How to Convey Trust & Legitimacy in Business

If people like you, they'll listen to you, but if they trust you, they'll do business with you.

Zig Ziglar

Trust is fundamental when it comes to personal and professional relationships, and the most successful companies realize that each and every interaction they have with customers and clients (from the awareness stage to ongoing account management) needs to help establish legitimacy if a sale is going to be completed (or repeated).

Fortunately, there are numerous ways for businesses to convey that they are in fact 'legit', such as having a physical presence (a storefront or an actual postal address), displaying authentic reviews and testimonials, or showcasing their accreditations (such as the Better Business Bureau). But there's so much more that today's companies can do.

What makes one company more trustworthy and legitimate than another?

While trustworthiness is certainly going to be determined on a personal level, what the most successful and progressive marketers have realized is that they need to completely think through the user experience. They need to pay attention to every single detail considered by a prospect when the objective is to understand what is genuinely important to earning their trust.

One of the most influential and important details throughout the customer experience as it relates to trust, of course, is that of a phone number.

How many times have you searched for a company phone number but had difficulty finding it? It’s a common complaint of consumers and their reaction to this challenge is rarely a good one - they often abandon the experience and are much more unlikely to ever become a customer.

For the most part, businesses have become quite good at the basics of conveying trustworthiness with their prospects and establishing their legitimacy. Advertisers and marketers, for example, routinely counter most objections with data (or logical and emotional narratives). They are expert at leveraging social proof (or taking it a step further with influencer endorsements) and even highlighting the people behind the business on About Us pages or in content marketing initiatives.

Phone numbers however, particularly those of a more memorable variety, are another way to convey trust and establish legitimacy that for far too long have gone underutilized by the broader business community. It has been proven time and again that a visible phone number is modest but meaningful marketing asset that can make a major impact on the success of your business.

Although online chat, social media and email are widespread, ‘click to call’ is actually one of the most effective calls to action a business can have on its website. A click to call call to action, above the fold, can increase the conversion rate of a site by 200%.

Quick Sprout

Most, if not all, businesses have a phone number, of course, but how many of those numbers actually say something -- something meaningful -- about the enterprise? How many of those numbers support prospective consumers' recall of the brand? And how many phone numbers are connected to some form of measurement which can influence and drive future strategic decision making in the enterprise when it comes to acknowledging or refuting the contribution phone calls from customers make?

The use of a custom vanity phone number does all these things - and the benefits - to both lead generation/conversion and brand recall - can be immediate. Customers are more likely to remember a vanity number, that is incorporated with branding, than a purely numeric number. In fact, research found that any type of advertising featuring a 1–800 vanity number generates around a 30 per cent higher response rate.

Custom phone numbers can reflect what is unique about your company, help you stand out among the competition, and provide valuable insights into your customers, the marketing campaigns, and the business initiatives used to attract and retain them.

Explore the wide variety of custom and vanity phone numbers available through RingBoost as well as the many local plans available to ensure that your company is helping build trust with its prospects and customers and standing out from the crowd.

Start Building Trust With Custom Phone Numbers from RingBoost