The benefits of a customer trust index and measuring the trust of customers

The benefits of a customer trust index and measuring the trust of customers

Is it possible to measure customer trust? What types of questions can we ask our customers to see what level of trust they actually have in our salespeople and products?

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We think that it's important to be developing a customer trust index, a way of understanding the level of trust that customers have for companies. We're currently working on developing this right now. However, before it's available to you or any other company, it's certainly possibly for you to think about measuring customer trust today. You're looking for complaint discovery, ways to elicit from customers their opinions, not only of what your products and services do for them, but also of how they feel about those products and services, your company and your employees, and whether or not they believe that your company plays fair.

There are two important elements to trust – one is whether or not customers believe that you're acting in their best interests, and not just selling them something to make money in the short-term. The second element is competency. When we're building customer trust, we need to understand what it's like to be our customer, what it feels like to wait in the cold, stand in line, and so on. So basically, we want to explore with customers what they believe about our products, services, sales and company as a whole. The next round of understanding the trust that our customers have is understanding the level of trust our own employees have. It's very difficult to project trust to your customers if the employees themselves have any doubt in your good will or competence.

Hear more in Creating Customer Value, a SearchCRM.com monthly podcast series with Peppers and Rogers.

This was first published in March 2009