Advancing digitalization is changing many things in the relationship between providers and consumers. Services are often no longer tangible for the customer. This results in increasing uncertainty. If you take the six dimensions described above into account and actively integrate them into service development, you can mitigate these negative effects.
The Internet of Things is characterized by the fact that the conventional interfaces known from marketing are becoming less important in the B2B and B2C sectors. Devices automatically exchange data with each other and intelligent services link them to create added value. This is increasingly leading to completely new types of Customer2Customer (C2C), Customer2Machine (C2M) or Machine2Machine (M2M) interactions.
As this makes services more complex for people, customers increasingly feel at the mercy of technology. It is therefore important to take a closer look at the effects of the new interfaces on trust-building processes. This is the only way to strengthen trust in services and thus help them achieve sustainable market success.
Due to their intangible nature, the relationship of trust between provider and customer is extremely important for the use of services.
IoT services are based on the exchange of data. In contrast to the ecosystems familiar from traditional marketing (B2B and B2C), there are often no central actors in this new world with whom relationships of trust can be established, as they are organized decentrally. Machines and algorithms generate information that customers recognize as smart, predict service requirements based on data and, in some cases, develop entirely new services based on the data generated. Such an environment is difficult to map using the familiar models from the B2B and B2C sectors.
You should think about how you can gain the trust of customers in the complex IoT world. To do this, you need to understand the dimensions on which customer trust is based so that you can actively play on them:
Familiarity and comprehensibility
In the old world, this dimension was primarily aimed at the expertise, knowledge and interaction with the respective contact person in your company. In a technology-based IoT future, this is changing. Here, you must first and foremost ensure that the customer perceives the services you offer as familiar and is able to predict their future behavior on this basis.
This means that the results and the necessary processes must be understandable for them. So explain to them exactly what data you use, what you do with it and how you arrive at your results. Only if the customer understands this process and can comprehend how results are achieved is there a basis for trust in the service.
Reliability and consistency
If you make promises to the customer, you should keep them! This is the only way to create a relationship of trust. This is an absolute prerequisite in the new world just as it was in the old. Your behavior should also be consistent. It doesn't make sense to be very proactive one day and then reactive the next.
This means that your actions are unpredictable. Your task is to implement this in your planned IoT applications. The service should always be offered with the same quality, intensity and frequency to enable the customer to get used to it.
Integrity
Honesty is a human quality that promotes trust between service providers and customers. But how do you ensure this in a digital world without direct customer contact? You should communicate to the customer that no personal data will be changed or passed on without their consent.
This is the law under the GDPR anyway. Nevertheless, you should explain this to your customer in detail. This additional effort pays off directly as a confidence-building measure.
Competence and expertise
They should be After-Sales communicate that you have the necessary expertise to meet the requirements placed on you. If you promise that you will be able to increase the productivity of the machine through live monitoring of machine data, then explain to the customer how this will work.
It's best to show him examples where it has already worked. Otherwise, they will doubt the solution competence of your service and the relationship of trust will be impaired right from the start.
This step is even more important in a digital world than in the familiar analog world, because none of your employees can personally shine with their expertise on site, but an invisible algorithm in the background is supposed to do magical things. This circumstance creates a certain basic skepticism that you can only mitigate with real examples.
Personalize
The customer wants to be the center of attention. This is just as important in the digital world as it has always been. It is important to respond to their individual needs. This is relatively easy to do in face-to-face interactions. In the digital environment, however, it is somewhat more difficult.
Nevertheless, you still need to give the customer the feeling that the data, services and results are personally tailored to them. If you manage to do this, trust in your expertise and the promised added value of the service offered will also increase.
Security
Drop one or two subordinate clauses about your security architecture in your marketing presentation. You should keep it at a level that the customer understands. Otherwise, the security concept will not be understood. And if the customer doesn't understand something, they will become skeptical and the trust they have placed in you and the digital service you offer will erode.
When introducing IoT solutions, all six dimensions of trust building should be taken into account. These principles should be integrated directly into service development. If this is underestimated, your application can be extremely beneficial and still be spurned. Therefore, make it as easy as possible for the customer to enter the new world.
