4 Rules to Build Customer Trust in Any Business

Customer trust is key to financial success. Your business will fail if you break the trust of your customers. When you’re hired by a customer or sell them a product, there is an inherent level of trust. Plumbers are trusted to know how to fix plumbing problems and get the job done right the first time. Mechanics are trusted with knowing how to repair a car.

Smartphones are trusted to work properly – not catch fire.

How can businesses build trust among their customers?

1. Offer a Guarantee that Forces You to Be Better

If you want to get the trust of your customers, put your money where your mouth is. There are a lot of companies pushing trust during their marketing campaigns, but they don’t put their customers first.

A company that offers a guarantee or warranty gains the trust of their customers.

Some service businesses even pay to have the job done right by another professional and will even pay fines or other costs associated with an error on their end. It’s this type of guarantee or warranty that drives sales.

L.L. Bean built their business on a lifetime warranty, and they’ve recently made headlines for discontinuing their warranty. The company will work with their clients to find a solution that is fair after one year, but they no longer offer their lifetime warranty, citing abuse of the warranty by consumers.

2. Accreditations, Associations or Certifications

Flex those accreditations, associations and certifications. These are powerful tools to gain the trust of costumers. Drain Doctor New York is a great example of this, showing that they’re:

• A Preferred Plumber
• Green Screened
• Tech Seal of Safety worthy

Tech companies may flex their certifications as well as electricians and other service professionals. Retail outlets or manufacturers that use green products or protect the environment in some way can use this as a trust-building tool.

3. Transparency Matters

Companies that are transparent win the game of trust. Take a quick look at some of the big scandals that have hit multinational companies recently. Yahoo’s breach and Equifax are two companies that have made headlines because they were hacked.

And the backlash may have been less if they were transparent about the issue.

Instead, the companies waited and waited before telling customers that their information had been leaked. This is a serious issue.

Transparency, rather than concealing everything about a business’s operations, can do a world of good for your business. Buffer, a social media tool, is transparent down to the salaries that they pay their employees and every last penny that is spent on their service.

It’s a trust-building tool that works very well.

4. Focus on the Being the Best

Above all else, you need to make sure that the cornerstone of your business’s operations is focusing on being the best. This means being better than the competition. Superiority is key, and if you offer the best plumbing service, customer service, shoes – anything – you’ll satisfy your customers.

The key isn’t to focus on trust in this point.

You want to focus on offering the best possible product to your customer. If you can do this, you’ll never have to tell a customer to trust you again.