Trust is the Product
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Consider rideshare apps like Lyft and Uber. If you were going on a trip, Lyft (or Uber) would be part of your unspoken plans, whether you thought about them consciously or not; they are simply too useful and omnipresent for you to be unaware - should you get out of walking-range of your hotel - you could with a relatively high level of certainty use them to get back. It’s unlikely that you even think about what would happen if they failed you - it’s just not common enough to consider.
Think about food delivery apps or just restaurants that deliver. You probably use them several times a year; some of us use them several times a month. It’s pretty safe; they generally do what they say they will do and your food shows up. It’s consistent enough that most of us never consider that it’s a pretty big thing to trust them with as well - your dinner plans aren’t nothing, friend.
We talk a lot about first-mover advantage, the idea that the first few companies to fill a particular niche build up momentum that’s hard for late-comers to overcome. That’s true, but it also doesn’t happen by magic; if Lyft or Uber had consistently failed to fulfill their purpose of giving people rides, we wouldn’t expect that first-mover advantage to materialize - they’d probably alert people to the possibilities of rideshare and pave the way for another, better company, but nothing more. We are now talking about trust; without it, you don’t have a product. Or at least you don’t have a product that can stand up to the storm of competition that’s eventually coming for you.
Here at Clipboard Health, we have to think about trust constantly. Our nurses go out on a limb every time they use our app. Whether that’s in terms of one shift they work through our platform that they might have spent as free time or worked somewhere else, frequent use, or the growing number of nurses who find all their work through our platform, they have to have a lot of faith in our ability to deliver what we promise. Without their faith, we fail.
Even when you are trustworthy, information affects your trust
We send payments to people. Often this is for single shifts they worked; a nurse signed on to the app, saw a shift they liked, considered it against all the other things they could do with their time, and still showed up and put in a long day’s (or night’s) work. Just like you’d expect, this means lots of shifts an individual nurse is working to cover a surprise bill or an unexpected cost. In those situations, fast payments mean more.
We know at Clipboard Health that this is important, and we’ve done and continue to do an awful lot to improve payment speed. But for someone worried that our payment might not come through in time to cover their needs, everything we’ve done might seem invisible. It’s high stakes for them; they might be checking their phone over and over to see if it’s come in yet, and that’s a lot more stress than you want to be associated with your product.
That’s where information and transparency come in. In this and thousands of other cases, a lot of what the customer wants can be summed up as just “wanting to know what’s going on”. In this kind of situation, giving the customer robust information about where they stand helps them dial down their stress and make informed choices. Even where this doesn’t affect the actual outcomes, it can help more than you’d expect.
For a familiar example of this, consider Amazon. On an average order, they start out by giving you a (generally pretty accurate) idea of when a particular product will reach you. From there, they keep you updated every step of the way. When the product ships, you know. If you want to check to see if it’s on the truck, that information is available to you; you can watch it travel from the warehouse to your door. When it arrives, you know and can even usually see a reassuring photo of what was delivered and where it was left.
But information isn’t just helpful when things are going right; it’s also helpful when things are going wrong. When a product is delayed, Amazon is also pretty good about keeping you informed of that, as well; they let you know it’s not coming on time and when you can expect it to get there. Nobody is happy about this when it happens, but consider the alternative of expecting something on a certain day and it just failing to show up; now the ball is in your court, and you are expected to make the phone calls or send the emails to see what went wrong instead of the company who failed. It’s infinitely worse, and the only difference is information.
Letting the customer know about bad news lets them make informed choices about what they need to do, but it also does something even more important: it increases their trust in you in all cases. If you are consistently truthful and proactive about bad news, you eventually build a kind of trust where the customer knows that the absence of bad news very probably does mean good outcomes are on their way. They experience less stress, and their confidence means you have less strain on your customer service team’s resources. At Clipboard Health, we’ve spent a lot of time working on improving the amount of information our customers have about their payments just as we have the speed of the payments themselves. It’s important to them, so it needs to be important to us.
One failure vs constant success
All of the above is especially important when you think about it from the customer’s side. Imagine a user (call her Jane) who really needs the utility your product provides. There’s some level of effort and resources that she’s putting on the line, regardless of what your product does. Her risk could range from mere time on a free-to-use app all the way to putting her safety and wellbeing in your hands (say, if she was counting on a rideshare app to get her home from a not-so-nice part of town or a gig-work app to help her earn extra income). Some of those risks would also cascade into other parts of her life; if she was planning on making extra income from an app and it failed to let her do this, this could mean a bill went unpaid or a birthday gift went unpurchased. From her perspective, a failure to provide what your service promises isn’t just restrained to the interaction with the service itself - it can negatively impact real parts of her everyday life.
