Here’s an excerpt from Chapter 8 of my forthcoming book Addicted Customers: How to Get Them Hooked on Your Company. To learn more about the book and the upcoming publication date go to www.AddictedCustomers.com.
Trust is not a given, especially these days when distrust is on the increase. A major mistake that many companies make is assuming that because they act ethically and honestly, they are perceived as trustworthy by customers. Perception is reality, and it is the customers’ perceptions that count. Recent studies uniformly show that unless there is direct evidence to the contrary, customers assume that companies are interested in winning the sale, period. This seems to be a well-grounded perception as a recent study found that nearly eighty percent of business leaders make marketing decisions without a clear understanding of customer preferences.
Not only is trust elusive, it does not evolve spontaneously. Trust grows out of interactions that demonstrate a genuine interest in a mutually beneficial relationship. Trust has an organic quality; it depends on interactions for nurturing and sustenance. Two essential elements of trust are predictability and dependability. However, these elements by themselves will not produce the type of trust that leads to enduring relationships. Confidence in the relationship enables both parties to go beyond tangible goods and services. But, it requires faith to trust the other party when inevitable change and uncertainty enter the situation.
Many companies take predictability and dependability seriously and take pride in saying they stand behind their products. That’s great, but without faith, conditions can lead to “satisficing” trust. “Satisficing” is the term that Herbert Simon coined to apply to information or knowledge that was sufficient to achieve an immediate goal. Armed with satisficing trust, customers feel confident in buying products from a given vendor, but that doesn’t mean they have bought into relationships. For relationships to evolve, customers must have hopeful trust, must desire to take the relationships beyond a satisficing level, must want to shift value from the products to the relationships.
Why would customers want this shift to occur? Without faithful trust, the world is overwhelmingly complex and uncertain. Without faith, the burden of adapting to change falls squarely on the shoulders of each individual. As discussed earlier, this is a daunting challenge that pushes customers out of their psychological comfort zones and into adversarial interactions with vendors.
Figure 8.1 illustrates the evolution of trust, and provides a guide for conceptualizing strategies and practices that facilitate this evolution.
Distrust - When customers distrust a company or have heard a company is not trustworthy, they do not want to do business with that company. These days customers have ample choices for avoiding a given company.
Suspicious Trust - When customers suspect that a company is focused only on the sale, they take a “What’s in it for me?” attitude. Indications of a one-sided agenda by the company are amplified in importance and can overwhelm other evidence of trustworthiness.
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Satisficing Trust - trust is sufficient to tilt the risk/reward scale in favor of a purchase. It is applied in an instance- by-instance basis-there is no accrued loyalty. Satisficing trust makes it easy for customers to buy commodity products that, in their minds, are undifferentiated from competitive products. Satisficing trust is a barrier to the evolution of faithful trust and long-term, profitable relationships.
Hopeful Trust - customers exhibit hopeful trust when their experiences surrounding a product have meaning, when they desire the experience and want to become more engaged. They are hopeful that they can reduce or eliminate the need to keep looking for evidence to distrust. Everyone wants to reduce uncertainty and complexity in their lives, to adapt. Customers have hopeful trust in a vendor when they are receptive to guidance and assistance. However, it is just a test drive.
Faithful Trust - Faith emerges when test drives lack evidence of distrust and allow expansion in the scope of the relationship. When faith in a vendor exists, customers forgive snafus and treat minor breaches of trust as instances rather than indices. Customers put more value in relationships and the relationships ability to help them thrive in a changing world.
Addicted customers exhibit faithful trust. They become hooked on a company and forgive its snafus. They value the relationship, they share information for mutual benefit, and they expect reciprocal sharing. Addicted customers see the relationship as the source of what they value and desire most. They may want a given product, but they desire the relationship for its ability to deliver emotionally gratifying experiences, an authentic sense of belonging, and the ability to adapt to an ever-changing world.
Faithful trust exists when Billy Blue can write his customers a letter telling them he is at risk of going out of business, and receive sizable checks in return. Leaps of faith are not based on guarantees; they are based on genuine demonstrations of a commitment to win-win outcomes.
