Podcast Episode #1: 15 Trust Principles to Reshape Your Customer Relationships

Hi and welcome to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. My name is Jermaine Edwards and I have become obsessed with customer behavior and how people and organizations win with their best customers long term. After starting, failing, and growing my own companies, 30 customer growth projects, hundreds of strategies, and the study of 50 years of customer service research, I've seen firsthand how and why organizations win, lose, and win again with their most important customers. This podcast is my way of sharing those insights, failures, principles, and strategies so you can become what I call an Irreplaceable Advisor, someone so valuable your customers never want to leave. In an increasingly competitive world, how do you continue to deliver unrivaled value and deepen those most important customer relationships? Join me as your customer growth guide, your Your journey starts here. Hey, it's Jermaine Edwards, your customer growth guide, and welcome to episode 1 of the Key Customer Growth Podcast. And we're going to speak today about the word trust. Now, before you roll your eyes or make the assumption that you've heard it before, I want you to consider a question I've been reflecting on for years. And the question is this: how do you intentionally build or deepen trust in every communication and engagement with your customers. So how do you intentionally build or deepen trust in every communication and engagement with customers? It's really important because oftentimes we think about our relationships, we think about them in the context of fairly general activities that really coincide with doing what you say and, you know, making sure the customer's happy, and we relate that back to the relationship getting better. But actually, there are very few correlating points to general activity and relationships getting better, because we know that customers leave all the time, and oftentimes it's not necessarily just because of the quality of relationship, but actually it's the consistency and the intentionality in the relationship that matters. So when we think about trust, we have to think about it in terms of intentional engagement. So what does that actually mean? Well, in order to do that, we have to think about what trust is to begin with. Now, the word trust actually comes from has some origins actually in the Indo-European root word named drūst, and that actually meant solid and lasting. And in the 14th century, Chaucer actually used the word trust to mean virtual certainty and well-grounded hope. And there's some really powerful statements there. Just imagine trust as a physical stature, thinking about it as solid, something really solid and fairly, really hard and unbreakable, and well-grounded hope, meaning You have certainty in the ability of the person. It's evidenced in some way. So, how do we use that directly within thinking about our own intentions with customers? There are some real benefits to trust, and I guess some things have been highlighted in different areas, particularly in the book The Speed of Trust by Stephen M. R. Covey. He highlighted these areas of character and competence and looking at how businesses with high trust have greater speed and reduction of costs significantly than those companies who have lower trust in their organizations. But that doesn't necessarily give us the full picture. What we often miss in business today is an accurate evaluation of how to understand the nature of trust, how to harness it, and allow the qualities and the economic and relationship benefits that sit within it to positively impact our organizations, our people, and wider stakeholders. In fact, in social psychology, there's a real differentiation in terms of the kinds of trust that you might experience. Now, they call it active trust and cognitive trust. Now, cognitive trust, to start there, is based on our knowledge and evidence about those we choose to trust, and affective trust is born out of the emotional ties, the security and confidence we place in others based on feelings from interactions and from past experiences that we may have. So you can see that there are these two overlapping areas of cognitive trust, which is really about the evidence area, the competence piece, and affective trust, the experience we get from the person of, uh, who they are directly. So in my studies going through behavioral psychology, evaluating and examining the relationships in business and research on social and economic behavior, it became really clear to me that trust is complex by itself. And so I found that by thinking about trust in these two areas, not necessarily cognitive or affective, but in terms of two different areas I call trust criteria, and trust triggers, we can move towards a much clearer idea of how to think about trust for our own businesses. Now, what do I mean by trust criteria and trust triggers? Because these will be the foundations of how I explain and how I think about trust and trust strategies within organizations. Now, trust criteria is what someone may need to see consistently to know you are someone who is trustworthy. That reflects back to the research of, in social psychology, of cognitive Trust. And then trust triggers are what you can activate based on the personal or corporate views and values of someone that you're communicating with. So in essence, trust with any human being on the planet carries a set of qualities, and it looks for skills and values, again criteria and triggers. So now that we know that, we now need to move towards what, what particular principles could sit underneath