Consumer's trust is one of the most important thing in order to to maintain your business's sustainability. But no one ever said that it would be easy at all.

A professor from Stanford University named Roderick Kamer said that :

“Trust is a total luxury that is so hard to be gotten but so easy to be disappear”.

We have to do some serious efforts to get the consumer's trust, but it only needs one simplest mistakes to make them go away completely (no kidding).

Practically said, there are 3 main things to do to ensure you could gain your consumer's trust :

1.  Offer The Solutions For Their Problem

Make sure that our business / service that we provide is truly the solution for their problem. Many company or start up businesses are so focusing in perfecting their services or products. While this is truly a good thing (and need to be done eventually), still the most important thing is whether the service or product that we offer could truly solve our consumer's problem.

So in short, instead of trying to create or offer a perfect service or product (that will be impossible to create anyway), we should try to offer a service or product that could solve their problem for the time being. 

There are always some adjustment or additional requirements along the process (and it is totally normal, even recommended to make sure you and your consumers could still be working together in the long run), but try to focus how you could utilize the product and the service to solve their problem now.

This way, you will give a "Reliable" impression which in result, will build your consumer's trust to you.

2. Fulfill Your Promise

The next thing to do is to NEVER EVER promise something that you might not be able to fulfill it later. Only promise something to your consumers something that you will be definitely  able to fulfill (as long as it is still in the agreement between both of you).

What if your consumer asks something that you are not really sure about?

Well, in this case, it is truly better to just say it straight out that you could not promise it everything, but you could still to compromise to which extent that you could do or fulfill the requirements needed.

Remember, it is truly more important to fulfill every 10 small promises, than to make one big false promise (which most company are so eager to get some high end consumers without thinking the consequences). Keep in mind that those small promises are our efforts to gain our consumer's trust, and they only need 1 false promise from us to make them decide to not trust us anymore.

3. Be Honest and Authentic

The price is not suitable? Say it so!

The timeline is not recommended? Say it so!

Your product has some defects in it and cause some major problems? Be brave and say it so!

Yes, most of the time, we might think that it (might be) better to avoid admitting that it is our own mistakes that cause such a failure, because it will cause some "unreliable" impression to our consumers.

But the fact is, most of the time it will be the opposite.

If we are always honest and authentic, we could make a great impression of "honesty" to our consumers, and we could assure you that consumers will choose "honest with integrity" vendors then "big sweet talk no action" vendors.

It is not a 100% guarantee that your consumers will still choose you (because in some cases, they might truly need something to be done based on their expectation while you cannot fulfill that). But at least, with this you have successfully maintained your business's integrity.

And it shows that you are capable to stand strong for your business core values and thus will attract more suitable consumers along the run.

Those are 3 practical tips in how to build your consumer's trust.

Remember that trust is something that we have to gain. Something that requires a lot of effort to gain to. But always believe that it's always worth it at the end! :)