"Trust is the most important currency in the business world." If trust is important for any company, it is even more crucial & critical for platforms.
Published on 2021-09-08 by Nathalie Lamborghini Dumas.
#### "Trust is the most important currency in the business world." Deirdre Campbell of the Edelman Trust Barometer.
One month after the Cambridge Analytica scandal announcement, Facebook suffered a nearly 20% drop in shares and "likes."
Direct and immediate consequence: traffic loss, degraded image, and heavy, urgent investments: 20,000 more employees for cybersecurity and content moderation.
Holiday scams on peer-to-peer rental platforms make headlines and reports, and durably penalize brands, while fostering the emergence of new competing platforms surfing on trust: new platforms thus propose renting only within your first circle of friends or family, others target minorities, still others only accept verified and validated properties on their site, etc.
In early 2019, Apple launched on 4 ecosystems, with heavy reassuring messages: "Apple doesn't collect your data"; "Apple doesn't know what you watch, what you play, or what you buy."
And on the consulting side, trust is increasingly emerging as a highly strategic topic:
If trust is important for any company, it is even more crucial & critical for platforms.
Indeed:
But when something is as complex as a platform or ecosystem, how can trust be established?
Certainly not by improvising, and to avoid having to react after the fact, when damage is done, this topic must be anticipated from the platform's design, methodically.
By analyzing how offline ecosystems build a structure that creates trust for their stakeholders, a proven model appears: that of states and the separation of powers.
It is indeed on the separation of powers in modern states (which are themselves ecosystems) that the foundation of trust rests.
By combining this analysis with understanding the challenges and constraints of digital platforms and ecosystems, we obtain the Trust Framework for Platforms; this framework is one of the essential canvases of the Platform Innovation Kit we use to model platforms.
This framework structures trust from the design phase, and anticipates the centralization or decentralization of all mechanisms and contracts to be put in place.
In any case, be assured that a "code of conduct" and other moral commitments from your stakeholders will unfortunately not be sufficient!
And with Blockchain, we could also see trust management evolve towards decentralized ecosystems: the guarantee, reputation and arbitration mechanisms, today carried by the platform operator, can then be distributed among the stakeholders themselves.
Trust arrives on foot but leaves in a Lamborghini.
It remains difficult, however, as a company to ask the right questions, or at least to arrive at the right answers, because you naturally look at your own interest first, and the limits you want to impose, the risks you want or don't want to take.
In this case, I find that nothing beats lived experience to properly understand the topic: we all have experiences, good or bad, as consumers; it is easy to connect to them to understand how volatile trust is, and depends on elements that are sometimes quite different from those we think of when looking from the company's side.
Example 1:
I bought on Backmarket a refurbished Dyson vacuum cleaner, which broke down after just a few months.
So regardless of legal responsibility, in my eyes as a consumer, the responsibility to solve my problem lies with Backmarket.
I go to the Backmarket site to report the problem, and I receive a perfectly reassuring message: the platform tells me it is taking the matter in hand, that it is forwarding my request to the seller and that it stays in the loop until resolution, committing to follow up itself if the answer is slow to come.
Then comes a three-way chat, where I can see my conversation with Dyson unfold under Backmarket's eye. Dyson's response doesn't satisfy me; Backmarket follows up as promised, explicitly taking on my request as its own.
Vacuum cleaner picked up by Dyson, repaired and sent back; problem solved. Skyrocketing of my trust in Backmarket.
Example 2:
I buy a small Pier Import side table on the La Redoute marketplace. Upon opening the box at delivery, the table is split in two.
Same reaction as for Backmarket: I go to the La Redoute site to report the problem. And there I find instructions which, instead of taking charge of my request, send me back to the seller: I must contact Pier Import... by clicking a button... available in a section... then filling out a form... all of it through La Redoute's messaging system.
Can it be more complicated? It starts badly.
So I go back to the interface to contact Pier Import: an impersonal form, fields to complete, an attachment to add, and no trace of any commitment from the marketplace on the timeline or the outcome.
Pier Import's final answer came after filling out the form, exchanging several messages (and thus waiting several days), sending photos, enduring their refusal to pick up the broken table, and spending a long time in negotiations because they refused to refund the initial shipping costs I had paid for nothing: a terse message explaining that since the table remained usable once repaired, no refund of the delivery costs was justified.
Note that this ridiculous answer from Pier Import arrives right under a big "La Redoute" logo. How can I feel about the people I am dealing with? Trust is not always entirely rational. It is a feeling.
Outcome: an unacceptable response in my view, since it is totally unfair not to refund shipping costs on the pretext that I can repair the table (!!), a lot of time wasted, a lot of frustration. After several weeks, La Redoute ended up refunding the shipping costs, but the damage was done: I had lost trust. I will no longer order anything on the La Redoute marketplace (and by the way, I will no longer order Pier Import products either).
The customer's point of view
When you put yourself in the customer's shoes, you see much better what could impact trust; platforms cannot hide behind legal mentions indicating they are not responsible, because we're not only talking about legal responsibility, but also perceived responsibility, and moral responsibility, and that changes everything.