“If people like you they'll listen to you, but if they trust you they'll do business with you.”
― Zig Ziglar
Building customer's trust is one of the few factors you can control to gain customers and can be the most important one in a service business. Products have brand loyalty, consistency, and they can usually be found in multiple locations, whereas how a service is provided can vary depending on who is providing it and potential customers won't have the trust in a brand to factor in. One of the first things a potential customer will look into is the reviews to determine how well a job you have done for others in the past. Reviews help quickly build up trust in a potential customer that you are the best company for the job. Let us dive in to what customer trust is, how you can use it to grow your business, and ways to implement tools to dominate your competition by taking advantage of the trust you built.
What is Customer Trust?
Customer trust is the faith a consumer has in a company. It is not trusting that a company won't make a mistake, but rather that if it does that it will deliver on it's promises to do what is right and fix them. Trust is that a company is representing itself and it's abilities honestly.
Why Should you Establish Customer Trust?
Customer trust is like currency that you can spend on mistakes and company changes. An unhappy customer will seek out services elsewhere at best and at worse, become a negative brand ambassador warning other potential customers to stay away. Having a built up level of trust allows you time to fix your mistakes or raise your prices before a customer is unhappy with your company. Customer trust can be damaged by bad experiences and repaired with good customer service, however once it's broken a customer is usually lost. It's important to have a line of communication that an unsatisfied customer can reach out to to help fix issues and keep up the trust levels.
How to Gain Customer Trust?
The quickest method - Reviews! Reviews can showcase a track record of your work. They can show customers the good and bad parts to make a judgement on how well your company can fit their needs and how much they can trust your company. Reviews can show that your company is consistently late to appointments but otherwise do a great job and help build trust that they will receive a similar experience.
Communication is another way to gain trust. Marketing and sales representatives can open up the lines of communication to get started building trust. Customer service representatives can build upon this by communicating how job progress is going or allowing a line of communication to discuss issues with the service. When a customer feels heard and feels that they can be reach someone to resolve issues trust is gained.
How Can you Take Advantage of Customer Trust to Grow Your Business?
Reviews can help turn potential customers into paying customers, however there are other ways to take advantage of customer trust and use it to grow your business. A "brand ambassador" is a customer turned advocate for your business and if you give them tools they can be like free sales people. If you find a customer has been sending you business, you may offer them incentives via coupons, or free merchandise or giveaways. Send some free merchandise to a brand ambassador to wear or to give away, can be another way to get your brand out there and may be a business tax expense write off depending on your circumstances. A loyalty program or coupons can work for the brand ambassador or their referrals, giving the brand ambassador an incentive to send as many referrals as they can for loyalty points or savings off future jobs or a tool in the form coupons to give their referrals savings.
How to Utilize Reviews?
Placing reviews on your website can do three things for your business. The first thing it can do is if you place the reviews with schema or use a widget that has it built in, your reviews can show up on search results or in rich snippets. This can make your website links stand out among your competition on search results. You can find out more about review schema from google: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/structured-data/review-snippet
The second thing that reviews on your website can do is to gain trust from customers who didn't search your brand or business name and found your website from a referral link or search result. The potential customer may have been searching for not the service itself but an adjacent topic and found your website from a search engine result for that such as "medium style haircuts for men". This probably landed them on an article page of your website, however if you have a review widget on this page that states a high number of reviews, this can gain you trust. If they didn't search for the service or your brand itself they might not have noticed your company on any review platforms. If you are looking for such a review widget check out this widget: https://elfsight.com/all-in-one-reviews-widget/ or https://www.review-widget.net/ or https://www.sociablekit.com/free-widgets/free-google-reviews-widget-website/.
The third thing placing reviews on your website can do is provide a way to gain a way for the customer to communicate. This one is referring to having a Facebook review link, or review platform link that goes to a social media website. Sometimes this is a social media feed instead of a review widget, however placing the review widget or social media feed allows a customer to reach your social media profile page where hopefully you have utilized it to become an open line of communication to your customers. Social media can be a powerful tool to communicate with your current customers and potential ones. Reviews can allow them to see how good a fit your company can be for your needs. The ability for a person to leave comments on post or quickly reach out can help you see how well your company is being received by the public and allows a customer with a bad experience a place to say something without them leaving a negative review. You can then reach out and hopefully turn the customer experience around and encourage the newly happy customer to leave a good review.
Final Thoughts
Good customer reviews can help bring new business in, but bad reviews can push new business away so a businesses should try to make it easy for a customer to communicate any issues and experiences so they don't feel like the only option is to leave a negative review to warn others. Reviews can also be a way to identify how well you or your employees are doing such as multiple of reviews of one particular employee standing out either negatively or positively. Utilize customer trust effectively and you can use it to gain brand ambassadors who can become a great source of new referral business. Customer trusts that your company will get the job done and leave them with a good experience, however if you don't honor that faith and trust, it can lead to broken trust and customers who will only have negative things to say about your company. Customer trust can be slow to build but very quick to lose. It only takes a few negative reviews to make potential customers question if you are the right company for the job.