Wondering how to build customer trust? Have I got a story for you.
With the release of Avengers: Endgame, this summer’s blockbuster movie season got off to an early start. Without giving away any spoilers, there’s a pivotal scene where Tony Stark (Iron Man) asks Steve Rogers (Captain America): “Do you trust me?” Rogers replies, “I do.” Then, the two super heroes head off on a bold plan to win an epic battle against inter-galactic bad guys.
Meanwhile, in the world of customer experience, another epic battle is being waged: The global enterprise’s fight against the experience gap. Research shows 80% of CEOs and companies believe they deliver superior experiences, while only 8% of customers believe they receive superior experiences.
Companies have an imperative to close this gap, as it has a direct effect on their stock performance, with market leaders nearly tripling the market performance of laggards.
Just like in the movie, a company’s ability to succeed in closing the experience gap hinges on a key concept: Building customer trust. This makes sense at a basic level: How can any customer say an experience is “superior” if they don’t trust it?
So, the question becomes: How to build customer trust and win the endgame? Let’s check out three of the most effective strategies for saving the uni… I mean, closing the experience gap by winning customer trust.
The B2C strategy: 3 ways to gain customer trust with preference and consent data management
According to PWC, 75% of consumers don’t trust businesses when it comes to their personal data. When the EU began enforcing the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), we entered a new era of tough consumer privacy and data protection laws. On the near horizon, California and Brazil will begin enforcing their own versions of these regulations in 2020.
To build customer trust and protect against the evolving risk of regulatory violations, companies are turning to enterprise consent and preference management solutions. With the right implementation, these solutions can:
- Improve transparency, so customers understand when their data is being collected and how it’s being used
- Enforce customer consent across channels and along every step of the buying journey, from the first touchpoint all the way through customer service and loyalty programs
- Put customers in complete control of their data – a key for building their trust and addressing data privacy regulation compliance
The issue of consent management strikes at the heart of a company’s ability to offer exceptional customer experiences. The question isn’t: “How can permission-based data drive better customer experiences?” The more accurate question – from both the customer’s and the regulator’s point of view – is: “How can you provide better customer experiences without permission-based data?”
This puts a priority on one of the most critical features of any successful preference and consent data management solution: The ability to scale quickly.
Customers interact with businesses across a wider range of often transitory channels and a broader lifecycle than ever before. As a result, today’s global enterprise needs a solution for collecting millions of consent records, requesting new consent when terms or business needs change, and surfacing the records upon customer request or regulatory audit without undue delay.
The B2B Strategy: Focus on driving revenue via more trusted customer and partner relationships
New research projects B2B e-commerce sales to be more than two times higher than global online retail sales by 2020. To take advantage, B2B companies need a solution for meeting the soaring expectations of their business customers and partners for a more B2C-like experience.
Business-facing (B2B) companies confirm the pain points they deal with as they grow their partner and business customer networks:
- Frustration and missed opportunities caused by slow on-boarding
- Skyrocketing costs due to overly complicated customer and partner lifecycle management
- Exposure to risks of data breaches and data privacy regulatory violations
B2B companies are looking to address these pain points with various capabilities. With improved ability to delegate account administration to customers and partners, B2B companies can improve time-to-market and enhance their on-boarding experiences.
With business policy-driven access management, the right users can get the right access to the appropriate content and intellectual property without draining IT resources. And with capabilities such as dynamic access control and consent management, companies can reduce the risks that challenge security and compliance efforts.
B2B companies are clearly focused on how to build customer trust with their partners and business customer networks because they see opportunity for more revenue growth and brand reputation improvement.
A strategy for the future of trust: The modern customer data platform
Forbes recently noted that companies now house an average of 15 silos of customer data. This makes it difficult to connect insight into customers’ intent and preferences, let alone execute programs using that data. Adding to the complexity: A host of new data privacy regulations state in no uncertain terms that consumers must be in control of how, when, and where that data is collected and used.
Best-run enterprises will handle these challenges in the near future with a forward-looking solution: The customer data platform (CDP).
An enterprise-grade CDP enables businesses to:
- Create unified customer profiles built on a wide range of attributes such as experiential data, operational events and activity, behavioral data, consent and first-party profile data, and demographic data
- Activate and orchestrate data to connected applications that power personalized cross-channel and touchpoint experiences across commerce, marketing, sales, and service
- Build lasting, trusted customer relationships based on the permissions and preferences of the customer
- Power meaningful cross-channel customer journeys by connecting offline and online experiences in real time
The end result of the CDP strategy is an improved ability to focus on customers, understand their needs, and deliver the best possible experience to them – on their own terms – throughout their relationship with the business.
Without a doubt, there’s a new endgame in today’s digital economy. Consumers don’t just buy products and services anymore; they buy experiences.
This demands a new approach to marketing, sales, and services; one that hinges on winning customer trust.
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It all begins HERE.