The trust experience | Megan Burns

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Well, trust is the connective tissue. So you ask Net Promoter likelihood to recommend, that depends on a lot of different factors, one of which is whether or not I trust you. Because my willingness to recommend you is based in part on my trust that you're not gonna make me look like an idiot for having recommended you.

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So it separates, by separating out trust, first of all, asking someone, how did this experience change your trust in us as an organization mixed about them, not you. What's up Lifers, and welcome to the Daily Standup with Lifetime Value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man Rob with us.

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Rob, do you wanna say hi? Good day. Good day. And we have JP with us, hiding a fresh new haircut.

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JP, can you say hi? Soup to nuts. Wow, it looks great. Thank you for the peek.

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And we have Megan with us. Megan, can you say hi, please? Hello. Hello, hello.

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And I am your host, my name is Dillon Young. Megan, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself? Sure, so my name is Megan Burns, and the short answer is I help companies use customer experience to build their business.

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I've been doing this for about 20 years. I spent 10 years at Forrester doing it, and then for the last nine, I've been in private practice. So that's me.

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Forrester is a name we know well here. Tons of very smart people come from there, including friend of the show, Irwin Hipsman, who I think you know, Megan, is that right? I do, he was there after me, but yes, I do know him. I'm sorry, I'm sorry you had to, no, he's awesome, he's awesome.

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Anyway, Megan, you know what we do here? We ask one simple question of every single guest, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success slash experience? Can you tell us what that is for you? Sure, 100%, I am all about trust as a topic. The issue of trust, particularly in B2B customer experience, which is what most of my clients are, is so big and getting bigger now as we're in more of a volatile environment, but it's not something that's been a huge part of the conversation over the last 20 years. And so I'm trying to change that because I think companies have a really big opportunity to build loyalty in a way they never have.

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So it's interesting because I think of trust as a customer success professional developing trust with my end users or the folks that my stakeholders, the folks that I'm responsible for maintaining a relationship with, but there is this entirely different facet, which is trust between a company and their customers, which I guess in B2B might be between customer success. So tell me a little bit more about how you think about that, why you think we've missed the mark for the past 20 years or just not had to think about it. And then I'll let the guys loose once you tell us about that.

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Sure, so there is absolutely interpersonal trust. I trust you, you trust me. The challenge for business is A, people move, they leave.

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And so if the primary trust that someone has is with a particular rep and that person leaves, you're kind of hosed. The other issue is that they can't just trust the person, they have to trust the organization. Otherwise, you've got them relying on one person.

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I had a client where they had trained every client to call the CEO because that was the way to get anything done. They didn't trust the organization, but they knew if they escalated it, it would get done. That obviously doesn't scale.

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So this issue of building trust at the organizational systemic level is really a new frontier, I think. Rob, why don't you go first? Yeah, I'm really liking this topic because it's got me thinking. It's got me thinking about a pretty big gap, I suppose, we have in the ways we think about and try to measure customer success.

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Because a lot of us, there's all this distracting debate about like, oh, NPS, should you use it or not? Is it good? And it's like, can we elevate the conversation to capture more nuanced human-to-human relationships like trust? I don't know of an NPS equivalent for trust, but I'm thinking about it because earlier this week, I was working on a customer journey map for a client, and they are essentially a digital-first dermatology clinic. And when you think about that, what underpins the whole customer journey and most of the friction points actually relate to trust. Can I trust this techie-seeming provider? Can I trust this versus like my general provider? Can I trust the fact that they're actually going to show up to the meeting? I called their phone number and no one picked up.

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Can I trust them? What's going on here? They're asking for my insurance information. Can I trust them? I'm gonna pay them? There's so many elements of trust that underpin that journey. And it's funny because we're gonna build all these playbooks, and I'm almost like, well, geez, I haven't been reading the elephant in the room here, which is a matter of trust.

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Well, trust is the connective tissue. So you ask NetPromoter likelihood to recommend. That depends on a lot of different factors, one of which is whether or not I trust you.

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Because my willingness to recommend you is based in part on my trust that you're not gonna make me look like an idiot for having recommended you. So it separates, by separating out trust, first of all, asking someone how did this experience change your trust in us as an organization makes it about them and not you. NPS is all about, would you recommend us? Did this make you trust us more or less? It's not quite so self-serving, but it's also, not every interaction leads to a sale.

