Event: Building Trust With Your Customers

This week was our first event of the Autumn term and was attended by a diverse range of London's business people from a multitude of different industries. We would like to thank Geri McAndrew and ButtleUK for hosting the event at their offices in Victoria.

This week's hotseat topic was building trust between a business and its customers in a unique way. For our hotseater, who runs his own, one-man financial consultancy, the core issue was whether there were different and more innovative ways with which to build trust with his customers.

Questions

In the exploratory section of the event (where the group asks questions in order to clarify the question and explore the issue) the questions included;

• How do you know when you have won a client’s trust?
• What is the profile of a typical client?
• What do you understand by the term 'trust'?
• Why do you do what you do?
• What separates you out from other financial advisers?

Ideas

Our attendees then discussed the issue and offered advice. Some of the highlights were:

• Identify your unique selling point – if you don't know what it is, then your clients won't be able to see it either.
• Your clients need to know that you care about them, that you understand their situation and that they come first.
• Genuinely listening to your clients is an essential tool to create trust.
• Get some really good feedback – what do clients think of you?
• Aim to show, not tell – this is what will ultimately drive trust between yourself and your customers.
• People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Conclusions

Our hotseater then reflected back to the group. His main conclusions were that he needed to focus on learning how to listen well and tell great stories in order to relate better to his clients.

The main takeaway from the event was that business is always about putting people first, no matter what industry you're in and that it is too easy to lose sight of that fact. When trying to build trust, it's important to be able to engage with your customers on a human level, to demonstrate that you can relate to and are interested in their unique circumstances.

An interesting outcome was that, in a discussion which looked like being about the ‘hard sell’ the group settled on the importance of selling the person, rather than the product. As one participant remarked “we succeed when we show who we are”.

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Our next event will be at TateHindle on 12th October. We hope to see you there!