post.
Let’s get to it!
How to Build Trust with Customers – What Does it Mean?
According to the Oxford Dictionary, trust is a firm belief or reliability in someone or something.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary also defines it as the belief that someone or something is reliable, good, honest, effective.
Therefore, building trust with customers is the process of getting your customers to believe in your abilities as a business.
In otherwords, their belief in your ability to meet and exceed their needs.
Also, it’s believing that you will always be available to provide them with the best services and solutions when they need to reach out to you.
Similarly, building customers’ trust ensures that your customers believe in the capabilities and abilities of your brand.
The capability to provide them with the best of values, experience, and services.
Importance of Building Trust with Customers
Trust, as we earlier stated, plays a very crucial role in customer-business relationships.
It is the foundation on which a business builds a rapport or relationship with its customer.
This relationship, in turn, offers the business a lot of opportunities, advantages, and benefits.
Therefore, trust is important in business;
Customers are the Backbones of Businesses
One of the importance of building trust with customers is that customers are the understructure in which businesses are built open.
They are the reasons businesses are established and the sources through which businesses generate revenue or profit.
Without customers, your business will be unable to strive in the competitive market, unable to generate profits, or even succeed.
This is why you need your customers to trust and believe in your business or brand.
Customer Retention and Loyalty
In addition to the fact that customers are the foundations of every business, your business also needs to retain these customers to succeed.
Customer retention and loyalty come with a certain level of trust built between the business and the customer.
When you can build trust with your customers, you will have them returning for purchases.
Also, they will become loyal customers who patronize your business alone amidst competitors and similar brands.
Boost in Brand Image and Reputation
When a business or brand can successfully build trust with its customers, it gives room for a boost and advancement in its image and reputation.
Pre-existing and potential customers always look forward to doing business with a brand that is not only credible but has a positive brand image and reputation.
Customers who trust your business will always speak about your credibility and reliability of your business in a positive light to others.
Be it offline in their networks or online via social media.
These reviews and positive statements help to boost your brand image and reputation amongst other brands.
Increase in profit
Building trust with customers increases profit or revenue generated by your business and company.
Customers who trust your business are satisfied and always willing to make more purchases and spend more money on your business.
This increase in patronage helps boost and increase the profit that your business generates over some time.
Builds Customer Relationship
As we mentioned, building customer trust is a piece of the puzzle that makes up a customer relationship.
When you build trust with customers, you have succeeded in making room for a long-lasting relationship between your business and the customers.
This relationship also helps increase your customer lifetime value (CLV), which is the profit generated by each customer to your business during their lifetime of patronizing your business.
Saves Costs
Business often has to come up with marketing and sales strategies that help them acquire more customers.
These marketing strategies involve campaigns, advertisements, and other techniques that cost businesses quite a large sum of money.
Customers who are confident in a business’s abilities increase their visibility by recommending and referring the business to others.
This they do through word of mouth and other methods like reviews online.
This way, a business acquires new customers effortlessly through the trust built with pre-existing customers.
Achievement of Business Goals and Objectives
Every business has a vision, goal, and objectives it aims to achieve.
These goals and objectives range from profit generation, customer satisfaction, production of goods and services, innovations, value creation, employee retention, etc.
Achieving these will require having customers that trust your business.
Reasons you Cannot Build Trust with Customers
While trust can be built with customers over time, distrust can also be built with customers.
Distrust could develop due to several reasons or lapses from the business, company, or organization.
Some of these reasons are;
Low Quality of Products and Services
One of the major reasons for customer distrust is the quality of the products and the services offered to them by your business.
If your products and services do not function as they ought to meet your client’s expectations, they will begin to question your trustworthiness.
Lack of Communication
Lack of communication between you and your customer makes building trust almost impossible.
When you do not communicate with your customers, you do not have the opportunity to know more about them and vice versa.
Poor communication or lack of communication with customers prevents you from having a relationship with customers, leading to the building of trust.
Customers cannot trust a business that knows nothing about them or that they know nothing about.
Lack of Transparency
No one can build trust by hiding things or withholding information.
Do you need your customers to trust you?
If yes, you must be willing to provide them with all the information they need regarding your business/brand, product, and services.
Lack of transparency leads to distrust.
