According to Mercuri’s State of Trust report, 99% of B2B customers find trust to be a crucial factor when choosing a vendor and building long-term relationships. Trust is more relevant today because of the complexity of B2B partnerships, especially considering the various data and security risks they might carry.
Ensuring a high level of trust in business partnerships isn’t a one-off initiative. It’s an ongoing process that involves numerous security and compliance activities. The immediate responsibility for these activities falls on your security team because a solid security posture is the foundation to building trust.
In this guide, we’ll explain why building trust is a high-priority task for organizations and what makes it challenging in the current business landscape. We’ll also discuss the most effective ways to build trust with customers and position your organization as a reputable partner.
What is customer trust?
Customer trust is a measure of a customer’s confidence in an organization’s ability to deliver a product or service efficiently, responsibly, and in accordance with the agreed-upon terms. From a security perspective, customer trust signifies how well a company is able to protect its customers’ personal information, data, and digital assets from threats such as data breaches and cyberattacks.
A customer’s overall level of trust is typically impacted by four key components:
{{cta_withimage17="/cta-modules"}} | State of Trust Report
Why building customer trust is crucial
Customer trust directly affects your organization’s operational stability and revenue potential. Here are some additional benefits from investing in active trust-building:
- Business longevity: Organizations need a stable and growing customer base to succeed, which can be achieved through ongoing trust management that ensures customers have high confidence in the organization.
- Customer loyalty: Loyal customers are more than buyers—they advocate for your organization and help you expand your reach without excessive investments. Customer loyalty can be enhanced with quality products, transparent security and privacy practices, and responsive customer service.
- Word-of-mouth marketing: People are more likely to trust recommendations from peers. Nurturing customer trust is an excellent way to get more referrals and deal opportunities, which fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads.
- Cost savings: Finding new customers is 5–25x more expensive than retaining the current ones. If customers trust you, it’s easier to retain them—reducing marketing and lead generation costs.
According to PwC’s 2024 Trust Survey, 93% of business executives say that an organization building trust among customers and employees can positively impact its bottom line. The trust heavily depends on security outcomes, as customers are quick to find alternative products and services if they believe their data is at risk.
The current state of customer trust
Research by Qualtrics MX Institute suggests that overall customer trust levels have been deteriorating since 2017 for most industries. This implies that building trust can become an increasingly challenging function for many organizations.
The sharp deterioration of customer trust can be attributed to many factors in the current business environment, including:
- Aggressive or misleading marketing: Invasive marketing practices (like intrusive, over-personalized, or excessive ads) frustrate consumers and can degrade brand trust over time. A rise in digital ad fraud also undermines brand credibility. While ad fraud is typically conducted by malicious actors, customers associate the negative experience with the brand itself. Ad fraud has become so common that, according to a 2023 research conducted by Ascend2 and OMI, 84% of enterprise marketers are concerned about digital ad fraud wasting their marketing spend and impacting their ROI.
- Poor product and service standards: Few issues are as harmful to customer trust as overpromising and underdelivering. Customers who experience a gap in service delivery will lose trust in the organization.
- Lack of support: Customers, especially B2B clients, should have ongoing support that ensures they can resolve any issues quickly and maintain operational continuity. Organizations that don’t provide quality after-sales support run the risk of damaging the customer experience and overall trust levels. According to a 2024 customer service study by Hyken, 87% of customers will trust a brand or company more if it provides a good customer service experience.
Another trend that has significantly contributed to the decrease in customer trust is the rise of cloud-based solutions. While cloud services revolutionized the way companies operate and scale, they also introduced security concerns. Recent statistics suggest that 39% of businesses experienced a data breach in the cloud in 2022. Customers are increasingly vigilant when it comes to cloud-based solutions.
Why security is essential to customer trust
Buyers want peace of mind when doing business with a potential vendor. In the current cloud environment, security is at the center of customer trust. Even the smallest incidents can damage a buyer’s confidence in a vendor’s ability to keep them protected, which can lead to loss of customers in the long run.
To start building trust in the SaaS landscape, you must first build and maintain a security program to patch any threats and vulnerabilities in your business landscape. It’s also essential to communicate your robust security posture to prospects, with transparent and easily accessible information at the ready.
