Feelter blog

Building customer trust should be a core component of any effective brand strategy. While there are many reasons behind why the first and most important one is that happy customers are loyal customers. According to a recent study by Deloitte Digital, more than eight out of 10 consumers say that trustworthiness is the trait that makes them feel most aligned with their favorite brands.

In other words, consumers come back for more when their brand experience is a positive one. In fact, when customers have a negative experience, nearly 13% of them will share it with at least 20 others. Ouch. With 62% of consumers reporting they feel they have a relationship with their favorite brands, negative customer experiences can be damaging to your brand in both the short and long term.

How to Build Customer Trust

Developing a customer satisfaction process will help your business build better trust with its customers. It will also help you find unhappy customers and understand what went wrong in their experience. Besides, it’s super valuable for any business to engage and communicate with its clients regularly –– it’s just good business practice. There are a few methods to measuring customer satisfaction, including metrics like:

1. Net Promoter Score®
2. Customer Acquisition Cost
3. Churn Rate
4. Customer Satisfaction Score

• Gather Customer Data and Metrics

But before reaching out to customers, it’s important to understand who they are, where they are, and what they need. This kind of customer data helps your business build the right message at the right time, in a way that establishes and builds brand trust. These kinds of metrics can be found using a robust CRM platform that gathers real-time customer information from across multiple channels. 

 Gathering customer data with the purpose of strengthening customer trust is foundational to developing strategies for customer outreach and satisfaction. As you collect more information on your target audience it’s helpful to adjust your business’s sales funnel, product experience, and marketing strategy in order to improve the overall customer experience and deliver on your brand promise.

• Optimize CX with User Experience Research

User experience (UX) is a primary factor customers consider when assessing their satisfaction with a brand’s product or service. A positive customer experience (CX) can be a make or break factor for customers when testing out a new product offering. Alternatively, a negative experience can have a long-term impact on how a customer views your brand. That’s why getting the user and customer experience right is so critical to customer retention and satisfaction. 

 While user experience testing can be costly, it doesn’t have to be. Conducting user research can be as simple as getting your target demographic in a room and asking them to try out your product without any input from you or your research team. Getting objective, unfiltered feedback from your business’s target user can be invaluable to finding gaps in the user journey and customer experience. Oftentimes, they can be small design details or incorrect copy which doesn’t take a big budget to fix. Other times, it can reveal huge gaps in product and marketing implementation which don’t align with customer expectations. 

 Whatever the outcome, go into the process open-minded and ready to discover new information you never knew about your customers’ experiences. All in all, user experience testing can only have positive outcomes, helping you identify the most glaring problems and frustrations keeping customers from enjoying your product or service.

• Understand and Reflect Customer Values

Customers don’t want to be a metric. They want to know they are seen and heard –– and that goes beyond a featured customer testimonial on your landing page. It goes as deep and shared beliefs and values. Today, 71% of consumers report that they prefer buying from companies that align with their values, with 70% of consumers expecting brands to take positions on social issues that are relevant and important to them. 

 In translation, that means customers don’t want to buy from brands they don’t identify with both personally, socially, and politically. Reflecting the right values to your customers is essential to creating a strong and positive bond between your brand and target audience. That means more than just walking the walk. It means stating upfront who you are and what you stand for without any gimmicks. You may be thinking, well, I just sell a product –– what kind of values does my business have to offer? 

 The answer is simple and comes alongside another question: What does your business stand for? This is a question for you and your team to dig deep into. After all, to customers, you’re more than just a business. You’re a living, breathing brand –– and that comes with expectations that your mission is aligned with theirs. From helping to create a more sustainable environment to promoting women’s rights issues, values are invaluable to building trust and brand loyalty.

Conclusion

In conclusion, building customer trust takes engagement, effort, and patience. But with the right customer data, user experience, and brand values, it shouldn’t take long for your business to start reaping the rewards of a trusting and loyal customer base. For entrepreneurs approaching new markets, customer trust can make or break a business. 

 From getting your business off the ground to ensuring its stability, building better relationships with customers is essential to the long-term success of your business and should be considered at every stage of its development. To sum it up: Listening to customers and adapting to their needs is a tell-tale sign of a business that’s built to last. 

 Learn more about how you can leverage customer UGC in your brand’s organic marketing efforts with Feelter. Designed to strengthen brand trust and customer loyalty throughout the sales funnel, Feelter puts your shoppers’ voices front and center in the customer shopping experience.