What Builds Trust With Customers?
Having an excellent product or service will go a long way towards building a successful company. However, if you don’t have a trusting relationship with your customers (or potential customers), then there’ll be an upper limit to how much you can achieve. This is true for all businesses, but it’s especially relevant for online companies. People are rightly skeptical about handing over their hard-earned cash to people with whom they can not interact directly. So it’s doubly important that these ventures are working to build trust with their customers.
In this blog, we’re going to run through some of the staples of trust. Take our advice, and it won’t be long before you’ve noticed a marked improvement in customer engagement and sales!
Your Story
One of the simplest ways to make customers question your trustworthiness is to hide yourself away. You’ve got a story for your business, so why not share it with the world? People like to dig deeper and see the ethos and personalities of the people that are working behind the scenes at a company. As well as building trust, this approach will also benefit you in other ways -- your story and background offer a unique selling point for your business. If you’re keeping it to yourself, then you’ll be leaving one of your most valuable marketing tools on the table.
Easy Communication
One of the reasons why people like working with real-world companies is because they know that if they have a problem, then they’ll know where to turn -- they can just visit the store and speak to someone directly. The digital world is different. Or at least, it can be. You can win your customers over by making it as easy as possible for them to get in touch with you. There are numerous ways to allow customers to get in touch with you. You can add live chat software to your website by visiting click4assistance.co.uk or have a phone number that they can call. Having active social media channels -- and responding promptly to queries -- will also help.
Reliability
Customers want to feel confident that they can rely on your company whether that means knowing that your website will always be up and available when they need it or that they will receive a package when you say they will. That’s why you should invest more time and money in things like business IT support, which will keep your business up and running, customer service to ensure consumers are always able to contact you and get a reliable solution, and a decent fulfillment chain to ensure products are always available, amongst other things.
Product Expertise
People want to hand their money over to people who know what they’re talking about, not people who are just in business to make a quick dollar. As such, it’s important to let potential customers understand that you know what you’re talking about. Hosting a podcast on your industry, offering tutorials for your products, and having in-depth guides on your website will all let the public know that you’re the real deal.
Correcting Mistakes
No one’s perfect. If you’re in business for long enough, then eventually, you’ll make a mistake. That’s not the issue -- the issue is how you respond to your mistake. Trust is easy to have when it’s not tested -- the power of the trust is shown when the going gets tough. To make sure that your customers trust you throughout all of the customer life cycle, you’ll need to come up with an established method for handling complaints and other issues.