According to Forbes, ‘94% of consumers would be more loyal to brands that practice transparency, while 56% claim that brand transparency would make them “loyal for life.”’
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Today’s market continues to change and advance at rapid speeds. And in such times as these, customers are seeking out brands who offer stability; brands who share their values, brands to which they can be loyal.
With that in mind, loyalty requires trust. If a customer trusts your brand, they’re likely to not only continue their buying journey with you, but also share their positive experiences with others – and sometimes word of mouth is the most powerful tool of all.
At redk, we’ve outlined four of those key levers that are particularly critical for building trust in customer marketing.
In Forrester’s words: ‘Organisations should build and continuously reinforce trust to establish mutually beneficial relationships with customers; attract and retain talent; and nurture an ecosystem of partners and other stakeholders that contribute to growth, retention and advocacy.’ Forrester has identified seven key levers in building trust between customer and provider: accountability, competence, consistency, dependability, empathy, integrity and transparency.
Competence
The clearest way to recognize an organisation’s qualities via existing partners and customers. As buyers place a great deal of importance on other customers’ opinions, your organisation can take advantage of consumer reviews and peer-to-peer discussions.
In order to promote positive insights, customer marketing teams should seek out customer advocates who are willing to spread the word. Customer advocates are those who share their insights on social media, in forums or during in-person events. And they can be a valuable asset.
In Forrester’s words: ‘Customer marketing should work with the product management and portfolio marketing teams to identify strategic stories.’
These stories can then be used both online and offline to truly highlight your organisation’s expertise. The role reviews play in B2B sales should also stay at the forefront of marketers’ mind when producing customer advocate strategies.
Consistency
This lever dives into customers’ expectations that the organisation will remain consistent throughout the buying journey and beyond, requiring getting organised both internally and externally.
In order to do so, your business must start with consistency from within. Investing in the effort to define team and individual roles and responsibilities clearly will improve your teams’ ability to meet customer demands as a unit.
Another way to ensure consistency is through multiple mechanisms for customer communication. Customer-facing parts of your organisation’s website should offer a wide range of communication channels. Keeping communication organised and consistent requires implementing an effective, high-value CRM software system like Salesforce. We here at redk can help your team digitally transform and stay consistent across the board with our Salesforce services.
According to Forrester, ‘Customer marketing should drive – or play a key role in ensuring – consistency in communications in content and cadence.’
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Dependability
This lever focuses on your ability to meet customer demands. Customer marketing strategies should be consistently analysed and updated in order to be a brand customers can count on.
To achieve this lever, customer marketing should place emphasis on understanding their customers and buyers alike. Once buyers become customers, their needs change – and your organisation must change with them. Additionally, customer marketing should create event experiences that build new opportunities for networking and insight collection.
Forrester encourages organisations to ‘capture key customer attributes and use them to guide decisions about interactions in the post-sale customer lifecycle.’
Transparency
This final lever is where your buyers, customers, partners and stakeholders can see your efforts to share accurate, honest information about the business. The more your customers know about your organisation, the easier it is for customer marketers to discover what is working and what isn’t.
Alignment is key. Customer marketers should be made aware of communications customers receive at all times, especially recalls or delays. Customer marketers should also be given access to data from various channels to help product management. Allowing all parties to be well-informed through transparency produces trust and, in turn, loyalty.
With over 15 years of consulting experience and CRM expertise, we here at redk understand customer marketing’s role in gaining trust. If your organisation would like to reinforce loyalty, or find out more about our Salesforce CRM implementation services, please reach out today. We understand trust, trust us!
Hideki Hashimura
Lead Consultant
CRM Transformation Practice at redk
Hideki applies over 15 years of experience in the field of CRM and Customer Experience to overcome business challenges in the customer cycle.
