By Janus Boye
Tim Walters on stage in Aarhus talking about having your privacy cake and consuming great customer experiences too
“A brand is simply trust”
With this famous Steve Jobs quote, Tim Walters used his Boye 19 conference keynote to drive home the point that it’s all about trust and trustworthiness if you want to deliver great customer experiences.
The key advice from Tim was that to succeed as organisations, we need to measure trust performance indicators rather than key performance indicators.
As an analyst and privacy expert, Tim changed the game on the customer experience conversation and made a compelling case that trust is a prerequisite for great customer experiences.
A long-term crisis of trust
Tim mentioned the arrival of tougher privacy legislation in the EU, California and elsewhere as one of the drivers for this renewed focus on earning trust.
As you probably know, Steve Jobs died in 2011 and the opening quote goes back much further. Edelman publishes an annual Trust Barometer, which has long documented a steady decline when it comes to trust. The 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer revealed that trust is in crisis around the world and highlighted that the general population’s trust in all four key institutions — business, government, NGOs, and media — has declined broadly, a phenomenon not reported since Edelman began tracking trust among this segment in 2012.
Tim spoke about a global data privacy revolution as the real GDPR. It’s not just about legislation from the EU and as he said, it’s not just a headache for the legal and compliance departments. To quote Tim:
It is a cultural and social transformation that derives its force from consumers – meaning that the response must involve any and everyone that is concerned with customer experience and satisfaction.
Coming to terms with trust
During Tim’s keynote, he shared several key points on trust and like any good former professor, he used questions to make us think:
What is trust?
How can we (re)build trust with consumers?
What are the elements or components of trust that we should aim to deploy/highlight/communicate
How do we know if we’re making progress?
To understand trust, he shared this widely accepted characterization of trust from the scholars Claire Hill and Erin O’Hara as published in A Cognitive Theory of Trust (PDF):
Trust is a state of mind that enables its possessor to be willing to make herself vulnerable to another—that is, to rely on another despite a positive risk that the other will act in a way that can harm the truster.
According to Tim, the most important elements here are, first, that trust is a state of mind – that is an attitude held by the truster about the trustee (so in a commercial relationship and attitude the buyer, or perhaps a commercial partner like a dealer has about the seller or brand). Then, trust involves vulnerability and it involves a passage into an uncertain future. The other “will act,” but how they will act is not known.
Tim shared the below two vectors of trust to illustrate what it is all about:
These are what Tim Walters call the two “vectors” of trust – uncertainty and vulnerability. And both of these must be in play for a trust relationship to occur.
How do you build or rebuild trust?
This is the obvious question that comes to mind. Tim’s answer had a slight problem: Building trust is impossible. He first quoted from the TED talk What We Don’t Understand About Trust by Onora O’Neill:
“Trust is distinctive because it's given by other people. You can't rebuild what other people give you. [What you can do is] give them the basis for giving you their trust.”
and then Tim followed up by offering this as his own explanation:
You cannot create trust anymore than you can make someone love you. The only way to increase trust among consumers (either the number of people who trust you or the depth of trust they feel) is to demonstrate that you are trustworthy.
As Tim stated in one of his clearly marked takeaways:
Your efforts will be futile unless you recognize that it’s not something you do on or to or with consumers but that its rather all about your character, behavior, culture, and ethos.
Assessing trustworthiness
There are various ideas about the traits by which people judge trustworthiness. Honesty is often included, sometimes benevolence. Tim brought the below set offered by Rachel Botsman, with integrity rather than honesty (it’s easier to apply to a company) and the inclusion of empathy, as the key trait for customer-centricity.
Rachel Botsman is a world-renowned expert on an explosive new era of trust and technology and what this means for life, work and how we do business. She is fascinated by how trust enables us to navigate uncertainty, place our faith in people and take leaps into the unknown.
For each pillar, Tim brought defining questions that you could apply to your customer experience efforts.
As an example for integrity, you could ask: Do our stories, messages, and commitments holistically express the brand promise? For empathy a question could be: Do we demonstrably understand customer needs and goals?
These questions then feeds into an trustworthiness assessment that Tim’s helped develop at The Content Advisory. It begins with an internal self-assessment – which is meaningless as a stand-alone rating (how trustworthy you find yourself has no relation to consumers’ trust), but it is crucial in order to measure and address the delta between the internal and external perceptions.
Then you want to determine the perception among different consumer at different stages in the customer lifecycle – audience members, prospects, converted customers. And you need to analyze how your existing content, processes, tech, and governance support the communication and delivery of this particular pillar.
The assessment would constitute the discovery phase of a trustworthiness strategic review. On basis of these insights you could set trustworthiness goals and map out a plan for getting there.
Today it’s TPI’s before KPI’s
One of the most memorable slides at the Boye 19 Aarhus conference. Trust performance indicators are more important than key performance indicators.
In closing, Tim had this very simple, yet very memorable conference slide making the point that trust performance indicators (TPIs) are more important – in the sense that they must come before – KPIs.
According to Tim this is where you want to be:
You want to reach a point where your optimized ability to demonstrate and communicate trustworthiness warrants more and deeper trust from consumers, which in turn provides access to more of that scarce data and powers more relevant experiences
Further reading
Tim has already shared several posting on the topic, including these two published on The Content Advisory:
CX in the age of privacy and trust, Part 1: It’s about the consumer, not the regulator
CX in the age of privacy and trust, Part 3: Can we (re)build trust?
On a personal note, this whole conversation about trust felt to me a bit like our 2012 conference theme which centered around caring. Similarly to trust, caring is not a usual part of the business lingo.
The conversation continues in our customer experience peer group and naturally also at the next Boye conferences!