that to help us think about how to activate these areas. Within the epicenter of trust sit what I've written as 15 principles that, if considered, will ensure we don't blindly build relationships, expect things to be easy when they're not, or assume we have deep relationships when we have no framework for evaluating its merits. And it's why in so many marriages, divorces, there tends to be one person that is always surprised, because we carry these unweighted expectations that the activities we do with somebody actually mean something to the other person, when we haven't validated that or actually even allowed ourselves to properly identify the right kinds of responses we should expect from that person based on our activity. So let's have a think about these 15 principles, and at the end, I'll show you exactly where to download this information so you get a complete list and at least can start to reflect on it with your own teams, by yourself, or with your organization. So let's think about the 15 Trust Principles. Principle number 1: 7 Universal Trust Behaviors. Now, there are actually 7 universal trust behaviors, and if you look across the social sciences, there are a number of different qualities that people would attribute to successful relationships. But as you go much broader, geography-wise, uh, looking at culture, looking at language, you find you have to distill it into much more specific criteria. So when I looked at this, 7 particular behaviors popped out at me as being the most consistent, particularly in my own travels, and those were empathy, confidence, respect, listening, honesty, credibility, and safety. Now, I actually have a completely separate blog just on the universal trust behaviors, and I have that in the link below so you can read that in your own time. But that's number 1 principle. Number 2 is trust actually brings changes to your biochemistry— oxytocin, to be more specific. Now, in a research paper, Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, they did some fascinating work on looking at the responses to people who had given particular things to another person, meaning trusted them with their money and given it back. And so what I'm gonna do is link a study, the link to the study for that, so you can read it for yourself. But some interesting things around the measure of an interaction around trust with individuals and the change in biochemistry that comes from that. So that's number 2 in terms of principles. It actually changes your biochemistry. The third is it's a relationship journey, meaning there's also an evaluation throughout it of risks and rewards. And actually, some of the research from Mark Knapps, a social psychologist, looked at certainly the steps that are moved through relationships that support and sometimes, you know, remove things from a relationship and causes it to really disintegrate. It's really fascinating work around the relationship journey. Again, I probably might do a separate podcast on that, which is going to give you a feel for that particular aspect. It's a relationship journey with trust, and that leads to the next thing, which is number 4, is that although it's a relationship journey, it's actually scalable, meaning that you can have shared confidence. An example of this is online reviews. Somebody who has previously had confidence in or experienced something with you in another format or in another experience can now be transmitted to somebody else when they read that particular review. They now feel more confident about that particular restaurant and now have more confidence, more trust in taking the action to purchase from that establishment. Very simple, but it is scalable. That's just one example of scalability. There are actually numerous examples around scaling trust with your customer. That's number 4. Number 5 is there are levels of trust, meaning it's on a continuum, it's constantly moving. The level you're at now in terms of trust is nowhere near where you can go if you chose to intentionally build it on a day-to-day basis, week-to-week basis, month-to-month, whatever that looks like. You can go to new levels of trust. Number 6, it's hard to cultivate but very easy to lose, and we know this just if you look into the news and in our general social environment. Oftentimes we operate on the basis that it's one strike and you're out. And although they say, obviously, not every organization and person works in that principle, the point here is that the missing link to trust happens in the brokenness of those past relationships. So if we can fix those areas by working intentionally on trust, we can actually begin to rebuild those things much faster. But other than that, it's hard to cultivate, but it's very easy to lose. That's number 6. Number 7 is impacted by environment and time. Trust is impacted by environment and time, meaning the conduciveness of how somebody is operating in that particular relationship with you makes a difference to how long it actually takes to really get to a new level of trust with that person. So for example, if you're in a particular really difficult circumstance together with somebody, those difficult circumstances can either really draw you closer together or they can move you apart if both parties aren't willing to engage and invest in each other. But that's where we come in. We have to be intentional and think about those moments where those trusts can be increased in difficult times, difficult circumstances. That's a really good place to get focused in that area. Number 8, trust can be experienced differently by different people. And this is where we come to triggers, that there are particular