Want a NOOK? Explore Now
If you accidentally try to order the same song twice from iTunes, you’ll be warned that you already own it. Not because it would be illegal or unethical for Apple to profit from your forgetfulness. There’s a clear business reason: the leaders of iTunes realize there’s no better way to make you trust them than to be totally honest when you least expect it.
In the age of the Web, smartphones, and social networks, every action an organization takes can be exposed and critiqued in real time. Nothing is local or secret anymore. If you treat one customer unfairly, produce one shoddy product, or try to gouge one price, the whole world may find out in hours, if not minutes. The users of Twitter, Yelp, Epinions, and similar outlets show little mercy for bad behavior. The bar for trustworthiness is higher than ever and continuing to rise.
Don Peppers and Martha Rogers argue that the only sane response to these rising levels of transparency is to protect the interests of customers proactively, before they have a chance to spread negative buzz—even if that requires spending extra money in the short run to preserve your reputation and customer relationships in the long run. The payoff of generating extreme trust will be worth it.
The authors show how this trend is playing out in many different sectors. Among their insights:
The companies that Peppers and Rogers call “trustable” remember what they learn from each interaction, and they use these insights to create better and better customer experiences. They focus on winning the long-term battle for trust and loyalty, even if the dollar value of that trust is hard to quantify.
For instance, in 2009 Best Buy launched Twelpforce, a service that responds to customer questions and problems via Twitter. It’s manned part time by more than two thousand employees. In its first year of operation Twelpforce responded to nearly thirty thousand inquiries—which not only improved customer service but also helped educate and motivate the associates who participated. The short-term profit might be small but the impact on trust is enormous.
With a wealth of fascinating research as well as practical applications, this book will show you how to earn—and keep—the extreme trust of everyone your company interacts with.
1 Trust: Not Just A Good Idea. Inevitable 1
Yesterday, Trustworthy Was Good Enough. Today, Only Trustability Will Do 2
Trustability: A Higher Form of Trustworthiness 6
Why This Book Is Different from Others You've Read on "Trust" 10
As Interactions Multiply, Trust Becomes More Important 11
Making Whuffie 17
But Hasn't Trust Deteriorated? 18
Our Goal Is to Help You Build a Solid Plan for Succeeding in the Age of Transparency 21
Sidebar: Basic Principles of Trustability in a Business 24
"You're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat" 24
2 Serving the Interests of Customers, Profitably 27
"You've Got Mail": The Wages of Untrustability 28
Banking on Customer Mistakes 30
Netflix: Bad Intentions? Or Incompetence? Or Both? 33
So What Are Good Intentions, Anyway? 37
Is Your Company Trustable? Or Merely Trustworthy? 39
How Companies Use Customer Insight 41
Empathy, Self-Interest, and Economics 43
The Social Role of Empathy and Trust 47
Psychopathic Capitalism 49
Putting on a Human Face 53
Trustability Test 55
3 Trustability: Capitalist Tool 59
Why Your CFO Will Learn to Love Trustability 59
Short-Termism: Don't Worry About the Long Term, IBGYBG 61
Taking the Long-Term View 66
Customer Relationships: A Link to Long-Term Value 68
Trusters and Distrusters 75
There's No Such Thing as One-Way Reciprocity 77
Trustability and Self-Interest: A Paradox 81
Trustability Test 83
4 Sharing: Not Just for Sunday School 87
Value Creation: Invented by Somebody, Owned by Nobody, Valuable to Everybody 89
You Can't Trust Everybody 94
Trust, Punishment, and the "Monkey Mind" 97
Death by Tweet 100
Cooperators, Free Riders, and Punishers 101
Trustability Test 105
5 Trust and the E-Social Ethos 107
The e-Social Ethos 108
How Friends Treat Friends 110
This Blog Post Brought to You By 116
The Kenneth Cole Affair 117
Trustability and Social Production 119
Sidebar: Influencing the Influencers 120
Innovation Thrives Where Trustability Rules 122
Trustability Test 126
6 Control is Not an Option 128
The Illusion of Control 129
Credit Cards, Biases, and Trustability 133
Social Relationships, Cocktail Parties, and Systems 135
Staples Sees a Good Program Die, Defeated (Mostly) by Chance 141
Unarmed, Nestlé Fights a Battle of Wits with Greenpeace 142
Facebook Learns the Hard Way 145
What Could Other Companies Learn from Facebook's Experience? 147
How Employee Autonomy Builds Trustability 154
Dealing with Unpredictability: Embrace the "Chaos of Community" 159
Six Strategies to Succeed amid Rising Chaos 160
Trustability Test 164
7 Build Your Trustability in Advance 166
Customer Reviews Are Essential. And Anyway, They're Inevitable 167
Sockpuppeting for Fun and Profit 171
Workers of the World, Blog! 175
Trustability as a Competitive Strategy 178
The Power of an Apology 182
Sidebar: Recovering Lost Trust 184
Letting Bygones Be Bygones 186
Cultures in Transition 189
Trustability Test 192
8 Honest Competence 195
Competence Is Related to Good Intentions 196
Product Competence and Customer Competence 198
Honest Competence Requires Honestly Competent People 204
Sidebar: Dear Abby 207
Self-Organization and Open Leadership 208
True Confessions: Domino's and the Transparent Pizza 212
Fallibility and Trust 216
Trustability Test 218
9 Trustable Information 221
Can This Information Be Trusted? 223
Science, Trust, and Evidence-Based Management 227
Intuition and Hunches in a Data-Rich Environment 232
Managing for Transparency 235
Trustability Test 237
10 Designing Trustability Into a Business 240
Imagining the Trustable Future 240
Trustability in the Mobile Phone Category 241
Trustability in Prepaid Cards 243
Sidebar: One Customer's Take on Rebates and Rebate Cards 245
Trustability in Financial Services 247
Trustability in the Automotive Category 249
Trustability in the Enterprise Computing Industry 251
Trustability in the Airline Industry 252
Is Your Business Trustable? 255
Can a Product Ever Be Trusted, Really? 257
The Technology of Trustability? 258
Start Planning for Trustability Now 259
Acknowledgments 263
Notes 265
Index 311
Overview
If you accidentally try to order the same song twice from iTunes, you’ll be warned that you already own it. Not because it would be illegal or unethical for Apple to profit from your forgetfulness. There’s a clear business reason: the leaders of iTunes realize there’s no better way to make you trust them than to be totally honest when you least expect it.
In the age of the Web, smartphones, and social networks, every action an organization takes can be exposed and ...