This is a summary of a book titled “The Four Factors of Trust” – how organizations can earn lifelong loyalty, written by Ashley Reichheld and Amelia Dunlop. As we get inundated with information from various multimedia sources, it is hard to know who is telling the truth and which sources to believe. Ashley is a principal at Deloitte Digital and Amelia is the Chief Experience Officer. They provide an easy-to-follow blueprint for establishing and maintaining trust.

Trust is essential to relationships, both imposed and sought after. All parties involved must strive to earn trust but some more than others. It is not just a critical component but the foundation. Knowing that an individual or a company will act with integrity and clarity while pursuing its objectives ethically, is both empowering and relieving. Trust enables both to be vulnerable to each other.

Trust does not just determine the current course of action, but it also affects the future. Workers who trust their employers are shown to be more motivated and less likely to look for other jobs. Some relationships are transactional and contractual, but others endure. Even though trust is threatened from many quarters, it must be diligently reinforced, or relationships will fail. People often mistake not listening or neglecting to cause relationships to fail but while they emphasize the means, trust emphasizes the tenet holding the relationship. There are numerous examples of how trust erodes all around us be it personal, social, community or the news.

It consists of four pivotal factors:

Humanity – A sense of shared humanity is significant to any human interaction. It dominates the process of how businesses and relationships are conducted.

Transparency – As companies strive to create an informed, seamless experience for their customers, they improve transparency.

Capability – Expectations can be fulfilled three times more likely when there is caring involved because it makes them competent and capable.

Reliability – Companies can be capable but still undependable. By meeting the expectations consistently, we gain a reputation as reliable that adds to trust. For example, FedEx evokes trust by meeting shipment targets on time.

People want your communications to show you understand them, know their desires and beliefs, and respect them.  Trustworthy organizations invest in humanity, transparency, capability, and reliability.  A respected healthcare corporation earns a strong humanity score by prioritizing patient needs.  A community of senior citizens benefitted from a diabetes treatment center in this case.

Hospitality organizations rank high in all four factors and serve as exemplary case studies. They have shown that it takes strong empathetic leadership to give tough messages in plain language. Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson rode over the pandemic crisis by taking 50% pay cut for entire executive leadership team and making severe staff cuts and explained his message in a heart-felt video stating that everyone must bear the brunt of the pandemic.

Leaders and consumers view organizational trust from different perspectives. They are often at odds with each other. Even when companies work to make it easy to do business with them, they focus on the wrong approaches. The “trust gap” is compensated by a driven approach towards performance in terms of capability and reliability. A consumer might have a three-strikes policy that she can grant to the business if the business tries to resolve it each time. Many financial companies have a high concentration of neutral trust scores. Edward Jones, sought to differentiate from the pack and achieved 30% above the average in perceived capability. The company trains all its advisors who live in the communities where they work to have face-to-face relationships with clients to build trust with them.

Trusting your employees helps them sustain positive relationships with clients. An inspired workforce is twice as likely to deliver improved customer satisfaction than a disengaged workforce. Trust isn’t an entitlement, both people and organizations must earn it.

A breach of trust can be repaired more easily if we have a strategy for making the relationship right again, rather than just randomly experimenting with possible remedies. Determine the objectives of the trust initiative, then assemble data that outlines the current situation and future goals. Anything any employee, customer, or partner says or does could make headlines and erode trust. Some of the quickest wins come from observing the effects of how we communicate with people and what access we are giving them to information. If you are trusted as a brand, you don’t have to use your finite marketing dollars to convince people that your product is high quality and valuable.

Previous book summaries: BookSummary22.docx