Gaining and Sustaining Trust
in Your Customers

Highlights and Key Takeaways from GrowthLab #22

29 SEPTEMBER 2020

LEAP OVER YOUR HURDLES

Our community of practice is all about learning from each other and then applying these lessons and these practices to your own business cases. Targeting specific hurdles allows you to identify the issues you need to address by providing more clarity and focus on the whats, the hows, and the whys that are relevant in reaching your next level breakthrough. Referencing these hurdles has become common throughout our community potluck sessions and are central to the discussions of today’s potluck, which revolve around getting customers to trust in the products that our potluckers are trying to offer. Think about your own business case, think about the struggles you and your team are having, and see which of these hurdles best apply to you. No matter how challenging your own business cases may be and even if you might not know what to do, these hurdles can steer you in the right direction.

TODAY’S POTLUCK SERVING:
Iconiqlast

Angelico Natividad, Creative Director of Iconiqlast

Breakthrough: Educate our audience, and transform their mindset from being ‘self-employed’ to ‘business owners.’

Our first serving starts from 13:00 to 1:14:00.

Iconiqlast is a studio that produces branding, design, and production for content creators – specifically, these people are gamers, streamers, or vloggers. We help content creators (CCs) with many aspects of the streaming service such as branding identity, finding their target audience, and developing video content and video strategy. We provide data on what keywords are being searched online because for content creators, the search engine is their best friend. So, we help them tap into that in order to jumpstart the audience base of their streaming service.

Our next level breakthrough is to educate our audience a bit more by developing a platform or voice that CCs will take seriously. The mission of Iconiqlast is to educate content creators on how to make their endeavors sustainable. We are looking to develop a ‘business owner’ mindset for these gamers and streamers. So how can Iconiqlast get them from a ‘self-employed’ mindset to a ‘business owner’ mindset?

These CCs are usually people who are in their early to mid-twenties. They look for sources of income that are aligned with their passion for their hobbies such as gaming as well as their interest in social media.

CCs broadcast themselves playing games or broadcast their daily life on social media platforms, which is called ‘streaming.’ This can provide CCs with a substantial income stream. However, they don’t have any business experience or foresight, so they see it as a get-rich-fast scheme instead of a business opportunity.

CCs don’t understand that they need a team behind them. They try to do everything themselves, when in fact streaming is like being a celebrity. For example, Brad Pitt has an entire team behind his name, such as a manager, an agent, PR people, and even a scriptwriter to develop content. This team helps with the branding of ‘Brad Pitt.’

There are a lot of CCs who approach this career in an unprofessional manner, and statistics have shown that to succeed in this industry you have to work on your branding and your hard skills like humor or showmanship. Furthermore, the lack of awareness in the value of having a team really hurts these young people.

Even if these CCs do succeed, most do not invest their income in developing their brand, hiring a team, or learning new hard skills, which causes them to fade away into obscurity. We’ve observed that it’s hard for young content creators to realize what their purpose is in life, and hence what the purpose of their content creation is.

PABAON FROM THE COMMUNITY

TODAY’S POTLUCK SERVING:
IT’S TOMATO TIME

Trina Molina, Owner and Managing Director of Tomato Time

Roll out virtual fitting app, because the fit and feel of our products are always the most important factors for our customers.

Our second serving starts from 1:17:30 to 2:08:34.

TomatoTime has been a brand of affordable watches since 2011. Our watches are more focused on fashion rather than functionality, although they do function well.

We’ve been strong in malls and stores with high physical traffic, and we’re strong with the working class market. We’re very weak however, in terms of online sales. We were always planning to have a presence online but we took it for granted and now with the pandemic, we have to pivot online and do deliveries.

Because we have so many branches all over the country, we’re able to offer same-day free delivery, but if we have to close down our physical stores, that would limit the reach and speed of our delivery.

Furthermore, our workforce and our market are both used to the purchase of our watches physically. Our customers expect to physically fit our watches before they buy. It’s one thing to have an online presence but it’s another to bring this experience online. So how can our customers fit watches online for them to be able to see and feel the watch?

Therefore, we’ve been developing a virtual fitting app that takes a picture of a customer’s wrist and when they click a watch of their choice, they can see how it fits. The virtual fitting app has been a prototype for a while now. We get feedback from customers and based on their feedback, we know how important asking questions are for them – these questions validate whether it is worth it to buy our watches or not.

Taking the case of one of our customers, which we can call Anna, she had so many questions and concerns. She had so many questions about fit that were hard for us to answer given the lack of physical presence. Like her, many of our customers prefer to pay by COD rather than by bank transfer, but at the moment we cannot offer COD because of the threat of fake sellers and buyers. Building trust is a two-way street – building trust in us and building trust in them.

PABAON FROM THE COMMUNITY

KEY TAKEAWAYS

We may not be extremely knowledgeable around certain areas but our insights either validate what our guests already know or it provides them a different way of looking at things. We offer a different lens that may lead them to new ways of thinking about the challenge.

Aileen

It boils down to the H and I of CHI/X. All businesses need to stay afloat in this time of uncertainty. And the ones that will survive are those that are driven by the genuine desire to care for customers and those who are taking care of their customers, at a whole new level. The onus is on the business owners to lead their team — from empathy to compassion.

Joana

It’s pretty clear that when it comes to establishing yourself and your business in the new normal, it must be driven by purpose. By establishing a purpose driven narrative for your business, your stakeholders will be able to reestablish that trust in your business, and eventually have a lasting impact on these stakeholders.

Marky

Innovation is a must in order to keep up with the fast-changing customer behavior brought by the New Normal.

Marjan

Trust is a factor I’ve rarely thought about when it comes to human-centered customer-centricity. But trust is actually the whole essence of being customer-centric – that’s what your efforts should culminate to. Trust will get your target stakeholders involved and committed to what you’re offering them. Trust is so important.