#5 - Trust is Your Currency in the Experience Economy

Whenever I choose to use leisure time to tune into the CBS Sunday Morning show it's with the sole purpose to spark some joy by catching the feel-good Americana stories they're known for (and which are so rare in mainstream media these days), so imagine my surprise when I found myself taking notes for work during the July 7, 2024 episode!

Their segment titled, "Can Boeing recover the public's trust?" really struck me to the core.

It struck me not because I am a frequent flyer (although safety and quality are of utmost importance as a consumer) or because I am shareholder (also an important consideration for the Bauer retirement plan), but because the topic shot an arrow into the heart of a value I care most about personally and professionally:

Trust.

Recently I created a presentation titled, "Trust: the New Currency of the Experience Economy", with the sole purpose of highlighting trust in the business context as more than a nice virtue but as the most important value proposition for any brand's customer experience (CX) strategy.

My intention in the presentation is to persuade the audience to think deeper about guardrails in place to protect their brand's reputation and ways they can proactively head off trust issues by systematizing active listening through voice of customer (VOC) and internal employee channels.

Understanding consumer expectations in the experience economy is foundational for my work as a trusted advisor, and my lived experiences in the hospitality industry as the steward of brand reputation back up my thesis:

Trust is the linchpin of business success.

Kevin Kelly's analogy creates such a relatable visual for the small details and slow grind of doing things consistently with excellence day by day, drip by drip, to fill the bucket of trust over time.

But oh how quickly that full bucket can be kicked over when a business operates outside of integrity.

Financial gains, operational efficiencies, and change for the sake of growth and scale are important to all stakeholders, but when culture gets sidelined in favor of a focus on the bottom line the risks outweigh the rewards, as evidenced from these quotes in the Boeing segment:

• the crashes exposed "the rotted culture of an iconic American company." "That's pretty much directly from the words of Boeing's employees," said Robison. "It's systemic. It's culture. Senior leadership had its eye on stock price, had its eye on share buybacks, and weren't listening to the people on the ground."
• Captain Tajer said, "Boeing seems to do the right thing only after they do the wrong thing; that's the problem. They react to bad things instead of being proactive."
• "It's not the airplane that I don't trust," Tajer said. "It's the people who delivered it to me."

In an uncertain economy, a shaky political environment and an increasingly more artificial-everything world, consumers are seeking trustworthy brands.

If you haven't walked a mile in your customer's shoes, mapped out every touchpoint on their journey and considered any possible gap in your culture that might leak (or flood!) trust out of the bucket your organization works so hard to fill, make it a top priority.

Now!

Stop reading. Make it a priority today. Don't wait for a mystical 2025 strategic planning session or heaven forbid, a Boeing-level situation to emerge in your culture. It's important.

Trust me.

p.s. this topic feels too deep, too wide and beyond interesting to me, so I sense a series coming on! Do you have trust issues you care to share for next week's installment?

p.p.s. view to the CBS Sunday Morning Boeing episode or read it here