What is Trust-Based Customer Service?
Short answer: Trust-Based Customer Service is the focus on building trust in every single customer interaction.
Why trust? Across industries, the clearest, most durable predictor of loyalty is the degree to which customers trust you. It is a causal relationship—when trust goes up, intent to stay, buy, recommend, and forgive mistakes goes up; when trust goes down, loyalty erodes—often quickly.
The Three Building Blocks of Trust
Researchers Mayer, Davis and Schoorman from University of Notre Dame and Purdue Universities identified three primary components of trust: ability, benevolence, and integrity. In a practical customer-experience framework, these labels become:
- Caring (benevolence): Customers believe you genuinely care about them and their best interests.
- Competence (ability): Customers see you as skilled, knowledgeable, and effective.
- Integrity (integrity): Customers believe you’ll do the right things and take ownership—especially when it’s hard.
Put simply, we learned that customers will trust us when they believe we care, that we’re good at what we do, and that we will do what is right. When that level of trust is achieved, customers become loyal.
A change in what we want from customer service
Our understanding of trust represents a significant change in what we want from customer service. Over the last couple of decades, experts have presented a number of customer service goals. Delight, convenience, value, frictionless, and other concepts have made their way into books, mission statements and training programs. While all still valid, none on their own result in lasting customer loyalty.
The evidence is overwhelming, on the other hand, that trust does result in loyalty. These other goals—as well as metrics like NPS—sit downstream of trust. They are outcomes of Caring, Competence, and Integrity.
Trust is The North Star of a Company's Culture
To create the most significant impact, of course, a company’s focus on trust needs to extend beyond the relationship with external customers. It has to exist between internal customers, and bridge the gaps between silos and hierarchy. It means aligning every aspect of CX—your processes, policies, practices, and people. Trust needs to become the North Star of a company’s culture.
It begins with people, and ensuring that trust is at the forefront of every initiative. Your onboarding, training, coaching, and managing all has to re-focused to a single purpose—building trust. Your metrics and KPIs have to support the change, and you have to have mechanisms to keep momentum.
Help your people to build trust
Change is never easy, and transitioning to a focus on trust is no exception. It begins with consistent messaging and support from every level of management. The next step is training. The concepts of caring, competency are easy to understand, but consistent execution requires both a unique skillset an mindset. At minimum, it should include:
- Content centred on caring, competence and integrity
Every element has to explicitly contribute to these three outcomes. - Leveraging the Six Pillars of Customer Service
Use the pillars of customer service when mapping what specific skillsets and mindsets to include. - No generic content
Generic content will never achieve specific outcomes. Stick to role-specific scenarios, situations, and case studies. - Make it Engaging
Don’t be boring. Keep things real and moving. Don’t just facilitate—bring it to life with dynamic trainers confident with the subject matter. - Keep it Alive
Have a plan in place to reinforce trust-based customer service with coaching and ongoing reinforcements
The payoff is immediate
When executed properly, the time and money spent transitioning to a trust-based service environment becomes immediately apparent. Decreased customer churn, fewer escalations, and more positive customer interactions, are just the beginning. As everyone gets more comfortable with the focus on trust, and as managers and leaders continue their support, it starts to impact every aspect of the workplace.