Being an entrepreneur, I constantly self reflect on what my business needs to accomplish to meet my customers’ needs. There are many components that are important. I found the most important thing is to establish trust and safety with each of our users. I learned some of these lessons from making my own mistakes, so I appreciate what Stanislav added in his article, “Few Suggestions for an Aspiring Entrepreneur”,  “If you learn from your blunders, you move closer to success even though you initially failed.“

Ascend is a personal finance company, and we are often presented with many different financial situations that have a great deal of complexity. To give our best advice and establish trust, we need to know almost everything about what makes them tick. 

Here are the 3 things that every business needs to do to establish trust and safety with its clients:

1) Understand Your Customer

This is the most important thing to establishing trust and creating value for your customer. I believe this is what sets unsuccessful companies to successful ones.

If your chief goal is to make money, you will make flawed decisions because your chief motivation will be to only understand their needs to make money off those needs.

If your chief goal is to help your customer, you will dig deep into the weeds of that customers’ life to understand what pain points they have, what drives them, and what you need to do to remove that pain from their lives. 

As a side note, there are great, free tools that can help you understand your customers better such as Google Analytics.

2) Create Great, Relevant Content

Once you understand your customer, creating great content is extremely important. When I say great content, make sure that the content you create is unbiased. To do this, the first step is to create a blog that is linked to your website. 

You want what’s best for the customer, so give them the pros and cons of your solution. For example, Ascend offers debt relief comparison services, and one of the chief concerns potential customers is making the right decision to resolve their debt. As such, we created the blogs titled, “Chapter 13 Calculator” and “Chapter 7 Calculator” because it was essential that our potential customers know both the pros and cons of of bankruptcy to make the most informed decision. We may lose potential customers because of this post because they do not choose our solution, but it’s more important to lose the wrong customers than to gain the wrong customers only for them to find out later and lose trust in your product and brand.

3) Be Transparent

Transparency is key. We had a customer who decided to switch to our product recently because the company stated the fee was 23%. They found out later the fee was actually 25%. Ascend decided that it was important that they know what the service costs. We added a pricing page front and center on our home page. 

Another way that we push transparency is through comparing our service to another service, such as comparing debt management vs debt settlement. This will allow the user to make informed decision before going down a certain road. One of the worst mistakes that a company can make is to try to pigeonhole a user into their product. 

Conclusion:

Trust is key in any relationship, but it’s extremely important in the relationship of the business to the consumer. People know when something isn’t right with your product and service. They will take their business elsewhere to a product that actually cares about their needs.