Trust or bust.
Thinking again about how and when we measure our relationship lynchpins.
I've been thinking a lot about trust lately.
Some thoughts I'll unpack over the next little while:
Un.
“Measuring trust” is usually manifested as a single trust score for an organization.
But there are different trust moments throughout the customer journey: from the point someone decides to interact with the product through conversion and retention. These different moments required different operational and experiential manifestations to keep people interested.
If we’re talking about trust that gets people to buy something, that’s one trust score.
If we’re talking about trust that gets people to continue buying something and maybe even talk about it with their friends, that’s a different score.
Deux.
How we measure trust has mostly been based off surveys to date.
To me trust is operationalized through action. It's similar to the AI survey situation, wherein we’re deriving usage and adoption inferences from asking people how they use AI and when they use it (in lieu of having the actual data on how and when they use it)
Yes, surveys might be a second-best situation. For trust specifically, though, we can bridge the delta a lot better between Actions Actually Taken and a simple survey response. Which leads me to Trois…
Trois.
At any given time, trust is based on our perception of available information from a wide range of sources, including:
• Company-released marketing
• Media and in listicles (always and forever)
• Influencers, celebrity affiliations (formal or otherwise), and social media
• Ratings and reviews
• Our friends’ hot takes, horror stories, or hardline opinions
Circling back to Un. (yes, I said circling back; I'm a consultant to deal with it), some of these sources of information are going to be more heavily weighted depending on where the customer is in their journey, whether they're just starting, actively considering, or about to tip the scale up to a fully retained user.
This matters in Trust Measurement, yet we seemingly measure once and cut once.
Quatre.
(I’ll stop after four since five seems too long and this is truly a bonus because our brains work in patterns, usually of three).
Just like most people on Planet Earth, I think that trust is becoming increasingly pertinent.
The paradigm that I think a lot about is that in the future we won’t go to the internet but the internet will come to us. Trust is a filter upon which we might filter the information that comes to us.
Trust me (sorry), there’s (a lot) more to come on this.