Businesses have always been tasked with gaining as much customer trust as they can because not doing so leads to no custom and then no profit. The best tool to use to obtain such confidence, today, is the Internet, but only if a business uses it in the right ways.

When used in a way that induces trust, the web can help to draw, convert and then retain custom, and all in a cost-effective manner. To see how to use the Internet in such a way, make sure to check out the points below.

Look professional in everything that you do

You may be well versed in the art of looking professional in real life, with your tailored suit and your firm handshake, but if you aren’t looking professional online, you are failing when it comes to gaining customer trust.

To look professional online, first, you must be devoting time, effort and money into making sure your website doesn’t look like it’s come straight out of the past. If you don’t, customers will be wary of trusting you because they will question your legitimacy. Furthermore, they will deem you too inactive to deal with their custom in the proactive manner that they want. You should only ever be including information on your site that is completely relevant to the type of business that you are and the sort of service that you provide. Quite simply, if any traffic heads to your site and views anything unprofessional, that potential customer would bounce straight off.

To stop a consumer hopping from your website to a competitor’s, hire a professional web designer who is capable of creating a design for your site that is aesthetically pleasing, compelling and, most importantly, completely up-to-date. 

If it’s broken, fix it

Again, to maintain professionalism and a sense of activity, make sure that you are fixing anything that is broken on your site. This means making sure all of your links work and are leading your customers wherever it is they want to go. Also, it means ensuring that your website is up and running at all times. Online website monitoring technology, such as UptimeRobot, should be used to assist with this. This handy tool takes it upon itself to watch your site at all times for any instances of it being down, alerting you whenever it deems it to be inactive. It would then be up to you to get your website back up and running in full working order.

Provide clear details about yourself

The Internet is the place where the majority of today’s customers will head to when they are in need of any details regarding your business. What’s more, they will expect to find them there instantly. If you don’t provide your details, not only will you be missing out on a golden opportunity to market yourself, but you’ll also break the trust of the customer that has sought you out specifically online. What they’ll then do is head to one of your competitors, who will, more than likely, fix the customer’s broken trust and turn them into a customer of theirs. So, provide some details about yourself online, and make sure they’re clear!

This doesn’t just mean providing details about yourself on your website and leaving them there for customers to access themselves. It means taking your information to the customer, as this saves them the hassle of searching for it off of their own back. An example of this is going out of your way to offer free online estimate templates to your customers in order to allow them to have a detailed look at how much your service or product may cost them.

Humanize your brand

The problem with using the Internet as a tool to gain customer trust is that you don’t get to utilize all of those little nuances that you normally use in real life to make yourself seem appealing, such as smiling cheerfully when you greet a customer. Although it’s not quite the same, you can replicate this kind of approach online by humanizing your brand.

To do this, you should ensure that you create an ‘About Us’ page on your website that includes information on who you are and what you do. Specifically, you should include a history of your business, who is a part of your team, what services you offer, and what makes your business philosophy so unique, all wrote in an inviting tone.

The Internet is a great tool to use in your quest to gain customer trust, but only if you use it in the right ways.