Gaining the trust of online customers
Usually, people would credit a great web design, nice photos, or other more obvious pieces of a website with generating customer trust. While each of these factors may contribute to the generation of trust, they are probably not the most significant factors. Listed are some new insights I gained today regarding the gaining the trust of online customers.
- Trust is gained when the customer believes you, as the seller, are empowering them to complete a task, such as buying a product
- Don’t make it obvious you are trying to gain trust – No one likes, or trusts, an overly-friendly salesman who acts very interested and sincere, but ultimately is after your money. Online customers feel just as uncomfortable with a website with flashy graphic and content but questionable products. Provide assistance to the customer to help them to choose for themselves.
- Utilize the power of word-of-mouth recommendations – a quote on the website from a “satisfied customer” is less effective than an online forum or thread of comments where people support your products. New customers trust these opinions as valid and authoritative, whereas hand picked “satisfied customer” quotes come across as gimmicky marketing tricks. Tricks does not equal trust.
These ideas came to me today as I read a journal called “How Task-Facilitative Interactive Tools Foster Buyers’ Trust in Online Retailers: A Process View of Trust Development in the Electronic Marketplace” by Pranjal Gupta, Manjit S. Yadav, and Rajan Varadarajan, found in the Journal of Retailing. They claim their research is relatively new, but certainly profound.
The authors propose that trust is based on the customer’s perception of the sellers intent, ability, and success in helping them complete a certain task. Sounds complicated, lets break it down.
Perceived intent to assist
This is key to the researcher’s findings. They say that initial trust development in online shopping begins with the seller helping the customer with a task. In their study, their task was to find a laptop computer which fit their needs. Customer’s trusted the seller whom they felt was assisting them to finish the task.
The study
In order to test their theory, the researches created two tests. One of them had interactive web tools which assisted the customers in their shopping experience, the other did not. The tools included in the assisted site were:
- Searching/filtering system – this allowed the customers to filter results based on particular attributes or qualities. Results were able to be sorted, and certain features were listed in a table format.
- Informative documentation – copy was provided to help the customer to understand the product, its attributes, and the benefits associated with different attribute levels. For example, the word hard drive would have a link explaining what the function of a hard drive is, what a gigabyte is and how many you might need based on your needs
Results
It’s no surprise that the results confirmed that the website which provided the tools listed above were trusted more than the one without. Here are some of the participant comments.
Site with tools – Participant responses
Site without tools – Participant responses
“. . .the information about the laptops was very basic and there was no explanation of what those things mean.”
“Not enough information provided to compare items and make appropriate decision.”
“The only problem that I would have would be that I don’t know EVERYTHING about computers and I know that I need a little bit more assistance in looking for a computer than just a bunch of listings.”
“This e-retailer is horrible. . . It’s hard to trust a site that doesn’ t give you any help in shopping for something as costly and important as a laptop.”
“. . .The site did not help me at all and made me guess which laptop link to click on. It felt very shady.”
“. . .In no way did it assist me in making a sound decision for my next computer. You had to search way too much to find exactly what you were looking for. For people that are not computer savvy, they would be extremely frustrated looking at all the computer terminology and not know what any of it means.”
“I do not believe they were trustworthy because they did not help me with any aspect of choosing a computer, all they did was tell me a little information about the computer. However, I do not know a lot about computers so I need a question answer section that could specify my needs. They should have given me a list of laptops that fit my required needs; they also needed to explain terminology.”
Other considerations
The level of perceived intent to assist varied by each user. This was directly related to the customer’s experience with computers (this was measured with a quiz testing each participants computer knowledge). Users with different levels of knowledge about the product will perceive your intent to assist differently. Perhaps it would be helpful to evaluate your demographics and decide who needs the most help (and are they the ones who are most willing to buy).
Word of mouth marketing has been around for years. Its online form is just as powerful, if not more. Another journal article called “Social ties and online word of mouth” studied the site Ratemyprofessors.com. Their study found that people using the site would often trust the opinion of a complete stranger’s online recommendation over the recommendation of a close friend. The greater number of positive reviews your product receives, the more likely a new customer is to trust you.
Do you have any other ideas of how to gain the trust of online customers?
