Companies. Building Trust and the COVID Effect

It is said that it can take a business years to earn trust, but that trust can be broken or lost in seconds. For any company, building a sustainable and reputable image: it is fundamental to develop and communicate trusting behaviour – rather than just claiming it can be trusted.

Jon Gorstein from Persona Global said: “In business, you need to communicate effectively to get results. To communicate effectively, your listener must believe you. To be believable, your listener ultimately must trust you”.

Given that trust has a substantial influence on the way people judge and interact with any business,  companies must be able to identify and gain feedback on their key areas of trust – for example:

• Strive to offer excellent service, consistently.
• Manage customer expectations for products and services.
• Build value & transparency by use of social media platforms.
• Publish customer reviews and testimonials in an open manner.
• Ask for customer feedback in order to learn and improve.

In support of both transparency and to gain customer feedback, many companies now use social media platforms that rate and rank their products and services based on actual customer reviews.

Once such platform is Trustpilot.com on which early 1 million new reviews are posted each month. Businesses are divided into sub-categories and users can write their own reviews based on individual experiences. This insures that companies have a structure in place to give feedback to customers but also importantly, build a mechanism to be able to act on these, which helps grow trust.

From an internal company perspective, trust is one of the most important customer-value-drivers. And Sir Richard Branson of the Virgin Group supported this in 2018 when he famously said: “Take Care of your Employees and they’ll take care of your Business.”

But that statement took on a completely new dimension recently when businesses were forced to  adapt at warp speed as a result of COVID-19. Overnight businesses had to work in different and often unproven ways. Processes and procedures were adapted even changed completely and trust took centre stage for companies – both internally and externally. Some key trust trends that emerged as a result of the Pandemic:

• Remote working
  • Despite having the technology to work remotely, pre COVID-19 – many companies were often uncomfortable with their employees working from home. Partly due to to trust issues.
  • COVID-19 acted as an accelerator in the development of trusting work relationships and has ironically now helped advance businesses worldwide to evolve their trusting cultures.
  • This has lead to remote working now being seen as an acceptable practice for those who wish to participate and where it is practical, feasible and also desirable for the business.

• Agile decision making
  • Companies were forced to make very quick decisions during COVID-19 but these needed to be compliant – both from a legal, as well as customer perspective. Some examples:
    • Putting the health and wellbeing of employees first and foremost, thereby creating a safe environment in which the business could still operate remotely.
    • Placing an onus on Leadership to communicate clear and legally compliant messages to ensure that employees who had to work in the office remained safe at all times and customers understood new guidelines.
    • Explaining any adaptions or nuances to employees and clients in order to meet the needs and expectations of  all stakeholders. This includes gaining feedback from stakeholders and adapting  processes and communication to working remotely.
    • Ongoing updates to stakeholders of the current situation including any changes in government rules as well as implications to products and services as a result.

All the above examples build effective and believable communications to listeners. And if this was not clear or fundamental to a Companys’ operation modus before COVID-19 – it certainly should be now. Only by communicating in a transparent and believable way can customers trust the businesses they interact with.

Before and  throughout the  Pandemic, Accurity has continued to communicate frequently across multiple channels with news about changes in regulations due to COVID-19 as well as other industry updates important to all our stakeholders.

Since our launch 20 years ago, we have worked with over 400 client companies and 3’000 freelancers and contractors from all walks of life and countries. Our team of experts takes pride in being available to answer all questions whether they are working remotely or from our office in Kloten, Switzerland.  Our goal has always been to listen to our clients and to continually build trust with them so that our  products and services remain best-in -class.