How closing the trust gap helps create more sustainable tight-knit relationships with customers
Take a moment to think about what makes your your closest relationships different from the rest. There’s no agenda and nothing to gain. Just an honest and genuine interest in the other person that yields equal results for both. Now, compare connecting with your friends to an interaction that has the potential of a transaction at its core. The differences couldn’t be starker.
Trust is at the heart of all healthy relationships. It helps you open up, get personal, and feel safe and comfortable enough to move closer — to deepen the relationship for the long term.
In business as in life, relationships matter, and they depend on trust. But business leaders haven’t quite captured the opportunity to create trust with prospects and customers. While 84% of executives think that customers highly trust their company, only 27% of customers say the same, according to PwC’s 2023 Trust Survey. This trust gap suggests a significant disconnect and a real opportunity. When you’re close to your customers, they will be more likely to come to you when they need something. The surest way to establish meaningful trust is by making your counterpart in the relationship feel heard and understood — not by pushing a sale. Modern marketers do just that. They nurture and enhance relationships with their customers to help pull them in.
With 82% of consumers willing to share their personal data in exchange for a more personalized experience, marketing leaders have an unprecedented opportunity to get beyond the next transaction and build deeper relationships. At the same time, you have an responsibility to listen carefully and act accordingly, all while protecting your customer’s privacy in the process. However, a slip up could cause that trust to drop significantly.
How to close the trust gap with your customers
If used right, customer data makes it possible to anticipate evolving needs and elevate the customer experience. Here are some steps you can take to build trust with your customers:
1. Stop selling
Nothing turns off a potential buyer more than the seller fast-forwarding to a transaction prematurely. Ultimately, it cheapens your brand, undermines your relationship, and trades short-term opportunities for the long-term trust that’s fundamental to building long-term customer lifetime value. In a recent PwC Pulse Survey, only about one-third of CMOs strongly agree that they effectively use personalization to attract customers, yet marketers are uniquely positioned to employ tools to close the trust gap. Modern tools can help marketers quickly translate listening into a responsive interactionmodel. Deploy tools that deepen understanding of your prospects’ needs, wants, desires, and fears. Start selling when your customer is ready. If you listen closely, you’ll know when to begin, and your customers will be receptive.
2. Start imagining
The design of a bespoke customer journey and the corresponding experiences matter at every juncture of the customer interaction. Retention and advancement along the customer journey rely on each interaction showcasing empathy and anticipating wants and needs. Generative AI is a powerful tool available to design those empathetic journeys on the fly and to generate digital content that deepens resonance with the customer. In fact, 54% of CMOs are increasing investments in marketing AI use cases. With AI-enabled listening tools able to discern intangibles like sentiment and planned actions, it’s not only possible to develop a better understanding of your customer’s attitude and interests — you can deliver enhanced and personalized experiences that cater to their ever-fluctuating behaviors and preferences.
3. Address segments of one
According to Forrester, companies that create personalized experiences grow year-over-year incremental revenue by 1.7 times, and more than double the lifetime value of their customers. Personalized experiences ranging from product recommendations to remembering user preferences can give your business the kind of human touch that makes each customer feel heard and valued — motivating them to keep coming back.
More than half of consumers say they would stop buying from a company that they otherwise liked after several bad experiences, and 8% say they would stop after just one bad experience. One or two errors can diminish trust and jeopardize a relationship. When harnessing customer data to deduce sentiment or intent, it’s important to strive for near-certainty. Even hitting the mark 90% of the time means 10% of your communications can be a turn off for some customers. Narrow that uncertainty gap.
4. Act responsibly: Build privacy and security into everything
When handling customer data, don’t limit yourself to baseline levels of compliance. Comply with regulations that don’t exist yet but should exist or are expected to be in place in the future. Two-thirds of both consumers and employees say it’s very important for companies to disclose data privacy policies, but only 42% of organizations say they do. Articulate your stance on privacy in terms that are easy to understand, not loaded with legal jargon. Be transparent about how and why you plan to use their data, and importantly, what they’ll get in return and for how long. Go the extra mile to create trust in your privacy policies and treatment of their data and your customers will be on your side.
Regardless of the number of customers you have, the size of your company or your share of the market, good business is and will always be an intimate, human endeavor. Trust cannot be assumed. It must be earned and carefully maintained. When used responsibly, modern tools such as customer data platforms, multi-dimensional generative AI and flexible content management systems can help close the trust gap and inspire lasting loyalty to keep your business growing long into the future.
Phil Regnault is a partner at PwC focusing on marketing transformation. He helps clients transform and optimize their front office operations and customer experience. Regnault is the driver of PwC’s Adobe Alliance relationship where he establishes amazing experiences for customers, marketers, and sellers. His client work has crossed industries and sub-functions within the front office — focusing mainly on marketing, sales, and channels excellence.
Regnault’s current work focuses on helping clients build a trust-based foundation for modern marketing. This includes enabling transformations with customer data platforms, customer journey orchestration, content management, and marketing operations automation solutions.