How to Assess Trust and Establish Trustworthiness

"Erik: As a marketer, how do you asses trust and established trustworthiness? Alan: Okay, so trust is something that I think every company aspires to. I think quite honestly the most important thing beyond trust is forgiveness, right? Companies who have built strong loyalty and great trust with customers survive problems. When the iPhone comes out with an antenna issue. Apple had earned the trust and respect of their customers to go through a break down and continue to trust Apple. So, to that extent trust is something that is something that is very, very valued, but I think that few people really understand how in fact it is created. I think we have good intuition about it. So, trust basically can be measured through something that I call speech acts, ways of how we commit by making offers and requests. And obviously substantiating those offers and requests through history. So, when we think about trust I really think about four different types of action. Reliability – does somebody actually keep their small promises? Second area is around expertise. Do they actually have a history, a resume if you will, of experience that says that they can bring a great domain expertise to a particular challenge or problem that we’re working on? Third area is presence. How do people show up? Where have they shown up? What types of boards are they on or what type of communities are they a part or what events do they sponsor? And the last area is sincerity, and I think Cisco is a great example of a sincere company that, as we said when I worked there was, ‘We ate our own dog food.’ We believed in our technology, we used our technology. We were one of the first companies to implement electronic commerce, and that in of itself really drove a lot of delight for our customers because they could order products quicker and that helped us fine-tune our supply chain. So, those would be the four areas that I look at in terms of assessing trust – reliability, expertise, presence, and sincerity."