Trust is important in any relationship. Whether you’re talking about a friendship, a marriage, or even a business-to-customer relationship.
For businesses, trust should be the cornerstone at the heart of every customer relationship. If there’s no trust involved, you’re facing a major impetus toward developing truly loyal, repeat customers. But the more your customers trust you? That’s when you’ll really start to thrive.
Here’s four effective ways your business can build trust with customers.
Understand your customers. Know why understanding your customers matters so much? It shows that you care. A business that doesn’t understand it’s customers won’t know how to authentically provide the right products and services. Without a great understanding of the customer (their wants, needs, demographics, etc.), business’s risk appearing out-of-touch. Customers need to trust that you know what they both want and need.
Embrace transparency. When it comes to building trust, honesty is one of the best ways to do it. Businesses that have a history of transparent practices are far more likely to keep customers around when something goes wrong. According to Sprout Social, 85% of customers have a greater likelihood to keep maintain their relationship with a brand if there’s a history of transparency.
Here’s an example. Due to outside circumstances, let’s say you’ve found that you need to increase the price of a good or service in order to maintain profitability. If you hike up your prices without explanation, your customers aren’t going to be so happy. But if you’re forward, and explain the situation, your customers will tend to understand. In fact, they’ll trust you because you’re being up front with them.
Show off your reviews. A great way to gain trust? Show off how much others already trust you. According to Bright Local, customers will actually read about 10 reviews on average before deciding to trust a local business. If you already have a selection of glowing reviews from your current customers, try showing them off on your website.
It’s important to note, anytime you’re sharing or publishing a review, it’s a good idea to ask for the author’s permission. Also, if the website was posted on third party website, check their policy for reposting reviews. Several of them will allow you to directly embed reviews into your website’s code.
Trustworthy service. If a customer’s coming to you with a problem, it’s imperative that you do your best to assist. Relegating your customer service to a series of unfriendly, unhelpful policies is a sure-fire way to lose trust. Understand the most frequent problems customers may face with your products and services, and be proactive in planning to fix these scenarios as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Build Customer Relationships With CoGoBuzz
Want to start building trust with your customers? You’ve come to the right place. Get started with CoGoBuzz, our state-of-the-art digital marketing service.
With our service, you’ll engage customers on the devices they use most, both in-store and out. Learn more about your customers thanks to the automatically-developed customer profiles we create for every login to your in-store HotSpot. On top of that, you’ll take advantage of a fully digital SMS-based loyalty program that simplifies engagement to a simple text message, allowing you to engage and communicate with your customers wherever they go.
Click here to learn more about CoGoBuzz!
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What does your business do to foster trust with customers? Sound off in the comments!