3 Easy Steps to Gain Customer Loyalty & Employee Trust

Trust is earned, and this easy three-step trust management formula will show how to instill trust in your customers and employees. Learn how to build trust in the workplace and increase consumer trust so that your business flourishes. For ways to gain trust, see below.

1. Know your customers. Know your employees. Increase trust.

Earning trust is important. Want to learn how to establish trust? Learn as much as you can about your customers, as well as your staff, to create trust. Building relationships with customers is key to earning their trust, and it is also how to gain trust and respect from employees. Send out surveys, talk to people on the phone, and meet with them in person to earn trust. Be the boss that goes around to every employee and learns their interests – then follow up on those interests – think of ways you can engage your employees on this level to gain trust because employee trust in management is essential.

Your customers want to feel like individuals, as do employees; good businesses develop relationships and maintain those relationships to build trust at work. The old adage used to be that it costs 5x more to gain a new customer than it does to keep an old one. While this might not be quite as extreme anymore, customer retention is important. It does require additional effort to establish a new customer and create customer trust, but it’s still vital that you strive for new customers too. Divide your efforts between keeping old customers and establishing new ones, examine your demographics, create detailed customer personas, and monitor your analytics reports regularly to know your customers and earn their trust.

It costs more to train new employees, not just dollars, but hours, so you should work towards a high level of employee retention by increasing workplace trust. Estimated costs to replace an employee with a new hire and get that new hire up to an adequate skill level range from 16-33% of your original employee’s salary to over 200%. Lower-paying jobs are typically on the smaller end of this percentage and work their way up the more demanding the role. Think of the factors that go into replacing your current employee with a new one:

• The time a role remains vacant before a position is filled
• Advertising for the position
• Interviews
• Training the new employee
• Incurred errors while the new hire adjusts
• Getting the new hire to maximum productivity
• Low morale for other workers
• And more.

The bottom line, owners, supervisors, and managers must earn the trust of their employees. Asking yourself how to build trust at work? Talk to your employees; do they feel they are:

• Valued?
• Have room for advancement?
• Get along with their coworkers?
• Have a good work-life balance?

These are just a few things to take into account with your existing staff and part of the necessary strategies for building trust with employees.

Getting back to building customer trust, a good question to keep asking yourself is, how can you tailor your products and services to the best needs of your shoppers to gain trust? A simple two-part answer would be, think of the companies you shop at consistently and what they bring to the table to keep you there. Secondly, read your customer reviews, all of them, and use them as an instructive tool for how to refine your business and how to earn trust. Displaying reviews on your website and responding to issues will also show that you are worthy of customer trust. Work always to refine your business. Often, bad reviews are more useful than good reviews for how to gain trust. Respond to your reviews, verbally and in your actions, show that opinions matter when earning consumer trust. Don’t put on a trust show – be authentic!

2. Be real. Be human. Build trust.

Corporations that forget their basic humanity will lose clients, as well as employees, and it will be harder to gain trust back, though not impossible. People want to know that there is a person behind the brand; a founder and a leader, but one that is grounded and listens to the voices who have dedicated their time, money, and effort to the business’s success. Without dedicated customers and employees, you don’t have a business. Be transparent with who you are and what you stand for when building trust in the workplace; it’s how to gain customer trust and confidence. Be honest about your faults as well as your strengths when building trust at work – always be willing to improve in an effort to establish deeper trust within a workplace and build trust with customers.

If you find yourself faced with an issue of losing customer or employee trust, you may ask yourself, can trust be earned back? How do you gain back trust at work? Can trust be earned back with customers – how about employees?  If you aren’t sure how to gain trust back, here are some tips.

Sometimes, it may feel like an issue is out of your control when a loss of customer trust and loyalty occurs. An example, massive shipping delays from third-party vendors during a time of increased sales. What are ways companies gain back public trust? While, you, the owner, may not be directly responsible for this issue, a problem like delayed shipments could affect customer trust on a large scale. While you might lose a percentage of your customers, no matter what you do, there is a percentage that will allow you to make it right to earn trust back. How would you feel? What could someone do to make it better? Ask your customers what could be done to maintain their loyalty. While you may receive some outrageous requests, focus on the reasonable ones, and try to meet these customers somewhere in the middle for how to earn trust back and maintain customer loyalty. Deep down, we know how to earn someone’s trust, and while gaining trust back can be difficult, it’s not impossible.

How about employee trust? What would be an example that could lead to the loss of employee trust? If a deserving employee continually seeks advancement but is met with ongoing resistance, this could lead to loss of employee trust, declining productivity, and an eventual departure. For ways to build trust in the workplace, try this: if a position is not available, offer advancement in your employee’s current role; add more responsibility to the avenues they are looking to excel in. For developing trust in the workplace, negotiate a raise or other perks that you and your employee will both be happy with, adjust their position title, allow them to manage a team whether for specific projects or always; give public kudos for their efforts.

Failing to listen to an employee’s ideas simply because they do not align with your own is not how to improve trust; in fact, it is another example of how to lose employee trust. How would you feel? Not every employee’s idea can be implemented, but you can incorporate worthy suggestions into your strategy for how to increase trust. While the entirety of any given idea may not work for your company, parts of an idea can. How do you build trust in the workplace? Try to find a portion of an employee’s idea that could be beneficial, give a compliment to this idea, offer ways this idea can be expanded or adjusted to help your company. Get insight and constructive feedback from other employees, as well, that’s how you gain your employees’ trust.

If your company fails to offer some type of work-life balance with zero perks, this is another example that could lead to the loss of employee trust. If your company is working tirelessly on a project and your team’s work-life balance is suffering, try to offer a series of in-office perks or, at least, a silver lining. How do leaders build trust with employees? Facebook employees often spend long shifts at the office, but there is access to quality food, sleeping pods, work out equipment, and more; getting outside and discussing ideas is also encouraged. Offer out-of-office activities; they also great for team building. Have catered lunches – host contests where hard work yields additional perks, like free vacation days. If your employees are spending extra time at the office, find ways to make it fun.

Today, more employees are working from home. Extended periods at home can cause people to feel trapped, isolated, and a lack of motivation. As a team leader, take a break and organize a Zoom party or digital happy hour to build trust with employees. Offer a day off. Implement a remote health and wellness program that encourages people to get outside and exercise. These are just a few things you can do to build employee trust.

3. Be a catalyst for change. Improve trust skills.

Customers and employees don’t want broken promises; a pattern of broken promises is a recipe for failure. The adage of under-promise and over-perform still works today, but what customers and employees want to see is not just the willingness to change, but the changes themselves; progression! Constructive feedback should be met with a real change to ensure a customer and employee trusts you. Not all changes have to be major. Be mindful to keep the best parts of your business intact while making strides towards a better future for your corporation, its staff, and customers.

Be mindful of your marketing, too; it can be an effective method for how to build trust with customers. Use trust images, trust badges, and messaging that conveys how conscientious you are. Marketing tactics are constantly changing. Now is the time to reassess your strategy for a new era.

Due to recent events and our current world crisis, the way customers shop and your employees operate may never be quite the same. Be a positive force for the future while building trust in relationships with customers and employees. Bring hope to everyone who has made your business possible – that’s how to create trust. If you want to know how to build trust with clients, examine your products, services, and brand voice to ensure that they align with the world as it is now. Provide useful solutions to today’s problems so that your customers and employees could never imagine a life without your business –that’s how you earn trust. Building trust with clients and employees is necessary, but it doesn’t have to be difficult.

Stay connected. Set trends. Bring hope. For more ways to establish trust and bring your brand message to the forefront, visit 123Print.com.