Building trust through tech

Some of the newest technologies are helping us achieve more than ever before, but tech is having to go back to basics in order to rebuild trust between businesses and their customers 

We live in a cynical age – and the reasons why aren’t remotely surprising. We don’t trust our financial institutions, we certainly don’t trust our politicians, and we frown upon big companies that do their utmost to dodge taxes. Indeed, there’s no end of research showing how trust in business has been eroding for years.  

However, when you consider that Forbes once called trust ‘the most valuable business commodity’, can businesses really afford to lose the trust of existing and potential customers? 

When global PR firm Edelman asked survey respondents how much they trusted various businesses ‘to do what is right’, a higher percentage gave the thumbs up to ‘high tech’ mobile banking and e-payments compared with ‘high touch’ financial advising and asset management. 

As for the financial services industry overall, that languishes at the bottom of  Edelman’s 2016 Trust Barometer, along with energy, telecommunications and healthcare. In comparison, technology – for the 16th year in succession – was considered the most trusted business sector by most of the countries surveyed.

So it’s something of a natural extension, then, that technology might be able to provide the way forward in rebuilding some of that lost trust – which is ironic considering that in many instances, tech precludes human interaction.

These days, most of us are comfortable making purchases from our mobile phones, and think nothing of uploading our personal data to the cloud. We may not understand how some of the newer digital solutions work, we just assume they will. 

But as Charles Irvine, Chief Executive Officer of UK consultancy Questions of Difference, explains, trust doesn’t apply in the same way to machines as it does to humans. 

“One of the challenges with trust is that it’s one word we think covers everything,” he says. “When we talk about machines, a more accurate paradigm is confidence, as in ‘Do I have confidence, proven through robust algorithms, statistics and data, that this process will be efficient and my data will be secure?’. 

On the other hand, we can’t definitively prove whether human beings are trustworthy or not, because of our different interpretations of competence, integrity, honesty, authenticity and the other terms we combine to define ‘trust’.”

What is trust?

When working with clients to handle conflicts, develop leaders or change cultures, Irvine chooses to see trust as a continuum, with the needle moving higher or lower depending on the degree of integrity that each party brings to the conversation. 

“To say ‘I trust everyone until you break my trust’ or ‘You’ve got to earn my trust’ isn’t helpful,” he says. “Taking an either/or approach to trust implies notions of people as machines, rather than complex and flawed human beings.” 

In other words, while automation instills a sense of safety, this isn’t the same as trusting – something we’re always trying to mitigate because of the risks inherent in human relationships. 

According to Dr Graham Dietz of Durham University’s Business School, who co-authored a report entitled Building and Restoring Organisational Trust for the Institute of Business Ethics, trustworthiness is comprised of a number of characteristics: reliable competence, benign motives, and actions that demonstrate fairness, honesty and integrity. 
Ethics is certainly a major factor of trust, although sometimes the focus is on a specific business outcome – as when a  Gallup Panel assessed levels of trust by US consumers in relation to data security. 

According to InterContinental Hotels Group Chief Executive Officer Richard Solomons, companies should look to add ‘trust capital’ to their existing financial capital, intellectual capital and human capital – all of which, he believes, are vital to revenue growth through a “new definition of value”. 

That includes enhancing customer service through personalisation – something that today’s data-capturing technology certainly can facilitate. This makes it easier for today’s businesses to respond to a human need – something that’s underpinned trust for centuries: being known and understood. 

Indeed, it’s only been in the past 200 years that trust has been institutionalised. Until then it was a bottom-up process involving small groups – such as guilds and chartered companies – comprised of ‘people like us’. However, that wasn’t doing much to boost economic prosperity, so when large institutions came along with more efficient systems, they co-opted the mantle of trust.

“Local providers once had an advantage over large ‘faceless’ firms because it was easier for them to adapt to the characteristics of trust expected by their communities,” says Cyrille Joffre, Chief Technology and Information Officer at telecommunications services company Sure, which operates in Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man. 

“Digital technologies, including the cloud, machine learning and data analytics, now provide large companies with the vehicle and fuel for regaining trust,” he adds. “Data sources can be integrated and services highly personalised based on consumer data.”

Power to the people

Technology is also helping to spearhead the burgeoning kinship economy – sometimes referred to as the ‘shareconomy’ – as third-party platforms begin disrupting legacy players in industries such as insurance. 

For example, Joffre points to Germany-based startup Friendsurance, which uses a peer-to-peer model to transfer knowledge and power back into the hands of consumers. Segmented into small communities according to the type of insurance they need, members pool premiums, spread risk and share a cash-back ‘kitty’ when no claims are made.  

 Stephen Scott, CEO and co-founder of Starling Trust Sciences, emphasises: “A reputation for trustworthiness is increasingly the necessary pre-condition to participation in the kinship economy.” He points to examples such as Airbnb, which “use digital systems to ensure accountability via sharing networks”. 

“These platforms for peer exchange don’t require that we place trust in the person on the other end,” he says, “but rather with the company or community of people ‘like me’ that have self-assembled around shared goals, such as renting one another’s homes so as to facilitate more affordable, and more ‘authentic’ travel experiences.”

Joffre also believes that blockchain will help transform our concept of trust by enabling economic empowerment. 

“This will allow us to reclaim ownership of our identities and our personal data, as well as create and exchange value without powerful intermediaries acting as the arbiters of money and information,” he says. 

One outcome of this is that consumers will no longer need to concern themselves with whether a new service provider is likely to act ethically and responsibly, or if a company will handle their problems quickly and efficiently when things go wrong. They will be in control of frameworks populated by people to whom they relate and therefore trust. (See page 42 for our article on blockchain.)  

Unfortunately, technology has also made it easier for fraudsters to build ‘artificial credibility’ by gaming systems, resulting in the kind of inflated product ratings that required Amazon to sue those responsible after they posted thousands of false five-star reviews on its site. 

Nevertheless, says Scott, companies that attempt to regain the trust of customers by forcing “a culture of rules compliance among employees” or responding to regulatory overreach 
are unlikely to succeed. 

All about relationships

To Iain Beresford, Group Head of Business Development and Marketing at global law firm Collas Crill, however, “technology is just technology”. His responsibilities include maintaining the promise of the brand and ensuring clients experience consistent reliability and integrity. 

Picking up on the point Charles Irvine made earlier, this inevitably means accepting that the human beings charged with demonstrating trust are fallible.

“Sometimes the expected behaviour falls down and someone isn’t as responsive as they should be, which fundamentally affects the trust a client has in us,” says Beresford. “But there’s an upside to that in offering us a chance to see where gaps exist, so we can remedy them.”

This is where technology needs to take a back seat, he says. While blockchain enables users to self-regulate and leverage the natural instinct of people to trust each other, and data mining allows companies to know more about consumers in order to offer individualised products and services, at the end of the day it’s all about relationships. Human relationships. Not least between leaders that are open and transparent and establish clear guidelines with their teams.

“My team trusts that I support them. I joke that while I’ll always give them enough rope to hang themselves, I’d never allow them to do it,” says Beresford. “Today, when an organisation is considered trustworthy it’s almost a competitive advantage. But it’s crazy that it should be.” 

As American economist Joseph Stiglitz once pointed out: “It’s trust, not money, that makes the world go around.” 

Maybe we just need to wait until technology has caught up, so that we can reinstate trust to where it’s long been – with small groups of ordinary people, not those in positions of power or bureaucratic processes. 

Dr Liz Alexander is an author, educator, business strategist, and Founder of business consultancy Leading Thought