Digital Business: Trust, Security, and Reviews

Building trust for a digital business is not an easy task, to run a successful business you need to build genuine relationships with consumers and trust is an essential commodity to support you in this quest. Every business should keep in mind that consumer is the god for their business, in order to keep the consumer happy- they should remain with consumer’s terms and providing them with best possible services.

How to build trust

The Web is a channel, not a tool, although many marketers will define it as such. As a channel, it offers you a broad choice of tools to help you sell, but to be successful you need to build genuine relationships with consumers and trust is an essential commodity to support you in this quest. Because trust is the lifeblood of every business relationship.

The relatively anonymous nature of the Web will make gaining trust a challenge for many entrepreneurs.  Here are some useful tips to help you build trust.

Companies need to have transparent and open business practices and take responsible actions to address the crisis. This is the first cluster of “integrity” attributes that are essential to building trust.

But the second cluster called “engagement” is equally essential in my view. It entitles a company that listens to customer needs and feedback, treats employees well, places customers ahead of profits, and communicates clearly and frequently the state of its business.

High-quality products and services, listed in the third cluster of key attributes to building trust, matter too, this time, however, we will deal with those factors that you can influence online directly.

Unless you are already an established brand, or if you are just a budding business, building trust is a hard task. But it’s not an impossible one.

All you need to remember are the rule of the four Cs: commitment, competence, communication, and consideration.

• Always deliver on your promise: that means commitment, or, in other words, do what you say.
• You also should be able to do what you promise, meaning that you have to be competent for the job.
• To do what you say means to always say what you mean, which is clear communication, another rule that will help you build trust.
• Finally, always be considerate to the people you are talking to.

These rules are not just fluff. All successful businesses today employ them or change their business approach to follow suit.

How to measure trust

There are several ways to measure trust in a Web environment, and there are also tools to help you determine how people perceive your business. Measuring trust is used to help you how your clients see your business, what programs and activities influence their purchase decisions, how their opinions impact others, and so on.

Depending on the size of your organization, you can choose a paid tool, or simply count on freebies to find out when your clients talk about you and what they say. You can also run a variety of surveys to learn how clients perceive your services, what they want to be improved, and so on.  While software can give you a decent insight into what you should look at, manual analysis is necessary to further research and to discover whether their machine-delivered results represent, in fact, trust.  

The Sentiment is a fundamental measurement feature that can, alone, determine, whether the person talking about your business trusts you or not. Sometimes, social media mentions can be harmful, which may well mean that your company’s trust score can go down impacting brand reputation and ROI immediately and in the long term too. Because you want humans to trust and follow you, not bots. Also, remember that people who like and follow your status updates don’t necessarily trust you. Many consumers are passive online, following your updates without taking any action (clicks, likes, comments, and ultimately buys), but among the “silent” watchers, there could be real buyers who only wait for the right moment. The best way to measure trust is based on actions.

Consumers voice their opinions on Twitter and Facebook more than anywhere else. To measure trust, you have to use a social media monitoring tool that gives your insight into conversations on these two social networks too.

Reviews and trust: do they converge?

The answer to this question is obvious: they do. Because of trust influences customer decisions, reviews that don’t convey trust have a negative impact on… well, pretty much everything you try to do online.

It is imperative to address reviews of any kind quickly and courteously, to prove that you are paying attention to customer feedback. Remember that listening to customer feedback. It is also common sense to believe that by engaging meaningfully with customers and peers they will trust you more. This is why managing reviews are such an important task.

Reviews can influence purchase decisions, so it’s in your best interest to address them, positive or negative, as soon as they are posted. Do not hide behind the “no time, no money” excuse. In the long run, a bad review can cost you more than hiring a professional to monitor and reply. As we often advise, respond to all reviews, good or bad. You establish trust by putting all your customers first, whether they are happy or discontented. Reward positive reviews and promise to improve when clients complain about certain issues to make the trust barometer rise.

Also, always remember that by addressing negative feedback instead of blocking or removing it, you are showing people that you have nothing to hide, that you are open to criticism, and therefore, that you are trustworthy. Do NOT remove negative reviews unless they are fake.

The security you should care about

There’s no “security” online. There are, however, steps to take to make your clients feel better about entrusting you with personal information such as credit card numbers, addresses, passwords, and the like.

Google already demands (as opposed to recommends) for you to use HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) to protect “the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user’s computer and the site Digital Marketing Course,” and they are starting to block sites that do not comply in the Chrome browser.

The moment Google displays a red flag in relation to your site, you lose: direct customers and search engine rankings at the same time, which, in turn, will destroy your reputation (and hard-earned trust) in the long term.

Have a clear site security policy in place to let customers know what to expect and to avoid litigations. Keep in mind that Internet trust is at an all-time low, and any business with a data breach might suffer irreparable damages.