Per BusinessWeek, ‘Trust’ is the new message….lucky for us, it’s true

The current cover story in BusinessWeek is ‘100 Best Global Brands: The Great Trust Offensive’.  http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/09/0917_global_brands/index.htm

Since we just ‘re-branded’ ourselves, the article caught our attention. It reports that recent polling shows “increasing numbers of consumers distrust business as a whole“, therefore, companies across the board are marketing their ‘trustworthiness.’

That makes sense to us.  Due to our busines model, trust is like oxygen – without it our business fades to black. There is an entire white paper on this topic http://www.contactsolutions.com/resource-center/.

Here’s the headline: When you buy IVR and other contact automation services as part of a managed service lease or purchase on-premise equipment, your vendor doesn’t really have to continually earn your trust. At that point, your costs are ‘sunk,’ so there is little incentive to continually re-earn your business (i.e. your trust).

When you buy an On-Demand model (which is what Contact Solutions offers), your upfront investment is much, much lower; so it’s much easier to turn to a new vendor if performance suffers. So for us, maintaining trust with our customers is more than a well-timed marketing campaign, it’s self-preservation.

A marketing consultant is quoted in the article saying, “Trust-related marketing only works if there is a message that people want to believe in. You cannot spin an audience that doesn’t want to be spun.”  

Boy, don’t we know it!

Call automation has taken a beating with consumers who universally complain about apps that have been unattended for years (‘Please listen as our options have changed’ – yeah, 10 years ago maybe). To compound the issue, people now go straight to Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets to tell the world about their poor experience.

No one said viral marketing is always a positive. Good luck getting trust back from a person who has read negative posts about your automated service. No amount of marketing dollars or spin will make YOUR customers believe that self-service is a great option if it’s not continually optimized for them. Nor will it make OUR customers believe their trust is our biggest concern.

Lucky for us, it’s not a marketing campaign, it’s a way of life.