Use Technology Responsibly to Build Trust

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Explain how organizations have historically used trust to build relationships.
• Describe best practices for using technology to scale relationships.

Trust Is the Core

From small-town markets and shops to large-scale trade fairs in medieval and pioneer times, relationships have historically played a key role in helping organizations, big and small, thrive. Relationships help leaders better understand market needs and build brand and personal loyalty through trust—a key ingredient to building quality relationships.

Historically, organizations have built trust through predictability. Business owners established this by consistently providing a quality product or service, such as home and office goods, delivery, and maintenance services. Yet over the years, as more organizations move into digital commerce, it’s been vital for them to find ways to build trust in this new landscape, including through technology.

A significant way organizations maintain trust in the digital age is through data security—the practice of protecting digital information, including customer data, from unauthorized access, corruption, or theft. And, just as in historical times, organizations can also build customer trust by consistently providing quality services or products.

To keep pace with current customer expectations and stand out from competitors, organizations also create trusting, lasting relationships with customers and society by exemplifying their core values, internally and externally. For example, if an organization values customer success or experience, it’s important to demonstrate this internally and externally. This could mean setting up a customer forum to receive feedback and then actively considering this feedback during their product or service design. If organizations don’t live their values, they risk losing trust with customers and the general public.

Losing customer trust is something no organization wants. But this can happen when organizations don’t consistently deliver quality in their products and services or demonstrate transparency in how they’re living their core values. In fact, technologies such as blockchain—a shared and fixed record that facilitates the process of documenting transactions and tracking assets in a business network—were created partly as a reaction to a loss of trust in individual organizations. When customers and the public lose trust, they may not only take their business elsewhere but invest in innovation to rebuild trust.

Next, let’s explore why it’s key for organizations to use technology responsibly while scaling relationships to maintain and enhance customer trust.

The Trade-offs in Scaling Relationships

It's easy to get excited about technology with new trends regularly emerging, like advancements in AI or virtual reality (VR). For example, AI-supported autonomous vehicles (AVs)—cars that accelerate, brake, and turn on their own—hold the potential to transform the way we relate to one another and the economy. The AV uses AI to quickly process and interpret the large amounts of data generated by the car’s cameras and sensors and helps improve fuel efficiency and safety.

Yet trade-offs come with this exciting new opportunity, including its impact on individuals and communities and the associated relationships within these contexts. For example, we might be trading away the experience and fun of driving on a scenic road with a friend. Or we may forgo the ability to earn income as a rideshare driver to contribute to goals such as a college fund or family vacation.

There are also potential financial and legal costs associated with releasing AVs on public roads, including new insurance regulations and other impacts on taxpayers, which can all be affected by this advancement. In addition, communities and individuals may have trust issues with AVs or reservations about how they might undermine public transit systems.

On the other hand, those with pandemic-related concerns may be hesitant around ride-sharing services in general. In which case, an AV might help quell this by taking a human driver out of the mix, while still evoking some of the concerns we've covered.

It's a complicated equation. And it’s important to be intentional about using technology to scale relationships, including implementing best practices to guide your organization’s use of technology for scale.

Implement Best Practices for Scaling Relationships

Best practices for scaling relationships represent well-founded research and lived experiences from experts on how to make the most of technology to amplify, increase efficiency, and satisfy the complexity of modern business relationships. When organizations don’t follow best practices, they risk losing trust with customers and the public and can also cause serious harm.

One example of an organization’s innovation causing harm is when a major corporation’s customer analytics engine accurately predicted a teenage customer’s pregnancy and alerted her parents via marketing before she told them about it. Another example is when a major corporation’s AI-enabled recruitment tool broadly recommended only men for positions.

To make sure organizations avoid these types of serious consequences, it’s key to:

• Recognize that there’s not a one-size-fits-all solution.
• Take the time to engage with customers and end-users.
• Understand that sentiment is an integral part of building relationships.

Let’s explore each of these points further.

No One Solution

As you learned in the AV example, people have unique ways of engaging with a product or service and are affected differently. Using technology to scale relationships must match this, relying on different kinds of technologies to provide varied solutions based on user and community needs.

Take the Time to Engage 

When scaling relationships with technology, it’s vital to understand how users interact with your product or service. This is why it’s essential to talk to customers and end-users to understand their pain points and needs. Doing this helps you better picture the features and functionality needed to help improve how they relate to the product or service and the affected relationships or interactions.

It’s also key to meet customers where they are and offer them value for engaging with your organization through resources like customer forums and learning platforms. This helps customers and end-users better understand your product or service to optimize their experiences and continue to cultivate a relationship with them.

It’s also important to note that using technology to scale can decrease direct interaction with customers. This means it’s vital for organizations to intentionally find other ways to stay in touch with market needs and changes.

Sentiment Is Important 

One of the greatest challenges for using technology to scale relationships is tech’s limited ability to understand nuance in human emotions and reactions. Human sentiment is an important part of building relationships. Even when your organization is technologically advanced and smart, customers and end-users still operate from a human perspective, complete with feelings and feedback they’ll want to share with you. Users are nuanced and diverse, and organizations must ensure that they’re adapting to those differences in authentic and sustainable ways.

Next, we explore how organizations can use design systems to scale their operations and relationships.

Resources

• Trailhead: Responsible Creation of Artificial Intelligence
• Trailhead: Values-Driven Design
• Trailhead: Accountability in Design (See Plan a Consequence Scanning Workshop unit)