From the business perspective, it’s easy and even tempting to think of this as just a +1 in an incomplete shift count somewhere. But thinking about that from the customer’s perspective doesn’t allow that at all; we have someone who has had their day off wrecked for no gain, who canceled plans they didn’t need to cancel, who spent time and gas money getting to their job only to find it wasn’t “real”. In this case (and in a whole lot of others) it isn’t just about the money they didn’t make, either - they were thinking about it in terms of a bill paid or a present they could buy, in terms of something they wanted badly enough to work when they were already tired. When they think about that, all that failure is on you. They had a need, and you not only failed to meet it but in a way that had significant cost to them.
To counteract something that big takes an awful lot of success. You might never get that particular user back, but if you do it’s going to take getting it right again and again. That might be for them the next time they try to use the product (if they ever do) but it also might be for the people around them, succeeding so much with other people they know that use the product that they can slowly realize the one failure they experienced was a fluke. But seizing the opportunity to recover is a massive amount of work compared to not making the mistake in the first place if you get that opportunity at all.
How you handle the initial fallout of the failure matters as well. Users live in the same world you do, where bad companies are more common than good ones, most interactions with businesses are hassles, and even getting to someone to voice your complaint can be a big deal. Understanding how substantial the impact of these kinds of problems is for the customer goes a long way - both for them to feel understood and heard and for you in terms of having appropriate context while you fix it. Mistakes are going to happen, and even an upset customer usually understands this - how you make them feel and making correct, empathy-fueled moves to fix it make all the difference.
Your product is a bridge
No matter what you make, it’s a tool for getting from some point A to another point B. In the case of Clipboard Health, those two points are “Making less money with less flexibility and control” and “Making more money, having more control, having more flexibility and power”. But that’s from our perspective - we already know what the product can do, and we watch it do it all day, every day. Our customers don’t necessarily have the advantage of that perspective.
For the customer, using a new product is like stepping out on a rope bridge; it takes some level of faith. Typically the bigger the benefit promised on the other side, the deeper the chasm below them can look; you are asking them to risk something, even if it’s just time. Every creak and wobble they see before stepping and after stepping on that bridge is another reason for them not to take that chance.
This gives Clipboard Health a clear incentive: the more we can ease those fears, the more people will take the chance to use us, and the more good we can do. That means a lot of things have to happen; first, the process a user goes through when signing up for our app needs to be as clear, easy, and streamlined as possible. That takes us a lot of the way by itself, but no app is so perfect that all users move through without any issues. That’s where our customer success teams take over; they not only react to customer questions and issues but proactively reach out to users of the app to make sure everything is going well and to resolve any issues, which helps our nurses know we are truly there throughout the process. And we have an incredibly robust escalation process - our product team is looped in throughout, with an expectation that where normal customer success operations aren’t enough they will be immediately involved to resolve the issue.
Given enough time and resources, anybody can build an app. And apps are cool; they let us do a lot of things. But the app isn’t in and of itself the business. Again, with enough resources, you can hire the best engineers, product people, and other staff. We certainly try to. But as important as having the right people is, it’s not the business.
Anybody can make a payment processing app, but people trust Stripe and PayPal. Anyone could make a ridesharing app, but people trust Uber and Lyft. Clipboard built the space we occupy; nursing agencies existed before us, but none that gave the nurses the real, on-the-spot ability to find shifts and build their work schedules around their lives. We are doing something new, and every day gives us another chance to justify and maintain the trust our nurses have put in us. We take that seriously; every team member in the company is encouraged to “work outside the box”, looking past job descriptions to find the quickest, best solutions for our users.
You can have slicker technology, better marketing, and every other advantage you can think of but without trust, nobody is going to use the product, and despite having all those other things you won’t have a business. The great technology and fantastic staff are important, but in the end are just components of the trust you are building and the confidence in your user base that lets them come to you again and again for their needs.
If this article is the kind of thinking you find cool or exciting, we’d love to talk to you. Apply here, and we will be in touch soon!