A best practice for organizations today is to have a public-facing trust center for both prospects and existing customers.
According to IDC, prospective buyers often prefer visiting vendors’ trust centers to review the up-to-date status of their compliance and security posture. This level of assurance is equally helpful if you’re looking to improve retention rates among existing customers. In fact, the IDC report suggests that poor visibility of relevant certifications can lead to loss of opportunities and partnerships, and may even reduce customer loyalty over time.
{{cta_withimage18="/cta-modules"}} | IDC Analyst Brief | How trust centers save time and accelerate sales
3 key steps to building customer trust
Security is essential to customer trust. Here are three basic steps an organization can take to ensure customer trust:
- Comply with applicable security standards and regulations
- Demonstrate your security posture
- Ensure transparency and open communication
Step 1: Comply with the applicable standards and regulations
Many industries are regulated by compliance standards. Such regulations entail implementing industry-standard best practices, so adhering to them shows a commitment to responsible operations and improves your reputation.
Depending on your industry, you may need to comply with various regulations, such as:
- HIPAA: Mandatory for organizations in the health sector that collect and process protected health information (PHA).
- GDPR: Necessary for organizations that collect personal data of EU and UK residents (regardless of the organization’s location).
- CCPA: Mandatory for organizations that collect personal data of California residents.
- SOC 2: Important for technology and cloud-based companies that store or process customer information.
Since adhering to regulations and standards can be an extensive process, it’s best to streamline your workflows with dedicated automated compliance software.
Step 2: Demonstrate your security posture
Prospects most likely won’t take you by your word when it comes to security—they’ll want to see proof of your security practices and overall posture. In most cases, this is done through security questionnaires.
For example, a prospect might ask you to complete the SIG or CAIQ questionnaire to ensure the key security processes, policies, and controls are in place. You must be proactive about handling such questionnaires. Industry-standard formats like SIG and CAIQ include hundreds of questions, which require a massive manual, cross-functional effort to complete. Delays in completing security questionnaires can extend the sales cycle, potentially costing you leads.
Filling out security questionnaires is a repetitive process for companies expanding their sales opportunities. To ensure efficiency, many organizations implement questionnaire automation software. It removes time-consuming and manual tasks from your workflow, helping you focus more on crucial security tasks that drive your program forward.
Step 3: Ensure transparency and open communication
Open, consistent communication about security practices and policies is crucial for a fruitful customer vendor relationship. You should have a channel to share relevant documentation with your potential business partners, while also maintaining control over who has access to it.
A potential hiccup in demonstrating trust to prospects is poor information exchange practices. There’s often prolonged back-and-forth via email between security teams on both ends of the partnership, and it gets challenging to share the necessary documentation securely, maintain version control, and manage viewing permissions. The solution here is to have a robust trust management platform like Vanta to streamline the workflow.
{{cta_webinar5="/cta-modules"}} | Questionnaire automation webinar
Build and maintain trust effortlessly with Vanta
If you need comprehensive security and compliance management software to ensure customer trust, Vanta can help. It’s a trust management platform that lets you proactively build trust with customers and other stakeholders with a robust public-facing Trust Center.
The Trust Center is a real-time dashboard where you can demonstrate all the security controls, documentation, and compliance frameworks you follow in one place. You can effortlessly showcase them to prospective clients, manage NDAs, and expedite security reviews to finalize deals by having self-serve information at the ready for prospects.
With a Trust Center, you can:
- Deflect up to 87 percent of security reviews
- Automate up to 93 percent of access approvals
- Automate up to 86 percent of NDA collection
To learn more about the Trust Center and how it can influence your sales and ROI, watch this free webinar.
Vanta also offers a Questionnaire Automation product that lets you complete security questionnaires up to 5 times faster. The solution enables up to 73% coverage across various security questionnaires. Vanta also leverages AI and automation functionalities to fast-track tasks like adding responses.
Request a demo today to get a tailored overview of how Vanta’s Trust Center can support your team.
{{cta_simple14="/cta-modules"}} | Trust center product page
Building and Managing Trust
Why is customer trust essential for your business and how can you build it?
