Customer loyalty and trust are essential to building a successful business. And while that may sound obvious, it’s hard to overestimate the value of building a solid base for long-term customers.
It is because customer retention is much more economical than regular acquisition. It costs 5x more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.
Even above retention, 83% of customers say they would recommend a business they trust to others. It means that earning customer trust can not only help you retain existing customers but can also help you passively generate new leads and earn sales.
Do you want to know how to gain customer trust and confidence? Then, follow these six actionable methods, and you’ll be well on your way to retaining a loyal fanbase.
1. Offer Excellent Customer Service
The level of consumer services you provide has a significant impact on customer loyalty and retention. It means having dedicated support staff and setting high standards for the speed and quality of your service is essential.
Once you have hired and trained a team of support agents, you need to facilitate contacts for your customers. Offer more support channels and make these channels visible on your site.
Then, as customers reach out with issues and questions, make sure you agree with their answers. Create guidelines for your agents that list appropriate answers for more systematic research and ensure they have the necessary tools to find solutions to more complex ones.
Of course, that doesn’t mean everyone should be approached to serve your customers. Instead, you need to encourage your agents to see these responses as the basic framework for their interactions, treat each customer as an individual.
It’s hard to earn trust when your customers feel like treating them like numbers. So instead, your goal should be to provide an effective, consistent personal touch service.
Train your agents to provide the information each customer needs, and then take the time to make sure the customer’s needs are met. And if there is an opportunity to be above and beyond – grab it.
It may take a few extra seconds of effort to make up the customer’s day, which can go a long way in building the kinds of relationships you want for your brand.
2. Be Transparent
If you want your prospects to trust you, you have to earn their trust. It means being honest and transparent about what they can expect from your company.
And it should start immediately with their first interaction with your brand. Avoid false sales copies and marketing campaign tricks, and don’t try to attract audience attention with excessive claims about your products or services. Instead, focus on being as straightforward as possible about what you can offer and set accurate customer expectations from the start.
Achieving this goal also requires the involvement of your sales team. They should be simple, with information on pricing, fees, and clear about any policies that might affect potential buyers in the future, such as return and cancellation procedures.
Every customer needs to know what to expect before signing a contract or placing an order. And while sharing certain pieces of data may dissuade a lead or two from converting, that’s okay. Ensuring all of your customers are happy with their experience is more important than getting as many sales as possible.
3. Focus On Content
Learning how to build trust is a key element of your business’s success. Creating and promoting high-quality, relevant content is not a new concept in marketing. Using a trust to build influence, however, is a newer focus.
Content can do this in several ways. If you establish yourself as a thought leader and provide readers with content that addresses their problems and provides them with genuine advice, strategies, and solutions, you can become a valuable resource.
Once they’re sure what you’re talking about, they’ll feel more confident in considering buying from—or even going to—your brand. But here’s the thing: That content may not come from a sales or promotional site.
It should be authentic and educational, focusing solely on helping the customer, not selling your services. The good thing is that this kind of content is incredibly effective.
A recent study published by Conductor found that:
- 65% of consumers feel that the brand is trustworthy/positive when they read some educational content from that brand.
- One week after reading some educational content from the brand, 74.49% of consumers identified the brand as “positive,” an increase of 8% from the initial reading of the content.
- One week after reading some of the brand’s educational content, 73.3% of consumers identified the brand as “trustworthy,” a 9% increase since initially reading the content.
4. Respect Consumer Time
Because our society usually loses some of the courtesy and respect that past generations have shown each other, we are well served to raise awareness of other people’s time, personal schedule, and needs. This concept translates to:
- Timely reply to telephone calls.
- Hold fast to estimated call end times, or inquire if attendees are free to keep going.
- Timely reply to emails and thorough resolution of all the points raised.
- Always log on to a scheduled call 2 minutes in before in advance of the start time.
5. Follow Your Commitments
This concept is associated with respecting one’s time but goes a little further. Consultants cannot complete work without clients’ contributions (feedback, content resources, consent, etc.). If you don’t cross the limit yourself, you can’t expect the customer to play their part in maintaining the timeline. This translates to:
- Keep the meetings going.
- Promptly getting back in touch with any follow-up items promised.
- Regularly communicate progress made towards the set deadline (it’s a great way to show that you always think of the client and keep the client up to speed if others ask them about status).
6. Ease of Payment
We are in the generation where internet piracy cases are increasing. Most of the customers want to shop online. Who doesn’t want to buy a product while sitting on the couch at home watching TV? But with increasing cases of internet theft and account hacking, customers are avoiding using this platform.
So what needs to be done? As a business, you need to make sure that you have access to more secure payment options both online and offline. It will help in building consumer trust.
Conclusion
Trust is the building block of robust customer support. It is essential to earning long-term customers and can make all the difference to your company’s success.
And gaining a client’s trust doesn’t require any complicated strategy. The perfect step you can take is to provide excellent customer service and make sure your support team knows the cruciality of their roles.
From there, be as transparent and honest as possible with your customers at every stage of the buying process and get feedback regularly.