Your customer’s faith in you is important in any business, but especially in one where their investments are both financial and emotional.
By Jennifer Paulson
The monetary costs of keeping horses in training, maintaining a horse’s health and wellness, and competing are high. But they can pale in comparison to the emotional investment when a client’s child is involved or when they’re emotionally committed to their horse. For these reasons, trust might be the most important part of your business, and it must be nurtured and supported for the duration of the relationship.
How can you gain more trust from your customers and potential newcomers to your barn? Here are four tips.
Tip 1: Be transparent.
Calling someone transparent might mean you can see right through them and their motivations, but in a business sense, this is crucial. Transparency comes in the form of billing, discussing a horse’s potential, going over expenses involved in various treatments and preventative measures, and your intentions with the horse and the customer. Authenticity and a commitment to honesty get you far in the effort to earn trust.
Tip 2: Be consistent.
If you’re all over the place in terms of your business goals, where you intend to compete, and what methods you’ll take to get there, it erodes trust from your client. Consistency equates to reliability, and that supports trustworthiness. You consistency even shows in your branding—using set colors, logos, and language in your marketing shows a commitment to consistency.
Tip 3: Communicate.
This goes hand in hand with being transparent. Your customers rely on you for information no one else can provide. If they call for updates on horses or information on medical decisions, it’s your job to answer or call them back in a timely fashion. Unanswered calls and ghosting customers causes uneasiness and, ultimately, erodes trust.
Tip 4: Deliver.
We all know that circumstances change, horses don’t progress as expected, accidents happen, and more. This can lead to the need to course-correct or adjust the plan. If you have communicated the plan as it evolves, it’s then your responsibility to deliver. Some like to set a lower bar for perceived over-delivering on promises; some deliver right on target with what they expect. The key is not to under-deliver, especially without communication, consistency, and transparency.
