How to Be "Trustable" -- Five Requirements

Being trustable requires you to be proactively trustworthy – that is, to proactively watch out for your customers’ interests. This might mean, for instance, preventing a customer from making a mistake (even if that mistake would generate more profit for you). When iTunes reminds you that you already own a tune or an app that you’re trying to buy from them, they are being trustable. Or it might mean reminding a customer that a payment is soon due, or that a warranty is almost up, or that some free vouchers haven’t been used and are still outstanding.

Trustability is a word that Martha Rogers and I “re-appropriated” in our book Extreme Trust: Honesty as a Competitive Advantage. I say we re-appropriated it because the word “trustable,” while rarely used, is already defined in the dictionary as a synonym for “trustworthy.” Martha and I needed a single, new word to encompass our new standard of proactive trustworthiness, so we are using “trustability” to serve that purpose.

Our book is easy enough to read, but there are many aspects to being trustable, and the e-social implications alone take us at least a couple of chapters to develop and document. Many people ask me if there are any guidelines to “being trustable” as a business. And near the end of our book we do summarize our recommendations into five overall requirements:

1. Demonstrate Humanity. To be trustable, a business must act toward its customers the way one human being would act toward another. Humans have empathy, and humans are fallible. To have empathy a business has to see things from the customer’s perspective, treating different customers differently, and demonstrating genuinely good intentions toward them. As for fallibility, just think about it: Businesses are already fallible. All they have to do to show their humanity is admit to it once in a while.
2. Think Long-term. You can’t be trustable if you’re entirely focused on the short term. Customers are the mechanism for linking short-term actions to long-term value, and if you don’t have the ability to embrace the long term, then don’t even think about trying to become more trustable, because eventually your flawed arithmetic and off-center metrics will do you in.
3. Be Competent. You have to be both product competent and customer competent. Not only do you have to have a product and service quality at least on a par with your immediate competitors, but you have to be able to treat different customers differently, track and improve customer loyalty, and maintain individual customer relationships that grow stronger with every interaction.
4. Share. They enjoy contributing to others, and if you want to be trustable your business has to share, also. So share your ideas, your technology, and your data. Make your intellectual property more freely available, in order to stimulate innovation. Trust others the way you want them to trust you. And remember: You can only harness the power of social production with trust, not money.
5. Respect Evidence. Don’t manage by judgment alone, but rely on evidence. Evaluate information for its objectivity and accuracy. And take the steps required to deal with the inevitability of random events: Pay more attention to numbers and statistical best practices, measure inputs in addition to results, and plan more carefully for alternatives and multiple scenarios.