Building Trust

Trust, like the core value buzzwords of “honesty” and “integrity”, gets thrown around quite a bit in corporate boardrooms and advertising.  There is strong reasoning for this as ultimately, we are all looking for trust in our relationships.  When discussing this internally at Townley Kenton, we realized that trust is really the intersection of honesty and accountability at some point during a relationship.  Without going too far down the rabbit hole of whether trust is “earned” or “given” (have fun googling that!), we wanted to share our perspective in the context of standing behind our clients.

You could spend decades earning trust by doing the right thing, however, until someone gives you their trust, the relationship does not actually HAVE trust.  In some cases, people will trust a business immediately based on the endorsement of a friend or colleague.  Other times, it will take years of witnessing an organization doing the right things before the trust is fully built.  In either case, if trust is broken it is hard to regain.

Does this mean we have to be perfect to maintain trust?  We hope not.  Admittedly, in our 78 years, we have made mistakes.  We are also certain that more mistakes will be made in the years to come.  When dealing with humans, it is inevitable.

So how do we build and maintain trust?  In each of these circumstances, we must continue to do all we can to advocate for our clients like family.  If we make a mistake, we will own it.  If we feel someone is being mistreated by a carrier, we will advocate on their behalf to balance the scale.  We will listen.  We will BE accountable.  We will do what we know is right in each circumstance and we will give our best effort.  Our actions will never be perfect, but we can try.