Be accessible, provide top-notch customer service. One of the most important, if not the most important, ways for companies to gain customer trust is through customer service. Ask for feedback and act on it. Write down three things you enjoy, like, or appreciate when it comes to your customers.
You may also be interested in the 45 BEST QUESTIONS TO ASK YOUR CUSTOMERS TO GET TO KNOW THEM Warwick Brown is one of the world's leading experts in key account management. Through The KAM Club, a global member community for key account managers, its blog that reaches 20,000 people every month, and a range of training and advisory services, Warwick has helped thousands of key account managers get better results faster. Competence is also something that can be applied to the outside: the points we talked about earlier are inward-oriented competencies, that is, those that affect people and the organization. However, if you take an outside-oriented approach, you can develop competence in different ways.
Spend time understanding your industry and what's important to them. If sustainability, for example, is one of your core values, point out the initiatives in which you participate and that support those objectives (if any, nothing undermines credibility faster than lying). Finally, make sure you choose and use the right tools for the job. A 6-month engineering project with multiple stakeholders will be more difficult to execute if you have a simple to-do list in a spreadsheet.
Your customers expect you to use industry-standard tools, such as Primavera P6, Primavera P6 EPPM, or Deltek Cobra. Encourage your team to train in Spring and practice hands-on with the software so they feel safe using it. Customers are confident in your abilities if you can enter and access project data quickly and if you know how to use the functions and reports built into the tool. Credibility is important, but it can take a while to get the reputation you want.
Collect case studies about what you can do and ask for testimonials, as they can help demonstrate your skills. You can gain credibility even from day one of a new business if you're honest, transparent, and lead ethically. Simply be the leader you aspire to be, create a culture of excellence, and you'll gain organizational credibility.
