One thing that’s become clear in my conversations with chief trust officers this month is that while a lot of companies know they need to develop trust with stakeholders, and many are actively attempting to do so, few know how to measure whether their trust-building exercises are actually successful.
As Pamela Snively, chief data and trust officer of Canadian telecoms company Telus, puts it, “The business case for building trust is there. What's challenging is measuring whether you’ve done it.” In fact, Snively, who has held her role at Telus since 2015, says that getting better metrics on measuring trust is her team’s challenge for the year ahead.
Certainly, the business case is there. According to PwC’s 2023 Trust Survey, 91% of executives say their ability to build and maintain trust improves the bottom line, largely due to increased referrals. Nearly 60% of consumers told PwC they have recommended a company they trust to friends and family, and 64% of employees say they recommended a company as a place to work because they trusted it.
But for people in the business of building trust, tracking revenue or performance growth and attributing that climb to increased levels of good faith with stakeholders isn’t enough. Snively has some ideas on how to go further.
“I think there are two aspects to trust. The first is to be trustworthy, which means figuring out what is the right thing to do,” Snively says. More often than not, Snively says, the “right thing” to do as a company means behaving in line with customer expectations, so figuring out what to do can be as simple as asking your customer base what they want.
Once you’re behaving in a trustworthy way, the second step, Snively says, is to actually be trusted.
“That requires a degree of transparency and even further customer engagements on what it is we're doing. So we are quite focused on transparency and informing our customers on how our technology works, what we're doing with their data, what we're not doing with their data, as well as our framework for data ethics and how we make ethical decisions,” Snively says.
Yet being transparent isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s no secret that most people don’t read privacy agreements online before signing them, as providing a deluge of legalese often overwhelms customers. That’s why, Snively says, Telus has “layered” information on its website—if you want to just get the basics about Telus’s data usage, you can just get the basics, and if you want to dig deeper you can learn more about it online.
“What we know is that it's really important to have that information available so that when people are concerned they can go as deep as they'd like to go,” Snively says.
Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com
