Trust is the most important factor in customer advocacy

How do you build trust with a customer? The difficulty in building trust in a B2B setting is that there are so many vendors an organisation uses its hard to build a real relationships.

It’s not impossible. There are great ways to build trust with your customers, Freshdesk have a lot of great insight: “earning customer trust doesn’t require any sort of complex strategy. The best step you can take is to offer excellent customer service, and make sure that your support team knows the importance of their roles.” When you give great service you’ll be on the road to building trust and advocacy. Having a customer advocacy programme in place will help to build and nurture trust with your customers too.

It means that advocacy is tracked, people aren’t constantly asked to do things for you by multiple people and customers are made to feel included and important.

Is there such a thing as real customer trust?

Customer advocacy relies on trust, so it does exist. For those with an advocacy programme you’ll be able to see that, but it’s hard to build.

Building trust takes time

We all read things online like: “it takes two years for customers to trust you” or “your customer will only ever have three trusted advisors”. It goes on and on and on.

Each of us know what genuine relationships feel like. We know whether our customers truly love us or hold us with contempt and if you don’t now is the time to think about that customer advocacy programme! We have to always remember that outside of our B2B bubble there is another world. Our customers are people, with lives, troubles and constraints.

To gain your customers trust put in place a robust customer advocacy programme that is based on building long-term relationships, and cemented with amazing customer experience and support.