How brutally honest agreements are essential for your company’s success

Fostering trust is the new business imperative.

Companies realize that in the coming decade, building customer trust is essential in achieving customer loyalty. To answer that need for trust, most of the attention currently goes to the lawful use of customer data. Nonetheless, the need for compliance to privacy law is just a mere externalization of a bigger shift.

The consumer of the 21st century wants to be fully informed about the good, the bad and the ugly of doing business with a company. Customers want to trust the company they do business with. Over 90% of consumers state to be more loyal, buy more and advocate more for a company they trust.

The core acquirement for fostering trust

How do we foster that trust? Doing business is in the core making agreements. You promise to do A, if your customer does B. Trust in partnerships is generated by clear and honest agreements that are adhered. Sadly, the core requirement for a long-lasting and stable partnership – clear agreements – is still treated like the ugly duck in business. Contracts are unattractive, complex and unreadable documents written for lawyers by lawyers.The moment of contract signing – i.e. the moment that the agreements are made explicit, clear and formalized – is something that businesses want to get over with as quickly as possible. As a consequence, your customer often doesn’t know what his or her rights and obligations are and a company’s employees themselves don’t know the rules. 76% of consumers get conflicting answers when dealing with the same issue with different representatives. No company wants that for its hard-earned customers. The reputation damage, bad customer experience and high legal costs that arise from poor communication and escalated conflicts create much higher costs than those incurred when proactively addressing such issues.

Hence, building trust implies not only talking about the upside of doing business with your client but also talking clearly about the downside. Research on warning signs shows that consumers reward companies who are brutally honest about the negative side of doing business with them, as long as they do it timely. The negative message should be given in the presales phase and not immediately before the onboarding phase of the customer so the customer can let it sink. Timely and brutally honest warnings boost sales significantly in the end. Hence, it’s better for companies to deliver a message clearly and timely than to bury the message in fine print or complex legal language.

So, what should you do? Our solution for the above, is the design of your customer’s legal journey throughout your company. We make sure you communicate timely and clearly about the rights and obligations of the customer when doing business with you, so the customer feels fully informed all the way. We lighten up the onboarding phase with entrepreneurial common sense, supported by techniques of lean contracting and legal design. Also, the after-sales phase – the retention phase – we support by implementing Early Dispute Resolution systems. In short: inform clients optimally, and intuitively, in every step of their legal customer journey. It saves a lot of time and money in the end.