Building trust with your customers is a crucial step in establishing brand loyalty, especially in today’s high-tech, highly competitive marketplace. You need to deliver on the promises you make, your products need to do what they claim to do, and consistency within your messaging and communication must be maintained. Enter the THREE Ts of TRUST – a foundation built to establish trust with every customer served.
How to Build Customer Trust
- Talking. Customers trust a company more when they know there is a living, breathing human being behind the service they’re receiving. Your company is probably already active on social media – but are you truly present? Make it routine to respond to social media comments! Whether it’s positive feedback or a frustrated customer, answer everyone (publicly first, directed to PM if they need more assistance). Whenever you can, avoid using scripts or formulated answers when communicating with your customers. Instead, have a general outline, but encourage your expert Customer Service team members to speak from their own minds, graciously and humbly.
- Transparency. Customers lose trust when they feel they haven’t been told the whole story, that there’s information being withheld from them. While there is such a thing as over-communicating, customers should never be left in the dark. It’s in your company’s best interest to be visible, keep customers informed, and acknowledge any errors proactively. Ensure that your customers always have multiple ways to contact your customer service team – a phone number, live chat and an email address – should all be easily visible on your website, preferably on the front page.
- Timeliness. Along the same lines of transparency, timeliness is key to building and keeping a customer’s trust, especially when they have an issue with a transaction. The longer you put off answering an email, resolving an issue or notifying your customers of a delay, the more you can expect customers to part ways with your brand. When a problem is resolved promptly and efficiently, you will be forever remembered as a reliable brand.
By making it a priority to follow through with genuine communication, consistent transparency and prompt interaction, your company will be more effective in gaining consumer trust.
Established in 1920 in Portland, Oregon, 2020 marked 100 years of expertise from DENNIS Uniform. Celebrating a century of school partnerships and three generations of satisfied families, DENNIS Uniform is the largest school uniform provider in the United States.