It seems that we have all become more cynical. It’s hard to know who to trust.

Companies we grew up with and expected to always be there have been bought by other companies or have gone bankrupt… Values that we believed in are being questioned every single day… We read in the paper about the wonder drug that is going to heal us and a year later we read about the same wonder drug that is having harmful effects on people. We thought the FDA was there to protect us…  Politicians who have been preaching how we should live and what our ethical standards should be now disappoint us when we find out who they really are and what type of personal lives they really live… The media, including print, network and cable news and programming either lean to the left or to the right in their political views rather than remain unbiased. News sources and entertainment venues try to sway our viewpoints to their way of thinking… Employees who have given their life to companies wake up one morning to find they no longer have a job but the CEO of the company walked away with millions of dollars in his/her severance package…  Retirees were made promises about how they were going to be taken care by the company they worked for when in retirement and now those companies are trying to reduce or eliminate those same benefits… We are all worried about what will happen to Social Security even though the government, all of our working life, has promised us it would be there… We were told to invest in America through the Stock Market on Wall Street but now people have lost major savings that may take years to recoup due to the latest financial meltdown.

By all the things above and many more that are just too numerous to mention, people today just don’t have trust in anything.

I believe one of the key marketing buzzwords going forward will be:  trust.

As a CEO, company president or business owner, you must instill and maintain trust at every level of your company.  With your employees, with your customers, with your vendors and suppliers, with those you outsource to, in the community where your company is located, among local government leaders, and to reach out with a message of trust as far as possible within your company’s sphere of influence. 

Live up to promises made to your employees. 

If you want to stay in business, your products and services need to surpass what you promised.  Always over deliver on what the customer expects. Stand behind your products and services.

Every day you need to work at building trust in your business, with your employees and with the marketplace. It’s easy to see how over the next few years there will be many companies who go out of business because they took shortcuts and didn’t tell the truth.

Let’s start turning this all around.  Get people to trust businesses again by doing the right thing day in and day out.

In economic times like these, make sure your company’s customer service is impeccable.  Superior customer service is one of the best business practices to promote trust.  If you haven’t already, create a list of customer service standards for your company.  And if your company does have a specific list of customer service standards, review consistently with your employees.

Often people talk about customer service but who hasn’t experienced an impossible maze of automated instructions in order to finally connect through to the appropriate individual (unless you gave up in frustration somewhere along the line) or you simply can’t get through or there is no response to your inquiry; or in store, no one knows anything about the product you are trying to buy; or, worse yet, after they get your money, they don’t want to talk to you yet before the sale nothing was too much trouble. It’s about going the extra mile for your customer.

That’s what brings customers back and creates trust.  You want every customer to become an advocate for your company.  And in today’s economy, every customer counts.

It’s a matter of trust.