Customer Trust
The Currency Of Customer Trust
By Carolyne Gathuru
Very many organizations, brands, and businesses across all sectors have in their list of corporate values the promise to be trusted or trustworthy- a very heavyduty responsibility because what does it actually mean for customers both internal and external to extend their trust and what does it take for organizations to sustain customer trust over time?
Trustworthiness is a much sought after quality, pillar, and tenet that when embedded in organizational culture, serves as a foundational bedrock for success. The innate ability for team members, leaders and other strata within the work force to trust each other is a catalyst for efficiency at work and ultimately efficient service delivery.
But where does culture start, where does it get embedded from, where does it flow to and from, and where does it get sustained for ongoing application? If Peter Drucker’ s age-old assertion that " Culture eats strategy for breakfast " is anything to go by, and the solid objective of any board or advisory council or top governance organ is to develop and oversee strategy development and implementation, it goes without saying that culture then sits right on top of strategy. The mantle, the baton, the magic wand or whatever is in the hands of the strategy owners and overseers is then squarely the responsibility of those at the very pinnacle of the organization’ s leadership. An institution’ s culture is the ultimate determinant of its results and sustainability, way more than its strategic plans will ever be.
Customer trust thus is a subject matter that needs to be on the board’ s dashboard as well as the Chief Executive Officer, Managing Director, General Manager, Director General, General Secretary, Secretary General, Executive Director or whoever is in the driving seat of the institution’ s vehicle dependent on the industry or sector nomenclature. This needs to be a reporting item that is scheduled in addition to all the board and management reports regularly presented. Trust is a leadership matter and it behooves leaders to ensure that existing customers develop customer loyalty through brand trust. Trust carries the day even when things get rough and turbulent, because the very customers who extend trust towards the brand are the ones that will rescue it when push comes to shove.
As board and leadership work through risk planning and mitigation modelling in their business continuity plan, customer trust needs to be placed in the matrix with severe weightage, for a violation of trust leads directly towards shaking the foundation upon which institutions lie, and can take a life time to build back. Sometimes never.
But where does it all start this matter of carefully designing, eliciting and sustaining customer trust? Most definitely with the internal customer. The real brand owners and brand warriors, and those that turn up daily to deliver on the vision, mission and mandate of the organization. The dynamics around internal customer trust building or conversely trust eroding, bears quite a lot on the way of life, code of conduct and internal culture traits. Lack of trust needs to be quantified in hard cold currency and especially the setbacks that occur from lack of team member and leader trust.
Trustworthiness is a much sought after quality, pillar, and tenet that when embedded in organizational culture, serves as a foundational bedrock for success. The innate ability for team members, leaders and other strata within the work force to trust each other is a catalyst for efficiency at work and ultimately efficient service delivery.
Institutions rife with work place politics, unsubstantiated rumour mongering, grape vine and other such untrustworthy communication sources, cannot in any way claim to have productivity and efficiency return on internal customer investment. Trust is a people issue and it needs to be addressed as such. For external parties to demonstrate customer trust and to trust products, services, communication and other engagements, then the internal trust must be at an all time high.
Very often it is mistakenly assumed that the persons at the helm of human capital management, either the head of human resources or human resources business
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