The Business of Trust

When every option is only one click away, why will a customer stay and do business with you? Of course, relevance, simple user experiences, distinctive content, and ability to get done what you need are important. But in the digital age, one element floats to the top: Trust. For most brands, trust is a cornerstone of what they stand for -- safety, reliability. It is the sum total of digital expectations met and exists from the moment of a visitor’s first digital interaction with a brand but is easily lost. But trust in the digital age has an increasingly high "burden of proof," especially given the modern anxieties around security, privacy, and complexity that can sink an otherwise powerful brand. Even “digital disappointments,” such as slow-loading pages, poor mobile experiences, complex website navigation, overly aggressive sales tactics and unmaintained digital programs will fall short of customer expectations, and ultimately drive them away.

Let me tell you a story to illustrate this. For a high-tech retailer client of ours with both stores and an online presence, they, as well as their competitors, could not appreciably move the needle on growing online sales as a percent of their total sales. Yet growing online was critical to the long-term health of the business, since stores were too expensive to scale further, and establishing an online relationship with their customers was critical to lowering the cost of cross- and up-selling.

Looking at the data, we saw that consumers would go to every competitors' web site and then drop out of the online channel. Usually, they ended up buying in a store, which from our research indicated was their intention all along. There was simply a very low level of trust in any of the players in the category. Pricing seemed complicated, and there were always special deals lurking around that people felt were hidden online. Many questions about trade-in credit were hard to figure out, and you did not realize you could buy online and pick up in store until you already bought online. Questions sent via social media got scripted, bureaucratic responses. Queries into the on-site search engine rarely generated useful answers. The buying process was complicated. While all this issues were problematic, the biggest problem was trust, in this case an emotional, core sense from the consumer that digital was not the way to go.

Trust in the digital age requires consistency of interactions across the customer's journey transparency, simplicity, reliability, responsiveness, and a proper use of the customer information the consumer expects you to have. At its core, building trust isn't a one-off event but a commitment across the customer's entire journey. Doing this well requires a constant set of signals and actions that the customer comes first. But just 19% of brands have digital marketing programs that consistently meet and exceed digital standards and norms and rarely disappoint or frustrate visitors, according to Northpage analysis of 75,000 digital marketing program benchmarks across 130 countries (Northpage is one of our exclusive alliance partners).

For our client, this lack of trust on in the digital experience reflected a lack of faith by the consumer that all of their concerns were being addressed online. The benchmark was not the competitors in the space; it was Amazon, Uber, Expedia, and even most of the major banks, who have all made huge strides in offering end-to-end, seamless digital experiences.

New analysis tools are available to help isolate and explain this breakdowns in trust. Artificial Intelligence services such as Northpage can test a digital and mobile customer journey against thousands of ever-updating "best practices", and illustrate where the journey falls short and what the benchmark experiences truly are. They cite how content can be inconsistent between a search link and a landing page, how copy can be considered misleading, how key steps in the consumer's opinion of the proper journey flow are not being met, and many other shortcomings. These services can not only create a punch list of fixes, but also show deeper changes needed in tone, information use, steps in the flow, and overall degree of granularity needed to personalize the experience, or at least meet the needs of different segments.

While these sorts of tools are very helpful, the challenge is less about the data and technology, and more about mindset, ownership, and process. Who owns building trust in the brand's digital experience? How will customers experience the signals of trust and see reinforcement that trust is valid? Take a step back and ask your customers how they think about trust in the digital aspects of your brand. Then take a look at your plans for improving the experience.

Are you just working on a punchlist of fixes, or are you managing the overall flow of the experience to bring out the best reliability, transparency, personalization, responsiveness and simplicity your brand can offer as part of a commitment to building trust?

Learn more this and other topics on our McKinsey on Marketing & Sales site. Follow us on Twitter @McK_MktgSales and @McKinseyDigital. And please follow me @davidedelman.