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Confidence gives customers the ability to decide, to plan and to act. Confidence brings freedom, enabling customers to focus their effort where it will benefit them most — not on concern or on developing back up plans just in case things don’t work the way they expected.

Confidence is hard to earn, and its by-product, trust, is just as easy to lose.

For something that is so hard to build, the formula for creating confidence is extremely simple: set appropriate expectations, and meet them. Then repeat. The greater the number of repetitions the better the quality of confidence you will generate and the greater the likelihood of trust emerging.

While there are a number of things that can corrupt that process, there are two which are completely within the control of any organisation, which nonetheless are extraordinarily common: poor communication and inconsistency.

There are no excuses for poor communication. Clarity is essential in setting customer expectations, ambiguity is, unfortunately, more often deliberate than accidental. It provides ‘wiggle-room’ for any organisational failure, it allows customers to over-estimate value and improve the likelihood of sales, it’s often ‘useful’ to be a bit ambiguous.

But ambiguity is a direct driver of poor experience and loss of confidence and trust. Setting expectations through clear and explicit communications is very different to allowing customers to set their own expectations based on ambiguous or incomplete information. It is infinitely easier to meet the expectations that you set than it is to meet expectations created by your customers — it is why you must be explicit and clear in all your communications.

Inconsistency is (ironically) a consistent challenge in the modern business environment. Customers are likely to have multiple interactions with a business, across different channels with the various touchpoints being managed by different teams, established in isolation and targeting different objectives. The potential conflict between teams, for example sales and service, and their relevant incentives can impact the way in which information is presented and services supported.

It is essential that at each stage of the journey what the customer should expect is clearly communicated and that their experience consistently delivers against that expectation. Audiences will forgive a huge amount if they know what is happening and they get consistent information and experiences throughout the journey

That journey is likely to be a lot wider than the online experience, the area which generates most attention in discussions of ‘journeys’. The journey incorporates physical environments, calls to customer service or sales, online processes, physical interactions with product or service literature, on-boarding processes, and ongoing service and support interactions that extend long after an initial sales engagement.

At each stage the greater the customers confidence, the better the results of them and for your business, and generating that confidence remains simple, be clear when you set expectations, be disciplined in delivering against those expectations, repeat.

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I’m a Strategist at Make it Clear. We help companies talk about technology-based products and services in ways that everyone can understand.

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