subjective things that are tailored to individuals. As you get to know somebody else, you get to know how they want to build relationships. And so we can activate things based on individuals. That's number 8. Number 9, it requires openness and intimacy. Trust requires openness and intimacy. So you have to, by nature, with trust, be open with the other person for them not to create a story and narrative in their own mind about who you are or who you aren't. And so that openness and creating intimacy there comes together so that they now know that you are somebody who can be really open and honest with them. Number 10, trust is driven by intent and service. So it needs to be a service-driven approach. So we need to think about how we give, going back to the oxytocin or the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies number 2 example, driven by that intent and service. The person knowing that you have their best interests in mind. Number 11: Trust is tangible and can be measured, but it takes time. Now, this is something that I've really been discovering and looking into because I'm not 100% happy in terms of the research that I'm seeing in regards to how trust is being measured. I think there needs to be much more consideration and much more thoughtfulness put into the continued evaluation of trust, but it does take time. I'm thinking about some measures myself and contributing to the work there. So that's number 11. Number 12, trust is an economic driver. So if you think about some books like The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey, we can understand through some case examples that at a much broader level, if you look at particular qualities, those organisations who have higher trust and based on specific criteria, 13 behaviours he has, they see much faster speed to delivery results and a significant reduction in cost to delivery than their counterparts who have lower trust based on Stephen Covey's 13 Criteria, which essentially is under character and competence, a series of behavioral competencies that we would all recognize and actually fall quite neatly under the 7 Universal Trust Behaviors. So that's number 12. Number 13 is when absence, things get harder to do. When absence occurs with trust, things get harder to do. And so that's really what it is. So we know that if we start to feel strain in a relationship, it's usually because we have eroded trust, because trust actually brings confidence and brings openness and the ability for you to have very candid conversations. And so it's important that when you are feeling or experiencing things being quite hard, we know that trust is being eroded or is starting to be removed from that relationship. Important things there. Number 14, trust fuels collaboration and greater understanding. Meaning it's contagious. If you're trusting somebody else and giving trust to somebody else, giving them the benefit of the doubt internally, it does bring some added benefits. And we'll talk about the internal thing in just a second, but it fuels collaboration and gets people working much more in an engendered way for mutual benefit of the other people. And then moves us into Point 15 of the Trust Principles: Trust brings transparency and confidence internally and externally. So once it fuels collaboration, once you have the greater understanding, it then brings greater transparency when people are communicating together and greater confidence internally that expresses itself externally to the wider market about what you're doing. It's those things that attract talent into organizations but also attracts customers. In a much wider way. And actually, I've got some really interesting case studies around that that I might bring into, again, another podcast to share and in the material to come as well. So those are the 15 trust principles, universal trust behaviors. Trust actually changes your biochemistry. It is part of a relationship journey. It's scalable. There are different levels of trust. It's on a continuum. It's actually hard to cultivate but easy to lose. It's impacted by environment and time. It's experienced differently by different people, requires openness and intimacy, is driven by intent and service, it's tangible and can be measured, but it takes time, it's an economic driver, when absent, it actually gets— makes things harder to do within our own relationships, it fuels collaboration and understanding, and it brings transparency and confidence. So now that we have these different ideas, what do we do next? Well, I've got a few things for you that I want you to download. The first thing is I need you to read the blog on the Universal Trust Behaviors. That's going to set the foundations up, but also have a PDF download so you can actually get the full 15 on a list and know how you can start to think about that in your own business. So thanks so much for listening to this podcast. Hopefully it's been at least interesting to you and of value. Listen to it again just in case there are some things that may have been missed, but download the worksheet directly with the 15 different principles, and I look forward to seeing you in episode 2. Hey, thanks for listening to the Key Customer Growth Podcast. Hope you enjoyed the episode and got some great value. If that has been your story today, please share, comment, and subscribe so we can reach more people with the message and impact them also. Most importantly, I want to hear your feedback on what you like, or what you would like to hear and see in the future. Look forward to hearing from you, and you can find all the show notes below. Wishing you success in becoming an irreplaceable advisor.