How to win (and keep) your customers’ trust – top tips from James Lenehan, managing director of WIN WIN.
There is one crucial factor that makes a serious difference when it comes to establishing, building and maintaining strong customer relationships: Trust.
If you don’t have trust, you don’t really have a relationship. That is equally true in business as in your personal life. Those looking to build lasting customer relationships must keep the old saying ‘Trust is hard won and easily lost’ constantly in their minds.
How Do You Win Trust?
Trust is only won by behaving in a trustworthy and reliable way in everything you do. Building trust is about being real, human and congruent. To achieve trust you must be trustworthy. Trustworthiness is based on both your character and your competence. Some of the most important character traits required to create trustworthiness is integrity (i.e. your behaviour has to be consistent with your values).
If you are in a leadership role it means making sure everyone ‘lives the brand’. This means they understand and buy into the company’s brand values. It is worth examining processes too. Many companies fail to focus on how their processes live up to the promises they offer customers and then wonder why they look elsewhere.
If you have ever been on the receiving end of one of those call centres that endlessly ask you to select from a list of options and then experience the phone go dead when you think you have finally made it through to speak with a human being, you will know how a customer might come to think of the service offered as at best unreliable and at worst downright infuriating.
Essential Rules to Keep Your Customers’ Trust:
-Never let them down.
-Consider things from their perspective.
-Always justify their faith in you.
-Go the extra mile to exceed their expectations.