This is true, especially when they have to find out about all these things on their own after giving your business the benefit of the doubt.
False Promises
In addition to lack of transparency, do not make promises to your customers that you cannot keep because you are trying to please them.
Unfulfilled promises lead to customer disappointment and dissatisfaction.
So, when you make false promises to your customers, you create room for disappointments, dissatisfaction, and a lack of trust.
Poor Customer Service
Customers trust you when you offer them great customer service with the best customer service support team.
A team that is constantly available to guide and assist your customers prior, during, and after purchase.
When your customer support system is poorly trained, lacks experience and the skills to help customers, customers will feel disregard and neglect.
Thereby leading to distrust.
Lack of Appreciation and Customer Reward
Additionally, customer distrust can be a result of a lack of customer appreciation and customer rewards.
Efforts should constantly appreciate customers and provide them with loyalty rewards like discount offers and bonuses.
Otherwise, the customer will feel undervalued and disregarded by the business.
Hence, this will lead to distrust between your business and its customers.
Disadvantages of not Building Trust with Customers
When businesses are not able to build trust with their customers, it leads to the following:
Loss of Business
We earlier established the fact that customers are the backbones and under structures on which businesses are built.
When businesses fail to build trust with their customers, it stands the risk of losing its backbones and understructure, which could hurt a business’s survival.
Decrease in Profit
Customers who distrust a business would hesitate or avoid making purchases from such a business.
When they stop making purchases, the revenue generated by the business begins to decrease, and the aim of the business aims to make a profit is defeated.
Loss of Customer Loyalty and Retention
Another disadvantage of not being able to build trust with customers is that the business losses the ability to build customer retention and loyalty.
A loss of customer loyalty and retention has a lot of financial risks and business survival risks.
As customers would not return to make repeated purchases or build long-lasting relationships with your business.
Increased Costs
Saving costs on marketing and advertising to new customers through the relationship and trust built with pre-existing customers should suffice.
However, businesses would begin to channel resources into acquiring new customers.
This is because they cannot retain customers or build customer loyalty which would have served as a means of acquiring new customers through reviews and referrals.
Bad Brand Image and Reputation
When businesses successfully build trust with customers, it boosts brand image and reputation.
However, if they fail to build trust with their customers, the brand image and reputation would begin to decrease and become poor.
This is because customers would refuse to keep doing business with a brand with a bad brand image and reputation.
Customers who do not trust your business will always spread negative reviews and reports about their bad customer experience.
And also, talk about the lack of credibility of your business and unreliability.
Resulting in a decrease in your brand image and reputation amongst competitors.
No Customer Relationship
Another disadvantage of mistrust between business owners and customers is that no opportunity to build a relationship.
The inability to build a relationship with customers decreases customer lifetime value which could have been an additional benefit to the business.
How to Build Trust with Customers
Building trust with customers is not something that can be achieved at once. Neither can it be maneuvered nor manipulated.
Rather, it is a process that needs to be followed diligently and intentionally at every opportunity that you have to interact or communicate with a customer.
This is because for customers to trust you, you have to earn it.
The question that may cross your mind is, “how does a business intentionally strive to earn the trust of your customers?
Here are some ways businesses, companies, and organizations can build trust with their customers:
Constant Communication
Communication plays an essential role in building trust with customers.
Interacting and engaging with the customers whose trust you want to earn shows them that you care about them.
Also, it provides an added value to the services that you offer them.
It lets them know more about your business with is very pivotal to building trust.
Additionally, it eradicates any form of miscommunication that can lead to distrust.
Moreso, it strengthens your customer loyalty and retention rate.
Communication can be done through phone calls, text messages, emails, newsletters, or social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
Listening to Build Trust with Customers
To successfully build trust with customers, you must listen both attentively and reflectively.
Listening involves paying close attention to all that your customers have to say.
It’s also allowing them to express themselves and provide you with information and their perception of your products and services.
This could be used as feedback to build trust with customers.
Additionally, listening improves your relationship with the customer, reduces customer attrition, and builds customer retention,
Most importantly, to this aspect, it builds trust.
Deliver Beyond Customer Expectations
Every customer expects your business or company that needs to be met.
When these expectations are not met, it leads to dissatisfaction and distrust.
