It’s been almost a year since starting my agency. In that time, I have learned a lot about building trust with clients. I had a significant amount of client relations and customer service experience before starting out, but things are still different when you’re out on your own. Especially, when you’re asking for money for a service that doesn’t always produce a result that you can taste, feel or touch.
One of the tasks that I’ve pondered over and again is that of building trust with our clients.
- What is the best way to instill trust with our new clients?
- How do you accelerate the process of building trust?
- Is it possible to build trust more quickly and what does that process look like?
- How do we maintain and grow trust?
These are all questions I’ve been working through and time and again I’ve seen that trust can be built or broken by the abundance or lack of communication.
Communication: How to Build Customer and Client Trust
This concept of communicating to build trust may seem intuitive, especially considering that many of us are in the communication industry, yet time and again we see agencies, consultants, and internal teams lack this trust-building component.
Communication is more than reporting back on results. Although result reporting is mandatory and essential to the process of building trust, it’s also vital to communicate as you make your way to those results. The process of intentional, ongoing communication is a key to accelerate the trust-building process for clients.
In the case of media relations, especially when you’re pursuing very niche for big national media coverage, only communicating results can leave large gaps of time where nothing is communicated.
Lack of Communication = Distrust and Discouragement
In my experience, a lack of regular communication can be discouraging and create distrust with customers and clients. So, instead of solely reporting on results as they happen, we have found more success in reporting progress as we go along. It’s easy to forget that work we do every day as a part of our process in marketing, PR, social media, and content, is not necessarily intuitive for our clients.
In fact, what we do may not be at all intuitive, which is why we’ve been hired to handle the process in the first place. Being entrusted by a client should not be taken lightly because it’s often a leap of faith. Hiring an agency or consultant is a risk and initial act of trust, even when a accompanied by an abundance of facts.
Pursue a Culture of Trust
The same goes for consumers of brands across the board. It’s essential to figure out how to build trust quickly and then pursue that trust relentlessly until you’re sure it has been gained. After that, you have to find a way to continue the relationship and cement that trust. It’s a challenge that we all face and an area where we could all use more focus and strategy.
Trust cannot be purchased. Trust is earned and communication is the key to building a culture of trust with customers, clients and your internal team.
What best practices do you have in place to build trust, especially when onboarding a new client?
