A customer’s trust is the most crucial aspect of your business. It doesn’t matter if you’re a healthcare practitioner selling a therapy session with rates in the three digits or an interior designer selling a full scope design package with fees in the five digits; trust is the single most important factor for a client to say yes to what you’re offering. The amount of trust required is usually proportional to the price of your product or service.
However, the trust level doesn’t end at the close of the sale. Delivering a positive client experience is also essential. Happy clients will be easier to work with throughout your process and will also be potential referrals for you in the future. I have seen some businesses do well in “selling” their product but quickly lose the customer’s trust later on when the customers go through the process.
Here are three tips on how to retain a customer’s trust from the start to the end of the customer journey.
1. Build up the reserves in your Trust Bank
The trust from your client is not a black and white case where they either have it or they don’t. Instead, you can think of it as a bank where you need to build up the reserves like a rainy-day fund. If something contentious happens down the road, there should be some reserves in your trust bank that you can draw on without completely depleting it. The more reserves you have, the better you can weather future storms in the relationship.
To build up these reserves, you need to take small actions that give your client trust in you and your organization. The first deposits will happen during the consultation period, depending on how well your Sales and Marketing process demonstrates your level of expertise. If you do this well, you should already have a certain level of credibility before your customer walks through your door or gets on the first consultation with you. This credibility should have been displayed on your website, social media efforts, or webinar and speaking events that you do.
Then, when you take the customer through your process, positive actions like delivering on your results and deadlines will be additional deposits in the Trust Bank. You want to have many more positive transactions than negative ones. Customers tend to remember the negative moments, so you want an abundance of positive experiences that your customer can draw on, if and when a negative situation occurs. The more positive reserves you have, the more resilience there is in the relationship with your customer.
2. Design your process for reliability and predictability
Unless you’re a single-person operation, you will have other staff or team members interact with your customers. Therefore, the key is to think about your process and have it systematized so that you can ensure a consistent client experience no matter which team member your client interacts with. Inconsistency is what deteriorates trust.
Part of the success of big franchise chains is the consistency they deliver in all their locations. Think about all the different McDonald’s or Starbucks in the world. No matter which location you visit, you get a similar product offering and client experience. This is why customers trust the brand. There is consistency and predictability in the experience, and that is a significant reason why those who like franchises choose to patronize them.
3. Plan to under-promise and over-deliver
So far, I’ve given you tips on how to build trust at the beginning and the middle of your customer journey. What if you could carry this massive level of trust and knock it out of the park at the tail end of the customer journey? This would make it so that your customer will tell all their friends about their experience, and this will ensure that you get warm referrals from your happy customers.
The way to do this is by planning to under-promise in the beginning so that you can over-deliver in the end. Of course, what you promise in the beginning should be in line with your scope of work during the consultation, but my point is to err on the side of caution when promising your deliverables when the process starts. And when it comes to delivering, if you can offer more than what you had originally promised and go the extra mile, that will solidify your customer’s positive impression of you. A customer will always have recency bias, so no matter how well you did at the beginning of your process, if you missed the mark in the end, that will be all they remember.
So there you have it, a recipe to build, retain, and transfer the client’s trust in you and make it work for your business. I hope you will implement it in your customer journey and reach out to me if you need help in the process.
