Customers are the stakeholder group about which a board most often believes it knows enough. There is contact, there are satisfaction figures, there is an account team or a customer service department that passes on signals. Yet this is precisely the group where the assumption is most persistent: that what comes in through the usual channels is representative of what customers really think about the organisation over the longer term.
A customer can be satisfied with a product and at the same time doubt the intentions of the company behind it. Those two do not sit in the same measurement. Customer satisfaction research is about the transaction: is the delivery on time, does the product work, is customer service reachable. Trust is about something else: does this organisation do what it says, even when no one is watching, even when it turns out more expensive.
The Trust Baseline therefore does not ask about satisfaction. It asks: what does management think customers find important about the organisation, apart from the product. And in parallel, as an external inquiry: what do customers themselves say when they are asked the same question. The difference between those two answers is the first outcome. Not a judgement about the customer, but a judgement about the distance between assumption and reality.
Organisations that investigate this usually expect the picture to line up reasonably well. Experience shows that the deviation is found more often in what customers need than in what they experience. A customer who is satisfied with the service can still have less trust in the organisation than management assumes, for example because an earlier promise about sustainability, transparency or service was dropped without explanation. That kind of moment weighs more heavily than the quality of the most recent delivery.
This fits a pattern that applies more broadly to stakeholder trust: failing to keep a small commitment costs more trust than not making a large investment. A customer who reads that a company invests millions in corporate social responsibility, but notices that a simple promise about returns, warranty or customer service is not honoured, draws a conclusion about the entire organisation. Large efforts are not weighed against small ones, they are overshadowed by them.
The internal inquiry establishes what management, commercial functions and customer contact roles think is going on with customers. The external inquiry asks the same questions of a group of customers themselves. Both inquiries together provide a starting point: where is there agreement, where is there distance, and on which topics is that distance greatest.
What this does not deliver is a statement about what customers think in general. There is no general customer sentiment that we can establish for you before a customer has said it themselves. The Trust Baseline measures the difference between assumption and statement, not the statement itself apart from that assumption. That is a deliberate boundary: a tool that claimed to know what customers think without having asked them would repeat exactly the problem this inquiry is trying to make visible.
A one-off measurement of the difference between assumption and statement is a snapshot, not a process. What counts afterwards is whether the organisation does something with what becomes visible: a commitment to customers that is recorded, followed up and reported back on. That is what the commitment tracker exists for, linked to a signal rhythm that returns with a certain regularity to what was promised and what has been kept of it. Not as a report card, but as a memory: a place where a commitment to customers does not silently disappear between two quarters.
Customers rarely stand apart from other parties around an organisation. A commitment to customers about the origin of materials touches on the way you look at what you want to know from suppliers; a statement about societal impact that customers refer to can overlap with what is at play in what you want to know from advocacy groups; and where customer trust is tested against regulation, there is a connection with what you want to know from regulators. Those who want to know more about the design behind this inquiry can find the background in what a Trust Baseline precisely measures and what it does not.
The Trust Baseline for the customer stakeholder group is currently being developed. There is no instrument yet that you can fill in today. Those with an interest in this can sign up for the waiting list and will be contacted as soon as the inquiry for customers becomes available. That is a more honest commitment than offering a tool that does not yet exist.
Mapping trust among customers often raises a follow-up question: how much capacity actually goes into maintaining that contact, answering questions, keeping track of commitments and following up on signals. Those who want to know which part of that work can be reallocated task by task between people and systems will find that overview in the work scan of FTE TO AI, which calculates per task which part of the work can be taken over by AI.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.