Therefore, businesses should strive to meet customer expectations and go beyond their expectations.
This will not only impress your customers, but it would serve as an opportunity for you to gain their trust.
Honesty and Transparency
To ensure that your customers trust you, you must be honest and transparent.
Honesty means being truthful with your customer about everything you do.
It also involves providing them with all the information they need for your business.
Transparency is about being truthful with your customers about all that they ask or request of you.
While honesty is about you sharing your perception of truth with your customers, transparency is your customer’s perception of the truth, which you need to provide to them.
Honesty and transparency help to improve your services to your customer.
Additionally, it earns you their respect, and it fosters your relationship with your customers.
Finally, it helps you to build trust with these customers.
Prioritize your Customers’ Needs
To build trust with customers, strive to ensure that you understand the needs of your clients first.
Then devise a method to partner with your customers to help them achieve those goals and objectives.
This helps the customer build confidence in your business, trust your abilities and trust your business or brand.
Do not Make False Promises
Making false promising is telling your customers one thing and doing the opposite of that thing.
Your customers begin to feel disappointed and lack trust or confidence in your business.
This is why you need to avoid making false promises to please a customer.
Avoiding false promises also involves not making brand promises to your customers.
When your brand products and services fail to distinguish themselves from that of alternative brands, you have disappointed your client.
Keeping to your promises helps you to achieve customer satisfaction.
Also, it boosts the brand’s image and reputation and builds trust in the long run.
Good Customer Service
Another way in which businesses can build trust with their customers is by providing good customer service.
It entails hiring qualified and trained customer care representatives or team members who are experienced and polite.
Also, getting those who can treat every customer respectfully and provide your customers with assistance, guidance, value, and a good experience.
Poor customer service discourages customer relationships and trust.
Good customer service helps increase sales, boost brand image and reputation, loyalty, customer relationship, and trust.
Availability
If you intend to build trust with customers, you must be available.
Customers cannot trust an unavailable business or cannot be reached when they need to place an order or seek assistance or guidance.
Hence, businesses or brands should employ the use of platforms that helps them to stay in constant communication and interaction with their customers.
Such platforms could be customer care lines, email addresses, web-chat, live chat, and social media platforms to create business pages.
Be Reliable
For customers to trust a business, such a business must be reliable.
This means that your customers are confident that they can count to be accountable to them.
This is essential when they have encountered a problem or an issue that they need to fix or carry out a project or task.
Reliability means constantly updating your customers with the information they need.
Also, follow up to ensure that your customers are carried through every single process of your business transactions.
Share Positive Reviews and Success Stories
In building customer trust, seeing is believing.
Customers need proof to believe that they can trust you.
Customer success stories, just like reviews, are testimonials that share a customer’s personal experience on the benefits of using your products and services.
When customers see real-life success stories and reviews about the benefits of your products and services, they trust the credibility and the reliability of your business.
Feedback
Feedback is a great way to build trust with customers.
You cannot provide goods, services, and values that help you to build customer trust if you do not know the perception of what goods, services, and experiences give your customers value.
One way to know your customer’s thoughts and perceptions is by asking them for feedback.
It also makes customers feel valued, regarded, and cared for by the business.
Customer Rewards and Appreciation
Creating loyalty rewards and appreciation schemes helps businesses to build trust with their customers.
Appreciation and rewards encourage customers; it makes them feel valued and prioritized. by the business.
Appreciation could be by sending thank you cards, text messages, emails, etc.
Customer rewards could be in the form of giveaways, subscription upgrades, gift cards or baskets, features on social media platforms, discounts, bonuses, and free trials, etc.
Respect your Customers Time
Learning to respect your customer’s time allows them to trust and respect you better.
Respecting your customer’s time means prioritizing and giving your customers the best of undivided attention when meeting and attending to them.
It also means scheduling a meeting at a time that is convenient for you and the client.
Additionally, respecting your customer’s time is getting back to your customers with answers on time and acknowledging their decisions on time as well.
Conclusion on How to Build Trust with Customers
Just as any form of relationship, a customer-oriented business requires the trust of its customers to grow and succeed.
When trust is successfully built between the business and its customers, both entities achieve their goals.
Therefore, practice these simple tips to build trust with your customers to achieve business success.