Building and Managing Trust
According to Mercuri’s State of Trust report, 99% of B2B customers find trust to be a crucial factor when choosing a vendor and building long-term relationships. Trust is more relevant today because of the complexity of B2B partnerships, especially considering the various data and security risks they might carry.
Ensuring a high level of trust in business partnerships isn’t a one-off initiative. It’s an ongoing process that involves numerous security and compliance activities. The immediate responsibility for these activities falls on your security team because a solid security posture is the foundation to building trust.
In this guide, we’ll explain why building trust is a high-priority task for organizations and what makes it challenging in the current business landscape. We’ll also discuss the most effective ways to build trust with customers and position your organization as a reputable partner.
What is customer trust?
Customer trust is a measure of a customer’s confidence in an organization’s ability to deliver a product or service efficiently, responsibly, and in accordance with the agreed-upon terms. From a security perspective, customer trust signifies how well a company is able to protect its customers’ personal information, data, and digital assets from threats such as data breaches and cyberattacks.
A customer’s overall level of trust is typically impacted by four key components:
{{cta_withimage17="/cta-modules"}} | State of Trust Report
Why building customer trust is crucial
Customer trust directly affects your organization’s operational stability and revenue potential. Here are some additional benefits from investing in active trust-building:
- Business longevity: Organizations need a stable and growing customer base to succeed, which can be achieved through ongoing trust management that ensures customers have high confidence in the organization.
- Customer loyalty: Loyal customers are more than buyers—they advocate for your organization and help you expand your reach without excessive investments. Customer loyalty can be enhanced with quality products, transparent security and privacy practices, and responsive customer service.
- Word-of-mouth marketing: People are more likely to trust recommendations from peers. Nurturing customer trust is an excellent way to get more referrals and deal opportunities, which fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads.
- Cost savings: Finding new customers is 5–25x more expensive than retaining the current ones. If customers trust you, it’s easier to retain them—reducing marketing and lead generation costs.
According to PwC’s 2024 Trust Survey, 93% of business executives say that an organization building trust among customers and employees can positively impact its bottom line. The trust heavily depends on security outcomes, as customers are quick to find alternative products and services if they believe their data is at risk.
The current state of customer trust
Research by Qualtrics MX Institute suggests that overall customer trust levels have been deteriorating since 2017 for most industries. This implies that building trust can become an increasingly challenging function for many organizations.
The sharp deterioration of customer trust can be attributed to many factors in the current business environment, including:
- Aggressive or misleading marketing: Invasive marketing practices (like intrusive, over-personalized, or excessive ads) frustrate consumers and can degrade brand trust over time. A rise in digital ad fraud also undermines brand credibility. While ad fraud is typically conducted by malicious actors, customers associate the negative experience with the brand itself. Ad fraud has become so common that, according to a 2023 research conducted by Ascend2 and OMI, 84% of enterprise marketers are concerned about digital ad fraud wasting their marketing spend and impacting their ROI.
- Poor product and service standards: Few issues are as harmful to customer trust as overpromising and underdelivering. Customers who experience a gap in service delivery will lose trust in the organization.
- Lack of support: Customers, especially B2B clients, should have ongoing support that ensures they can resolve any issues quickly and maintain operational continuity. Organizations that don’t provide quality after-sales support run the risk of damaging the customer experience and overall trust levels. According to a 2024 customer service study by Hyken, 87% of customers will trust a brand or company more if it provides a good customer service experience.
Another trend that has significantly contributed to the decrease in customer trust is the rise of cloud-based solutions. While cloud services revolutionized the way companies operate and scale, they also introduced security concerns. Recent statistics suggest that 39% of businesses experienced a data breach in the cloud in 2022. Customers are increasingly vigilant when it comes to cloud-based solutions.
Why security is essential to customer trust
Buyers want peace of mind when doing business with a potential vendor. In the current cloud environment, security is at the center of customer trust. Even the smallest incidents can damage a buyer’s confidence in a vendor’s ability to keep them protected, which can lead to loss of customers in the long run.
