Trust is essential to building new customer or client relationships.
Trust helps to build certainty and remove doubt. In the context of website design trust keeps the “conversation” and the conversion process moving ahead. By virtue of building trust you keep me engaged, reading onwards, clicking to the next step on your website – your connection between me and your company.
So when I have my first encounter with a company’s website undermines my trust I think “Why should I form a relationship with a company that I’m already experiencing doubt about?” I will break the connection right then and there. Walk away. Click away.
Today I came across two situations where my interest in a service was lost due to a loss of my trust.
If you run a hosting company and put a banner on your site advertising $149.00 managed dedicated servers, make certain that you actually offer such a product. When I discover that the only offers are $189.00 and up . . well . . guess whose trust . . and business . . you just lost?
If you are going to attempt to promote your company in an affiliate forum, but you hog-tie your affiliate manager’s hand by not allowing the affiliate manager to disclose the name of the company (except via a phone call), how much further do you really think I’m going to go in building a relationship? You won’t even tell me your name – or anything else about you – and you expect me to call for a date?
A business is often said to “take on a life of its own” and, like human beings, a corporation is often known for it’s character – or lack thereof. Marketers oftenrefer to a business’s character as that company’s “brand experience”. Brand experience is a convenient way of expressing the idea that a company’s brand, in any one consumer’s mind, represents an aggregate of many variables: quality of product, customer service, etc. IN a sense, a “brand experience” is highly akin to what we humans call a “person’s character”, somewhat the sum total of a person with an emphasis on their fundamentally important attributes, such as decency, honesty, stand for something, trustworthiness . . .
When your online business is looking for new customers or new clients you are really looking to build relationships. The lack of trust or loss of trust is lethal to almost any type of relationship.
Do you want my business? Then be a company of good character.
That would include being a business or company worthy of my trust, a company whose brand experience includes that it is a “trustworthy company”.
Do you want to blow any chance you have of having a happy long-term relationship with me?
Then start by blowing my trust from my very first encounter with “you”.
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