What is customer trust?

My last job often championed "trust" as its number one value, though sometimes it was a bit nebulous about what was meant by it. Having not worked there for over a year, even I have started to forget what exactly is meant by it. But thinking about it again, it's actually really simple, and the company says as much in various places if you look.

Trust is simply whether people trust you or not, and maybe how much. Trust you with what? With anything they possibly could. If you're a business, and you want trust, you typically want to be trusted to do the right thing, to have a product that does something useful in a good way and in line with customer expectations, to be upfront and honest and transparent about your mistakes instead of burying them (and try hard not to make mistakes). This trust extends beyond your customers and includes your employees, too. Part of why I left was a loss of trust between myself and the company -- so many pieces of information were learned via public news instead of an internal announcement, for instance. Trust, once broken, is really hard to re-establish.

Another thing about trust is that what people do or do not trust you in changes from person to person, which is why it can be a bit nebulous. Is it reasonable for me, a simple IC, to expect that the details of firing a security pair moments after giving a talk at Defcon would be provided in news articles and public forums and totally ignored internally and talked around when brought up in a company all-hands? Maybe, maybe not, but that was an early loss-of-trust moment for me, and even a rage-quit-in-solidarity moment if I was part of the security team.

See Full Post and Comments