Measuring Trust
Trust is foundational for all relationships, including the trust we wish to gain for our business or our products from our customers. It’s the first important step in all business relationships. There has to be some level of trust before any customer is going to part with their money to buy your product or service.
How could we create a shared definition of trust for our firm (or our department within our firm) and make sure that it is measurable?
Trust occurs incrementally, as a step function. Something has to happen to move the customer upward on the graph over time, as shown above. We all start at the bottom left corner of the chart with zero trust until something happens that moves us either up or down. Ideally, our customer might hear about us from another one of our happy customers and they start out with an aggressive move up the graph. When they hear bad things about us, trust can go into the negative. Before our customer has any experience for themselves, this can be detrimental to the relationship. Now, imagine a line across the top of the chart called the “Trust Threshold.” Once we establish a clear measure for when our customer has exhibited trust behavior, this line would represent that point in the relationship. Our goal is to condense the amount of time it takes to get our customers to cross the “Trust Threshold.”
For some of your customers, you might be able to purposefully add steps into the process to increase the number of experience opportunities that occur to try and move them up. You should, however, be judicious with that strategy as customers will quickly become annoyed when you over-communicate with them — even if your intent is positive. However, in all cases, you should work to increase the impact (the upward movement) of each experience that occurs. You should spend a lot of energy and run a lot of experiments to try to improve the trust you gain from each experience that your customers have. Here is a tool to help you brainstorm.
Before we figure out what your trust threshold will be, try out this thought experiment: Have each of your leaders, including yourself, spend 90 seconds to privately write down their definition of trust on a piece of paper. After 90 seconds, Go around the room and have everyone read their definition aloud.
I have run this exercise with groups of 20+ CEOs, in leadership workshops and privately with executive teams in hundreds of companies. It always yields the same results. There is a lot of positive head bobbing in the room as people read their definitions aloud. After everyone is done, we come to the following agreements: Everyone has a different definition of the word. None of them is wrong. Many of them have similarities, but most of them are markedly different.
How each of us measures and gauges trust is vastly different. It carries a different level of importance to each of us as a result. These variances make it difficult for us to have valuable conversations in our organizations about how to build and improve trust.
The simplest definition of trust that I could find from an authoritative source comes from Merriam-Webster:
“One in which confidence is placed.”
Most sources have lengthy and broad definitions for the word. Dictionary.com lists 10 different definitions.
We could turn the simple definition from Merriam-Webster into something measurable by asking it as a question: How will you know when the people that you want to earn trust from (your customers) are placing confidence in your organization? The answer to that is relatively simple: it occurs when your customer makes their first significant investment in your firm. That investment could come in the form money, but it could also come in the form of time or information. Try this on for a simple, shared and measurable definition of trust between your firm and your customers:
Trust: Your customer’s first significant investment of time, information or money in your firm.
How this gets implemented will be different for every organization. If you are selling a low priced commodity, like donuts, for example, your measure will most likely be money. If you are selling $100M construction projects, you measure is more likely to be your key customer’s time or information. If you are responding to an RFP, for example, and your client is not taking your calls or spending the time to give you the information that you need to be successful, you have not earned enough trust. Here are a few examples from some different industries that I have seen be useful:
- For a local chain of coffee shops: A single, one-time purchase of coffee is not a great indication of trust. It is a small cost and they may have only bought your coffee this time because your location was more convenient than others. However, if your customers invest in telling you who they are, what they care about, and they allow you to track their purchases, you have good candidates for a powerful trust measure. In this case we might use “The percentage of our customers that have joined our club” as a great measure of trust. The raw number of people who have signed up is also a good measure when you are starting out.
- For a heating and cooling contractor: The price point of your average customer is a bit higher than the coffee shop and your customers probably tend to shop around and get a few quotes. If your measure of trust is the sale, you are missing the real opportunity here. The trust, in this case, needs to be earned way before the customer pulls out her credit card. A better measure of trust is whether or not she filled out a complete assessment that allows you to collect her concerns. Another measure might be the percentage of assessment meetings that are attended by all of the decision makers of the household.
With a clear and shared understanding of what trust means to your organization and a clear metric, your team will fully understand the result that you are expecting from them:
Customers that trust us more and show it by investing their time, information or money in our organization.
If you also empower them with a clear set of best practices and the decision rights to experiment with things like the language that they use or the tactics that they employ to maximize trust, they will find the innovations that lead to more trust and they will share them with their colleagues.
Let’s use the barista behind the counter in the coffee shop above, for example. If she understands how important trust is to the organization (because it is one of her KPIs), and understands that you are playing the long game with your customers, you will unleash her creativity and she will figure out what stories to tell and what language to use to inspire your customers to sign up for your coffee club and to use their cards when they visit. She will quickly figure out how to communicate the value of the club in terms that your customers understand.
More trust will be earned and everyone wins. After you have earned trust, you can start working on customer loyalty.
