4 Components Your Website Must Have To Increase Customer Trust	1.0/5.0 (1 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
Harry Trott December 23, 2016

Trust is an integral part of online retailing. According to one study, visitors to a website who interact with both user reviews and the Q&As posted by customers are 105% more likely to purchase compared to those who do not. Interacting with such content helps site visitors build trust and this helps reduce the friction that an online visitor has when buying online.

There is no shortcut to build trust and credibility. A lot of this is built organically over time through serving hundreds, if not thousands, of customers each month. However, there are a few things that a website developer could do to showcase your business’ reputation online. In this article, we will take a look at four website components that can directly increase trust and thus impact conversions.

Testimonials

Testimonials are by far the most important among the many ‘trust-building’ components of a website. To a new visitor, testimonials help demonstrate the fact that your product or service already enjoys patronage from other customers. This alleviates any kind of apprehensions that a visitor may have and enables them to trust your offering. Execution is quintessential here though. Your testimonials must contain the name, photo and designation of the person providing the testimonial. In the absence of such validations, visitors to your website may assume these testimonials to be cooked up and fake. This erodes the credibility of your site further.

Case Studies

For enterprise and B2B businesses, case studies are an important component of trust building. Case studies help businesses explain what they do and how they do it in better context. Visitors to your site make use of testimonials to gain several insights - the kind of customers who use your product, what pain points they had with their operations, and how your product or service solves this pain. Getting these questions answered through case studies builds trust and increases conversions.

Contact Information

It is no longer enough to simply slap a ‘Contact Us’ page with your registered address and phone number. Potential customers need to know the avenues of communication that they can use to get in touch with you for potential support requests. It is important to open your business over as many channels as possible. This includes toll free numbers, email, social media channels as well as live chat from within your website. Demonstrating your availability for support over these many communication channels increases your credibility and brings about greater trust among customers.

Being present across all these various channels alone is not enough. Customers who fail to receive responses to their queries in a timely manner tend to lose trust in businesses. Make use of automation tools to engage with these customer queries. Such tools allow businesses to reach customers without human intervention and this allows for quicker turnaround and thus greater trust.

Public Forums & Message Boards

Sometimes, opening a support channel alone is not sufficient to elicit customer trust. Visitors to your website are also apprehensive about the quality of support they receive from your business. Establishing a public message board where your support staff can engage with site visitors and customers provide site visitors a peek into the kind of engagement they can expect from your business. Of course, this strategy can also backfire if not executed well. But by providing an open forum, businesses help establish transparency in the way they operate and this is crucial to bringing greater credibility to your business.