Who do you “trust”?
Collin at RadicalTrust.ca has a good post up about, well, radically trusting your customers. I have another post noodling around in my head regarding community, anonymity, behaviour, etc. but in the meantime, I really am stuck on the “trust” factor as Collin describes it. Granted, I get his point that – Consumers have no reason to trust you – and I for the most part agree. But the conclusion from that – When you open the relationship by trusting your consumer, you may actually earn their trust in return. – opens a slew of questions for me about what consumers/ people actually want from a business. Do they want to trust them as individuals, or in the aggregate? I trust American Airlines that their planes will stay in the air. I trust they have hired qualified mechanics and that the gov’t has systems in place for quality assurance. Do I trust them not to raise airfares, lose my bags, or cut back on flight routes? Not really. And only one of those do I believe is directly within their power to control (the bags). The rest are the results of the competitive business landscape they operate in.
So that leads me to my boat-load of questions…
Would you trust a company? Can you? Do you need to? What is the/your definition of trust? Is it the same way you trust your spouse or parent? Your boss? Your friends? Can you trust an organization, or just the individual people within it?
Can you trust it to always live up to your values? Does it have to? Can a company be all things to all people, as what may make me trust a company may not be what makes you trust them. Where’s your dividing line?
Do you still do business with a company who has broken your trust before? Is there a degree in the trust level?
Who decides and how?
[photo credit: thorinside on Flickr]
Maybe you are being rhetorical. But I have been thinking about this since you posted and decided to respond. I don’t have all the answers, that said… Here are all the answers.
> Would you trust a company?
Trusting a company is foundation of every finacial transaction you make. You trust that the product is made with the standards, quality and of the materials it is portrayed as and priced to. You trust that they will be there if there is a problem, they will be accountable. I suppose, they trust that the money you are giving them is good.
When I think of the trust we put into the food business, my head explodes. I think of that with every piece of meat I eat, every glass of juice I drink. (Government restrictions, also based in trust may be dealt with in another rant) This is about trust.
> Can you?
We do every day. Actually several hundred times a day. Driving down the street… think of the hundreds of thousands of products, things, and people that could literally kill you… if you don’t trust they won’t you can not move.
> Do you need to?
Trust is the foundation of society, without trust, community is impossible
> What is the/your definition of trust?
Trust is truth. A firm reliance on integrity, ability, or character… What’s yours?
> Is it the same way you trust your spouse or parent?
Of course not. That is love. However, trust is a key principle of love isn’t it? Love is the definition God to some people. Some folks would go as far as to say that to trust is divine. Trust in truth. Gandhi said, “I used to look for truth in God, now I know that truth is God”. I’m a trust man.
> Your boss?
Who trusts their boss? ;-)
> Your friends?
Of course.
> Can you trust an organization, or just the individual people within it?
I don’t see the difference.
> Can you trust it to always live up to your values?
No, in fact, I am always surprised when they do. That fosters loyalty.
Does it have to?
It doesn’t have to. But if the trust is lost, you may find it hard to stay in business.
> Can a company be all things to all people, as what may make me trust a company may not be what makes you trust them. Where’s your dividing line?
I believe that trust has more to do with honesty and truth then it does a sliding scale of transparency. I agree that some people have different standards in what they will accept as truth, as much as every company has a scale of how much transparency they can accept before feeling compromised. Maybe this is a new way to define a target demographic… who knows…
> Do you still do business with a company who has broken your trust before? Is there a degree in the trust level?
Absolutely. We are all human. An in that we trust people can learn and grow. Companies I think, are the same.
Look at the famous Tylenol example of re-earned trust.
http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/spring01/Hogue/tylenol.html
> Who decides and how?
The consumers, the customers, the users. In other words. People.
cheers
collin
Posted on 24-Feb-07 at 2:44 pm | Permalink
Hey Collin,
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I wasn’t be rhetorical though, I think these types of questions are fundamental to building customer relationships. Your idea of what “trust” means and how you are willing/ able to relate to a company does not necessarily mesh with my perception. To your point on “who decides” – the customer… exactly. But one size does not fit all and definitions of trust change from person to person. I gave my example of how far I am willing to trust a company, but it may be less or more for the next person. Words as homogeneous as “trust” need to be parsed further if we are going to truly understand what motivates people.
That being said, I absolutely disagree that you can trust a company vs. the individuals within a company. When I think of Wal-Mart the company I have a much different impression than if I think about Suzie the Wal-Mart cashier. It’s just human nature.
Posted on 27-Feb-07 at 11:23 am | Permalink
Well start parsin’, Tamera! This is a very fertile topic IMHO – it leads in a number of directions.
Think about the offbeat kinds of “rule-breaker” businesspeople that are quite trusted by the public today:
- Mark Cuban
- Howard Stern
etc.
or – Google, insofar as their prospectus stated they were a different kind of company, would never do anything to appease quarterly investment targets; and went public in a nose-thumbing way vis-a-vis Wall Street; etc.
Now compare them to “careful” companies that never misspeak or misstate.
Is throwing caution to the winds in some cases a means of building trust? I never would have thunk it.
But I think the answer is that companies, like politicians, have multiple constituencies. You’re going to wind up offending someone – so you have to calculate who that should be, and balance the various interests that are out there.
Again think about Google having to cosy up to 10’s of 1,000’s of webmasters for moral support and as AdSense publishers to they can build out their content program. At the same time they take actions directly against that same constituency when they crack down on search engine spam techniques. They need to keep them happy but also rule against them, to keep the other constituency (users) happy.
Obviously, it’s worked, mainly because Google’s overprotectiveness of users has led to bold, defiant actions — not cautious ones. Caution would have destroyed trust.
In other fields — like entertainment — how do you balance the need to be racy, exciting, lewd, crude, etc. – with the apparent outcry against this? Again, who is supposed to trust you or like you? If you back down on your principles everytime someone complains, *that* loses you trust in your main audience.
Knowing which constituency holds the balance of the power is vital to the “lifetime politician.” Companies need to get better at it.
Posted on 03-Mar-07 at 2:59 pm | Permalink