Building blocks for gaining customer trust

This is the message from Samantha Burns in an article titled ‘Building customer trust' in the soon to be published 2008 edition of The Encyclopaedia of Brands & Branding in South Africa. This edition takes a closer look at ‘brand trust' and South Africa's 100 most trusted brands using the Brand Trust Index, a concept it pioneered in the 2007 edition in conjunction Ipsos-Markinor.

Burns, currently responsible for Ethics and Fairness at Discovery Health, points out that trust is a complex subject and there is no simple formula to building it. However, she does suggest five disciplines - be great, intend good, talk straight, listen hard and keep your promises - that could help companies or brands increase customer trust.

She says: “Three key business activities that touch customers in one way or another are the way we communicate, the way we design products or processes, and the way we deliver on our brand promise.

“By concentrating on five, easy-to-remember disciplines that test for character and competence in these three key business activities, customer trust will increase. These five disciplines are be great, intend good, talk straight, listen hard and keep your promises.

“To be great speaks of being competent. Be great at what we do for our customers, whatever we do, and make sure that we do it with excellence. It entails recruiting the right people for the job and ensuring they receive the relevant training and support to become experts in their fields.

“To intend good means that our intentions towards our customers are always good. We exist for their benefit first and foremost, recognising that without our customers, we have no business. It also requires that we ensure the sustainability of our business to meet customer needs, not only now, but also in the future.

"For our brand or organisation to talk straight it necessitates that we go to great lengths to be clear, simple and not misleading in all our communications. The moment a client feels confused - whether we intended that or not - they become potentially suspicious of our intentions.

“An obvious key to building customer trust is keeping promises. This is nothing new, it simply requires that a company or brand delivers on what it says it will. This can be quite challenging as a company gets larger and requires different divisions to timeously fulfil their part of the promise or when employees no longer have a sense of direct accountability.

“An age-old, indispensable relationship-building principle is to listen. Apart from the psychological benefit to the person being listened to, the benefit to the organisation that knows how to listen and systematically listen and record and act on that listening is immense.”

But how do these five disciplines relate to a company and its brands? In her article, Burns explores the answer in-depth; just one example can be found in brochures and advertising material.

Explains Burns: “Our marketing brochures and advertisements lead people to certain expectations. Are we sure that the type of expectations any reasonable human being would have based on what we publish, translate into promises that we are prepared to keep? Being committed to deliver on all our promises, it is worthwhile to make sure that we aren't inadvertently making promises that we have no intentions of keeping and indeed, cannot keep.”

If you'd like to read more about establishing customer trust, Burns' full article is published in the 2008 edition of The Encyclopaedia of Brands & Branding in South Africa being launched in October. To order your copy, email affinity@iafrica.com or call +27 11 442 2366.