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How do we as consumers know when to trust a business, enterprise or company’s transparency models? Most businesses approach trust through the exposition of their wallets. The thinking in enterprise storehouses across the market is funded on the ideas of revenue investment returns – the more an enterprise shares their spending, the more people will validate their efforts of being trustworthy. The stories of struggling enterprises paint a different story, having us believe there is more to the trust of an enterprise than its revenue spending.
The Brothers that just do Gutters recently covered trust in an article we titled, “Transparency of Business”. In the article we discuss the transparency of business acquisition and the validity of the efforts to acquire new business leads. How many times have we as consumers experienced a bad business deal leaving us feeling like they care more about acquiring new customers than they care about fixing the problems with our product or service they provided for us? This is a common feeling created from various mistrust-funded sources such as personal experiences, related testimonies, social media “feasting” and private data sharing – the ideas behind our transparency blog.
Markets shift rapidly and consumer loyalty changed over the recent years making repeat business a lower returning resource. This is causing a divide in businesses who are struggling to figure out a new approach to attain consumers and those who are successfully attending to the real needs of their own customers. Most enterprises are adjusting costs internally while addressing price externally. When a business does address their social profile, it is usually through the social media platforms and lacks real heart and effort.
We discuss in many of our articles and material about the relevancy of trusted resources or affiliations. Take Google search as an example of affiliation importance. For a business or enterprise to position well in search results, page authority and rank is heavily favored. Both rank and authority are dependent on the number of linked websites and the trust value of those links. In the consumers mind, the same thing is true – we want to know the authority and trust of a business through other people and resources we trust.
The dollar still matters. We don’t want to overspend for our products or services but the dollar only matters as much as it can deliver the quality. It was predicted in 2011 by a Yahoo article that Five Guys Burgers and Fries would struggle through the year 2012. By the end of 2012 the burger joint had more than doubled its stores. The original analysis was based on the cost of the food. When looking back at the consumer use models, the experts were surprised to find out that quality still mattered. We believe quality maters even more when the dollar is down and spending is being scrutinized. Most people want to spend the little they have on the best product or service available.
The Brothers that just do Gutters are using transparency of our services through our independent affiliates to generate trust in our services. Through our crowd-funded resources of Angie’s List (subscription required) and Guild Quality, we are working to be as transparent with our work as we can. It is a great feeling to hear the many testimonies of how our efforts are helping each homeowner with their specific needs. It is rewarding to hear our own words of customer-relations echoed in the testimonies but we don’t stop there. Our efforts extend to other channels not always reported on.
We don’t cover everything in our organization. We don’t talk about the time we spend training our crews or the skills ladder created internally to evaluate and inspire our installers. We don’t cover the meetings we hold at 6am every week with our crew leaders to cover the challenges presented and the areas to improve. These are just small portions of our effort to relate to consumers and we like to be as transparent about all our efforts, but communicating our efforts to care about the consumer can come off sounding just as marketing oriented as any social media post about fluffy puppies and rainbows. We are not just here to smooth feathers and pat heads while soothing the feelings disrupted by a bad experience. The effort needs to be obvious and is why we put action behind our words.
By posting blogs and articles like this one, we are putting effort into educating on all levels. Letting our consumers know who we are is just as important to us as resolving a gutter-related problems. Every day is a balance between choosing to do quality work and just doing work. Those choices need defining at times to help our customer understand why our recommendations are not to cause them more money but rather to save them time, money and headaches down the road. As this blog started out saying, we want to be trusted as the professional gutter-related source.
See our work and more testimonies on our Houzz page. Visit brothersgutters.com for more information about our services and be sure to contact us by filling out the form on the website or calling 845-223-6111 if you want a free quote.