“R-E-S-P-E-C-T, Find Out What It Means To Me…”

I have a sales director friend who likes to remind her team, “Trust owns the marketplace." That’s a great truism. Mutual trust is important for sustaining any relationship, and the one between a company and its customers—or more specifically a brand and its stakeholders—is no different.

Trust is what will enable your work or business to gain customer attention, to rollout new products or business lines, to build belief before the evidence supports, to have a leg up on your competition, and to overcome breaches in performance. And trust will also grease the wheels to develop that strong relationship of two-way conversation we’ve been discussing in recent posts.

One way to establish trust is to do what you say and to say what you mean. In other words, to deliver. This is perhaps most emphasized method in the business world today. A second way to establish trust—one less emphasized but equally important—is through simple respect. We humans aren’t perfect and at some point we will make mistake; we will fail to deliver and cause an exception to our “rule” of quality and excellence. At times like these, the trust we have built through respecting the customer will buoy and stabilize the relationship, until we can repair our error and get back on course. So we need to think of, plan and work for, talk and listen to our customers with respect.

How To Listen
As I've previously said, talking with your customer and not at your customers requires first listening to them. So how do we listen? With respect. When you engage customers in formal listening through things like surveys and focus groups, or informal listening from order taking to trend and sales analysis, remember: these are not “customers,” they are people. Human beings. Sometimes it helps to imagine that they could be your sister or your aunt, your old college roommate or neighbor down the street. You will actually hear more of the story-beneath-the story if you keep this in the forefront of your mind when in dialog with customers. In other words, listen with respect. In fact, I would urge, be bold: listen with love. Then you will begin to build the kind of trust generates customer loyalty and create customer evangelists.

This seems so simple—kindergarten stuff or what our mothers taught us as children. And frankly, it is. But just because it’s simple doesn’t mean mamma wasn’t right. If we wish to have fruitful two-way conversation with our customers and stakeholders it’s essential.