More About Trust

Two professors from ESCP Europe Business School have published a comprehensive review of the business and academic literature along with a survey of 2000 consumers in the US and the UK. Their findings are worth taking some time to report and interpret. The title of their report is "The Role of Trust in Consumer Relationships."

Their research focused on banking, insurance and mobil phone network companies and included interviews with executives in these businesses.

As a beginning consider some of the statistics they uncovered.
1. 32% of consumers trust international companies and 13% trust advertising compared to 48% trusting their friends, work colleagues or neighbors.
2. 90% of consumers trusted recommendations from friends and 70% trusted consumer opinions posted online.
3. The Edelman trust indices show that banking, media and insurance organizations score 21%, 23% and 41% respectively compared with 74% or technology and 57% for retail.

The bottom line is that customer relationship management has been centered on one or one-to many interactions with customers. This has changed with the digital communications media which now provides multi-channel relationship management. Companies can no longer afford to manage all the possible media that is available to their customers. Thus, trust appears to be gaining in importance as a way of building trust-based relationships that transcend the multi-channel media.

This report will be further discussed in future blogs.