Do Your Customers Trust You? Here Are Four Secrets to Discover What They Really Think

How do you know if someone trusts you? Is it how they talk to you? How much time do they spend with you? What do they say about you when you aren’t around?

We might argue the answer is D, all of the above. Plus, there are many other behaviors people have that indicate they trust you. Moreover, these things are true whether we are talking about people in your personal life or customers on your sales reports. 

All this talk about trust is because of Bob. As you may remember, some of our listeners write into our “I’m in a Pickle” feature of the podcast. This week we consult Bob about how to find out if the account he manages as part of his new position trusts his company.  Bob’s wants to know if we have any tests that will help him determine if they do.

In this episode, we talk about the many ways you can find out if your customers trust you. They range from the direct to the obscure but should give you a clear picture of how customers feel about your company regarding trust and many other emotions you want to know about.

Key Ideas to Improve your Customer Experience

Bob’s question inspired not just one answer, but several. We have four suggestions for Bob that can help determine if his account trusts his company. Each of them is effective in their own way, and also works together with the others to create a complete picture of the trust in this significant business relationship. 

Here are a few key moments in the discussion:

• 02:29  Our listener Bob shares his pickle as a new employee at a company handling a big account that wants to test whether the account trusts his company, and asks for our help.
• 04:13  We share our first suggestion for Bob, which is to ask customers if they trust you, preferably on surveys, which is the easy part; the hard part is what we tell you about the answers.
• 08:13  The second secret we share builds upon the first one by suggesting you pose scenarios and ask questions whose answers will indicate what they think about you.    
• 15:39  We talk about how to use what you know about customer behavior data to discern how much customers trust you, including what they want to hide from you.
• 22:02  Ryan explains how trust experiments and games can also indicate how customers feel about you, including an example from the British TV hit show, “Golden Balls.”

 

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Customer Experience Information & Resources

LinkedIn recognizes Colin Shaw as one of the 'World's Top 150 Business Influencers.' As a result, he has 290,000 followers of his work. Shaw is Founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy LLC, which helps organizations unlock growth by discovering customers' hidden, unmet needs that drive value ($). The Financial Times selected Beyond Philosophy as one of the best management consultancies for the last four years in a row. Follow Colin on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Click here to learn more about Professor Ryan Hamilton of Emory University. 

Why Customers Buy: As an official "Influencer" on LinkedIn, Colin writes a regular newsletter on all things Customer Experience. Click here to join the other 35,000 subscribers. 

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