It really doesn’t matter what type of your business you’re in establishing trust is paramount to your success. Seth Godin had a blog post on this Benefit of the doubt where he talks about how building up trust allows you some leeway with your customers when things go wrong. And if you’ve been in business for even a short amount of time you know that stuff just happens sometimes that is completely out of your control. Having established a good reputation with your customers will give you the benefit of the doubt.
As an online business if you are focused strictly on cutting costs or rolling out new marketing initiatives but not on establishing a strong customer centric organization you are bond to run into problems. Trust is the fundamental building block of customer service and not just in dealing with an issue after the fact.
Without having established trust…
You emails are spam.
Your marketing efforts are ignored.
Your business partnerships become strained.
Your sales and profits fall.
For an online business this is even more critical as there is no storefront to walk into, no face-to-face interaction. A study by GetElastic.com listed some of these as the top six issues in establishing trust from your customer’s point of view:
- Quality of the product
- Quality and reliability of customer service
- Will the item arrive on time?
- Will the product be as described or shown on the site?
- Is the item true to size?
- What if I need to return the item?
Having a well designed, clean web site with a secure ordering process, links to customer service, clearly stated return and privacy policies and a toll free number that is plastered throughout the site will all go a long way in making customers feel at ease as you establish trust.
We’ve gone so far as listing the CEO’s direct email address and personal cell phone number on our sites.
Adding customer reviews for your products is another way to build trust. It is important here that while you review each review for inappropriate language you don’t filter or throw out reviews because you don’t agree, or they are tearing down your products. Customers expect to see some less than perfect reviews. And if you are knowingly selling crap then hiding reviews isn’t going to save you anyway.
We also like to add some blind surveys to some of our sites so that customers can give feedback completely anonymously. This is another way to gauge “how are we doing” and will also help in improving trust.
Another tack that we’ve used for sites on a shoe string budget is to be sure to take advantage of Google product feeds into Google shopping. Not only do you get sales (well that’s the best part) but you also get another opportunity for an uncensored view of your products, the shipping process and the overall shopping experience. This keeps you on your toes and ultimately improves your opportunities for success.
And as a slight twist to the end of Seth’s piece – if you worked at it could you do a better job of establishing trust and growing your bottom line? After all we know that it is infinitely better business (and less expensive) to keep an existing customer than to find a new one!