Your Employees Want Customers to Trust Them!

A few months ago we at Peppers & Rogers Group were doing a consulting engagement for a large U.S. company in an extremely competitive category. Persuaded by the logic in Martha Rogers’ and my new book Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage, executives at the firm had asked us to help them design a strategy for becoming a more trusted advisor to customers.

Market research showed clearly that our client already had a better reputation for reliable and trustworthy service than many of its competitors, but the senior management team wanted to leave no stone unturned. They wanted their company to become the single most trustable company in their category -- the one consumers knew would always "have their back" and proactively watch out for their interests. So our consultants brainstormed with managers on which of the company’s policies would need to be changed or upgraded so as to generate even more trust. It was a challenging assignment, because the company’s overt processes were already well designed to act in customers’ interests at critical junctures.

But the company also had thousands of employees charged with handling customer interactions by phone, online, and at retail locations. So as a routine step in our engagement, we circulated an email to all employees asking them if they were aware of any instances in which the company was not acting in customers’ interests.

To our consultants' astonishment, more than 500 employees replied “yes” to this question! The company's employees pointed out literally hundreds of specific areas where policies and processes were not designed in the interest of customers, or where they had been subverted by other processes. Most of these situations were entirely new to us. We had overlooked them in our management brainstorm.

While a company's executives almost always think their customers trust them, our book argues that social media and increasing transparency are already driving customer expectations much higher than most of us realize. Customers are now demanding not just that the companies they deal with should be trustworthy, but proactively trustworthy (this is extreme trust, something Martha and I call “trustability”). For example, customers now expect companies to help them avoid mistakes or oversights, even if it means the company itself might collect lower fees or less immediate revenue. And customers want unbiased reviews of products or services, along with recommendations on how to save money (by buying less, for instance).

Everyone already knows exactly what it means to act in the customer's interest: It means to treat the customer the way you'd like to be treated yourself, if you were the customer. This is nothing other than the "principle of reciprocity," which underpins every major ethical and religious philosophy. It could hardly be a simpler idea, and it is easily grasped by everyone. Unfortunately, however, complex business processes often make it quite difficult to for an operating company to put into practice.

The thing is, your employees know what customers want. Do you?