Playing the Part - 7 Ways to Make Your Business Look More Trustworthy
- Written by News Feature Team
One of the key parts of running a business is making your customers feel comfortable with the business itself. Trusting a business is an important part of deciding whether or not to use its services or products, as an untrustworthy company has many competitors that will seem more interesting or appealing with the competition taken into consideration.
Making your business more trustworthy can be as simple as getting uniforms for your customer-interaction staff, which can be gotten from corporate uniform suppliers, or as complex as enforcing entirely new customer-interaction protocols and retraining all employees. There are many ways to make a business more trusted, and we have compiled 7 of them here.
Testimonials
Something people tend to trust is other customers.
If your friend tells you that a certain restaurant is really good; the staff are friendly, the food is fresh and the prices are good then you’ll likely visit that restaurant yourself. This is the strength of testimonials, and it starts with providing great service to you earliest customers.
Guarantees
For product-based companies, guarantees are a great way to increase the amount of trust people place in your brand. A company that is confident in it’s products will be confident in providing longer guarantees, hence customers being more comfortable paying for products that the company guarantees for more than the usual 12 months.
Dress Codes
Having your employees don uniforms and head out into the workplace to interact with the customers is a great way to make people feel more comfortable in your establishment. There is an inherent awkwardness to approaching someone who may or may not work at a store to ask about a product, and a person in uniform does away with that awkwardness.
Contactable
Making your business contactable at all times is another way to increase the trust placed in your product or service. Customers that can always call and ask questions or make recommendations to an actual human employee (instead of a robotic answering service) are customers that will return in the future.
Location
Having a wonderful, uniformed staff and a well-presented, contactable store won’t help much if that business is located in a run-down part of town. Unfortunately, where the rent is cheapest also tends to be where the least foot-traffic is, and having to drive way out into the middle of nowhere usually isn’t great for your image and general trustworthiness.
Graphic Design
The branding on your store can make all the difference for your trustworthiness, too. Having a unified brand on all your products and buildings and vehicles means people will feel more secure when approaching your business, instead of unsure if they’re approaching something entirely different due to the branding.
Customer Treatment
Finally, the way your customers are treated is paramount to how trusted you are as a brand. A zero tolerance policy for employees that mistreat customers is essential, as the internet has become a powerful tool for mistreated clients, and word spreads faster than ever about rude or ineffectual businesses. On top of this, people enjoy being treated nicely and with respect and dignity, and will usually return to a place that treats them well.
All in all, earning the trust of your customers is a relatively straight-forward procedure, and following these tips will see you get there in no time.