To start building trust in the SaaS landscape, you must first build and maintain a security program to patch any threats and vulnerabilities in your business landscape. It’s also essential to communicate your robust security posture to prospects, with transparent and easily accessible information at the ready.
A best practice for organizations today is to have a public-facing trust center for both prospects and existing customers.
According to IDC, prospective buyers often prefer visiting vendors’ trust centers to review the up-to-date status of their compliance and security posture. This level of assurance is equally helpful if you’re looking to improve retention rates among existing customers. In fact, the IDC report suggests that poor visibility of relevant certifications can lead to loss of opportunities and partnerships, and may even reduce customer loyalty over time.
{{cta_withimage18="/cta-modules"}} | IDC Analyst Brief | How trust centers save time and accelerate sales
3 key steps to building customer trust
Security is essential to customer trust. Here are three basic steps an organization can take to ensure customer trust:
- Comply with applicable security standards and regulations
- Demonstrate your security posture
- Ensure transparency and open communication
Step 1: Comply with the applicable standards and regulations
Many industries are regulated by compliance standards. Such regulations entail implementing industry-standard best practices, so adhering to them shows a commitment to responsible operations and improves your reputation.
Depending on your industry, you may need to comply with various regulations, such as:
- HIPAA: Mandatory for organizations in the health sector that collect and process protected health information (PHA).
- GDPR: Necessary for organizations that collect personal data of EU and UK residents (regardless of the organization’s location).
- CCPA: Mandatory for organizations that collect personal data of California residents.
- SOC 2: Important for technology and cloud-based companies that store or process customer information.
Since adhering to regulations and standards can be an extensive process, it’s best to streamline your workflows with dedicated automated compliance software.
Step 2: Demonstrate your security posture
Prospects most likely won’t take you by your word when it comes to security—they’ll want to see proof of your security practices and overall posture. In most cases, this is done through security questionnaires.
For example, a prospect might ask you to complete the SIG or CAIQ questionnaire to ensure the key security processes, policies, and controls are in place. You must be proactive about handling such questionnaires. Industry-standard formats like SIG and CAIQ include hundreds of questions, which require a massive manual, cross-functional effort to complete. Delays in completing security questionnaires can extend the sales cycle, potentially costing you leads.
Filling out security questionnaires is a repetitive process for companies expanding their sales opportunities. To ensure efficiency, many organizations implement questionnaire automation software. It removes time-consuming and manual tasks from your workflow, helping you focus more on crucial security tasks that drive your program forward.
Step 3: Ensure transparency and open communication
Open, consistent communication about security practices and policies is crucial for a fruitful customer vendor relationship. You should have a channel to share relevant documentation with your potential business partners, while also maintaining control over who has access to it.
A potential hiccup in demonstrating trust to prospects is poor information exchange practices. There’s often prolonged back-and-forth via email between security teams on both ends of the partnership, and it gets challenging to share the necessary documentation securely, maintain version control, and manage viewing permissions. The solution here is to have a robust trust management platform like Vanta to streamline the workflow.
{{cta_webinar5="/cta-modules"}} | Questionnaire automation webinar
Build and maintain trust effortlessly with Vanta
If you need comprehensive security and compliance management software to ensure customer trust, Vanta can help. It’s a trust management platform that lets you proactively build trust with customers and other stakeholders with a robust public-facing Trust Center.
The Trust Center is a real-time dashboard where you can demonstrate all the security controls, documentation, and compliance frameworks you follow in one place. You can effortlessly showcase them to prospective clients, manage NDAs, and expedite security reviews to finalize deals by having self-serve information at the ready for prospects.
With a Trust Center, you can:
- Deflect up to 87 percent of security reviews
- Automate up to 93 percent of access approvals
- Automate up to 86 percent of NDA collection
To learn more about the Trust Center and how it can influence your sales and ROI, watch this free webinar.
Vanta also offers a Questionnaire Automation product that lets you complete security questionnaires up to 5 times faster. The solution enables up to 73% coverage across various security questionnaires. Vanta also leverages AI and automation functionalities to fast-track tasks like adding responses.
Request a demo today to get a tailored overview of how Vanta’s Trust Center can support your team.
{{cta_simple14="/cta-modules"}} | Trust center product page
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