Q&A: Trustpilot Chief Customer Officer on what trust means in financial services

Trustpilot Chief Customer Officer, Alicia Skubick, reflects on what it means to be trusted in financial services and how firms can get there.

What do you see as the role of reviews in financial services?

Reviews do a couple of things for companies. The first is establishing trust and that can be really powerful. In financial services as an industry, it’s especially important to understand and know who you’re buying from, and this is a really strong way to have that third-party validation.

Once you’ve built the trust and invited your customers to give that feedback, good or bad, you can showcase it throughout the purchase journey. Having this kind of proof point really gives confidence to buyers and to customers.

Often customers want to build trust and improve their marketing ROI, but the insights they get are so powerful that it drives a change within the business. For example, in prior companies I worked for, we had a meeting every two weeks where we’d look at our company metrics, such as employee, shareholder and customer engagement. Trustpilot was a score we looked at every two weeks.

The more I talk to other CMOs, especially in larger companies, the more I find they’re using it as an operating metric less around the marketing, but also just around the customer experience and building a better business.

What do you see as the advantage of Trustpilot over other customer satisfaction metrics, such as NPS?

Trust platforms are a really unique place in the market. They have a product review, so you can buy a sweater or pair of trainers and get a review there.

But more often we are giving a rating around the company itself, built from the reviews of the customers who have bought a product, determining whether it’s a company or service they can trust.

Then you’ve got things like NPS, which is an internal tool. You don’t often publish your NPS ratings externally, whereas Trustpilot is showing the world with an open platform that all can see.

Is trust in financial services, then, more about the perception of the company than individual products or services?

Totally. One of the things we’ve researched is there’s this huge trust gap within in all sorts of industries, where employees and companies feel like they’ve got a 90% trust rating and approval. Of course they do, because most people work for companies they think are ethical and good.

On average, consumers see a 30% level of trust. So imagine, businesses think they’ve got 90% trust and when asked consumers say much less.

That matters especially in financial services where mortgage products, what you’re really buying is “is my money safe?” Can I trust this company if it goes wrong? Will they protect me? Does it take hours to get through to them? If it’s financial services software, is it reliable? Does it have bugs that that might give me an incorrect tax calculation or payroll problems?

These are moments that really matter for people, whether they’re B2B or consumer.

It’s interesting how many people aren’t aware of the £85,000 FSCS protection you get. Challenger banks especially have great user experiences, but people wonder if they can trust them. There are government stamps and protection, but there is also just seeing the experiences of other customers and whether they can get their money out if they need to.

We often say that at Trustpilot we’re in the trust business, not the review business. People are really looking not to understand whether this sneaker or mortgage is the right one, but whether they can trust this company? Do they on average build quality products? Is my money safe?

If you compare it to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the [FSCS compensation scheme] is like the hygiene factor. Then there’s ‘is it easy to use?’ and communications around interest rates.

Trustpilot kind of shortcuts that and really favours those companies that are trustworthy, safe, protected, but also: is it a great experience?

When I was working at QuickBooks, we were new in the market and not well known. We were confident we had a better product, but how do you get people to believe you?

So one of the ways we felt was really important to establish trust was to get some reviews to good and bad and showcase them and really showcase the experiences and really sort of try and establish a foothold in the market. We didn’t have the awareness, but we could build that trust.

How can reviews factor into brand strategy overall?

First you have to get the reviews, which can be scary, because of the possibility of getting bad reviews.

We always say that a bad review is the start of a better business. People are saying these things about you, whether you’re aware of it or not. I always recommend to dip your toe in the water and get going. If you’re getting bad reviews, you need to know about that too.

We recommend that the rating shows up in results across the search journey. We want our search span to go further, so once you have 50 reviews you get a star rating. That means your Google search is converting around 10% better than it was without that.

Then you want to make sure you’ve got it on the website. What we’ve seen is that 23% is the average conversion rate increase you get with the placing of your ratings on the site to give people confidence and a really important place to build that confidence is that shopping cart moment.

We did work with Kantar to prove the performance on ads featuring a Trustpilot rating. It was a 7 point increase in terms of willingness to purchase on the TV ads.

Digital ads, again, there is really compelling data in terms of adding Trustpilot ratings. Putting the stars in and putting customer stories if you can get them into the ads goes so far in terms of improving your ROI.

I always think it’s almost like ‘do you want fries with that?’ You should always have TrustPilot involved in your marketing because it always give you an extra boost.

What drives positive reviews in financial services, and what brands are getting it right?

When you have companies like Monzo, I think they’re all held up as truly stunning customer experiences in banking.

When you have a well-engineered user experience, whether that’s software or it’s the banking app, that creates trust in the business. If you’ve got a clunky, old-fashioned, hard-to-use site, it can be concerning and drive a wedge in that trust gap.

In our software, we aim to design with trust to build trust and I think you see that in companies who spend a lot of time and effort there.

Customer service is huge – when it matters, it matters. You don’t often need to call your bank, but when you do, sometimes you’re waiting for hours and hours. If similar processes are really messy, or if you do a transfer ad it takes 48 hours, that can create trust barriers. Difficulties in getting money out, or making the process onerous can create that kind of mistrust and frustration.

Those things are important when you talk about mortgages: excess paperwork, hidden fees and charges again create a lot of animosity and frustration.

Lloyds has really improved how they communicate. They’ve done a great job in their ads and they also have a really great user experience, which is really helpful for businesses. When I look at fintech software, again, Sage has done a really good job.

I think it’s also important to have reliable offers for customers if they’re providing an offer or a product – not regularly pulling interest rates and having simple, clear, communications.

If it’s software or any of those types of fintech tools, again, it is being easy to use, easy to cancel, being able to get your data back when you’re finished.

In B2B, it’s the same. My experience is businesses buy like consumers and their thought process is the same. It’s a person making the decision at the end of the day, so they’re using the same criteria to evaluate.