A Concrete Way to Measure Trust

>>Understanding the trust deficit

If you’re noticing trends in your NPS and HCAHPS scores that seem to point to a larger issue, you’re not alone.

Organizations across sectors are seeing an alarming drop in trust:

• Public trust in the government has fallen from 73% of Americans trusting the government in 1958 to 17% today.
• In healthcare, only 24% of American patients believe hospitals prioritize patient care over profits — a 50-point drop over the last 4 years. 
• For years, Gallup’s Confidence in Institutions poll has placed business near the bottom of public trust, with only 17% of Americans reporting confidence in big business and 20% in large technology companies.

With AI deepfakes, misinformation, polarization, and political crisis deteriorating public trust, many organizational leaders are asking the same question: “How can we get people to trust us?”

It starts with knowing your baseline: How do people feel about your brand, and just as importantly, why do they feel that way? To influence trust, you need to start by measuring it. 

>>How to measure brand trust

Trust is best measured through experience design research, which involves speaking with the people you serve (customers or patients) to identify the moments that influence emotions.

Every moment of an experience can have ripple effects on trust — every interaction has the potential to make or break it. For example:

• Getting your package in the mail on time vs. passing the delivery date with no shipping updates
• Getting helpful directions from empathetic security personnel (a real example from a Cast & Hue project) vs. wandering around a building and struggling to find the right room
• Calling a support line and speaking with someone right away vs. wasting time on a phone tree that never routes to a human representative

Design research methods like in-depth interviews and journey mapping uncover the exact moments like these in your experience and how to fix the breakdowns. 

The problem with measuring trust through surveys

Most organizations that try to measure trust start with surveys and social sentiment research. These methods show trends, but fail to dig up deep insight you can act on.

A survey provides a number — not meaningful insight into the hundreds of interactions behind it. And social sentiment is fundamentally biased. Your greatest fans and biggest critics are the ones most likely to post online about your brand — you’d miss the people who fall in the middle.

Both methods oversimplify the nuanced reality of trust. It’s abstract, highly variable depending on who you’re talking to, and rooted in emotion. To understand it, you need to get personal.

The power of design research as a brand trust exercise 

Specific moments in an experience influence emotions, which then drive brand perception, trust, and loyalty. To measure trust, you need to understand the emotions behind it and the moments that trigger those emotions. Design research uncovers this information straight from the source. 

In-depth interviews, journey maps, Jobs-to-be-Done interviews, and other tools in a design researcher’s toolbox excel at helping you develop empathy for the end user’s reality:

• What it’s like to interact with your organization
• Where your brand meets expectations
• The Trust Cliff: where your organization underdelivers*

*These mistakes hit brand trust the hardest, and are the most difficult to recover from. 

Empathy is at the core of positive customer and patient experience design. Listening to the end user helps you understand their needs — both functional and emotional — to create experiences that repeatedly hit the mark.

>>After measurement: Going from baseline to blueprint

Measurement is the first step. What comes next is designing an experience that improves the moments that impact trust. By basing these improvements in what you learned from speaking with customers or patients, you’ll know which moments to prioritize and which solutions to test or implement. 

At Cast & Hue, we turn design research findings into experience blueprints: documents that align teams on one overarching vision for the ideal customer or patient experience. 

But your next step doesn’t have to be formally documented to make an impact. You can start by testing an idea you heard during your research. It could be something as simple as OhioHealth’s “comfort cart,” which is filled with the items patients and caregivers said they needed most during emergency visits.

Ready to design experiences that build trust? Since 2014, Cast & Hue has helped companies and organizations across industries design experiences that influence brand perception and loyalty. Learn how we can help. Explore experience design.

>>Trust metrics: How to measure progress over time

Experience research doesn’t just measure an organization’s trust baseline. It diagnoses areas of need, gives you solutions to act on, and offers a tangible way to track progress. 

By targeting trust through the lens of experience, you tie moments within the experience to trust as an outcome. The metrics behind those moments (wait time, satisfaction scores, resolution rate, and more) can become KPIs. You can track this data to measure trust improvement over time.

A simple reframe

When facing a trust deficit, many address the challenge by adapting their messaging or launching a trust campaign. But marketing alone can’t fix a trust problem. It takes time, a willingness to listen, follow-through, and consistency.

Rather than asking, “How can we get people to trust us?” focus on this guiding question: “How can we become worth trusting?” Deeply understand the people you serve. Know the expectations your brand is held to. And close the gap between what’s promised and what’s delivered. 

Trust is something that’s earned, not manufactured. Experience design research shows you exactly where to start.

Did this post get you thinking? Reach out to talk about it.