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And sometimes the way you handle not being able to help somebody, you can either do that in a way that says, you know what, they weren't able to help me this time, but I trust that they really wanted to. Or you can do it in a way that says, I don't think they could care less. Trust, interesting, I just wanna put this out there.

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There are kind of four things that people look at when they decide whether or not to trust you. One is your competence. Can you actually do what you say you can do? One is your consistency.

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Are you gonna do it well every time? One is integrity, which is pretty self-explanatory. And then the fourth, rather, is intentions, which is, do I think you're looking out for me and my best interests, not just your own? And so different behaviors signal different elements of trust. And most of the time, competence is not a question.

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You wouldn't be talking to the company. You wouldn't be a customer of the company if you didn't think they were competent. It's those other areas where we've got some room to do some work.

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Sorry, go ahead, go ahead. I was gonna, on a previous episode, there was a brief mention with, I think it was James Sanchez's episode. There was a brief mention of something called the Ben Franklin effect, where a young Ben Franklin built trust with this hotshot politician by asking to borrow a book.

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And the establishment of that relationship, where, interestingly, Ben Franklin was asking for a favor from somebody else higher than him, created a trusting relationship just by the very nature of that simple, tiny transaction. And we kind of do that with our customers all the time, right? Yep. Rob, I wanna fight you right now, but I'm gonna move on, I'm gonna move on, and I gotta let this beautiful hairline get in here and tell me what he thinks.

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JP, go ahead. Yeah, I think the thing that I was thinking that was hit upon was the consistency part. And consistency, I guess when I think about it visually, it's both vertically and horizontally, in the sense of if you have one CSM and they're doing a great job, when that account has to get passed off, right? Internally, someone may leave, get promoted.

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Sometimes we're just refreshing books of business. Are you gonna get the same experience you got with another CSM? So I think that that's one type of consistency that's sort of building the trust horizontally. And then you've sort of got this opportunity for trust also at the product level.

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So it's like, okay, the service, and then is the product consistently delivering what we need it to? And I think those are sort of the axes, for lack of a better word, that I sort of think about sort of a consistency getting played out on, which can really build that trust. And I think that there's a lot, in terms of like what we control as CSM professionals, is like even something like the handoff, we've talked about this ad nauseum for a long time, the handoff between sales and CS, right? What often falls through that gap, right? Sales is making a promise. And then if we come in as CS, and that promise is false and not able, then we're already starting from really a disadvantage in terms of trust that we have to then go build upon.

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So that's where I think like, I see the consistency as being such an important element, because like McDonald's is not my favorite thing to eat, but like, damn it, they're pretty consistent. You know? And like they build their whole model on being consistent. And like, and that's how they scale.

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Like you can't scale really without the consistency. So, yeah. Well, yeah.

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And you know, there's a phrase I coined actually before I started really getting obsessed with trust, but it turns out to map up. I would tell people the customer experience strategy everyone should be going for is to be consistently good and strategically amazing. Everybody focuses on being amazing, being wow.

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You can't be wow all the time. You don't have to be wow all the time. How consistently good are you? People just want things to work.

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And so that element of consistency, you're absolutely right, is something that is not, I mean, consistency is boring. It seems boring, but these days I think we could all use a little boring. And I think that's why you hear this phrase all the time, show up.

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I'm gonna keep showing up, which I think is a bit of a trope, but that's a story for another time. JP, I love the way you visualize that though, horizontally and vertically. I think that's an incredible way to think about it.

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Megan, with the time we have left, I have one question for you. And maybe it's a hot potato, but I'd love your take on it. Do you think trust is the end all be all of relationships or is it just this sort of necessary component that you cannot ignore? Like, how do you think about it? Is it everything or just a piece you can't do without? I think trust is the essence of the relationship because trust is the thing that keeps the relationship going.

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If I don't, there are two, I was reading some research recently, people stick with vendors long-term for two reasons. One is dependence. I don't have a choice.

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The other is trust. And so my continuing to do business with you depends on my trusting you. So there's a lot under there, but I think it's really the most important element we can have.

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A lot under there. You'll just have to come back another time and we can explore it further. But for now, Megan, that is our time.

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We have to say goodbye. Thanks for having me. You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value.

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