While establishing a business is one thing, sustaining it and building the trust of your customers, employees as well as an investor (if any) requires another level of input and this one is continual and requires you to take consistent measures. If you don’t develop a culture code that focuses on building trust, most likely you will lose your clients in no time and your employees will soon quit their jobs.

If you have started a business venture recently, or you are not too sure whether your employees and clients trust you completely, here are a few practices that could help you build trust in your business.

1. Be Honest: One of the key parts of telling the truth is staying true to your words and keeping promises. The other part is not concealing the business situation from your employees. Whether the business is going up or down, be very honest with your employees. No one’s asking you to share the profit or loss statements with your employees but what you can do is maintain an environment of honesty with your employees.
2. Focus on Customer Service: Be responsive towards customers and your clients and make them feel important. No business can thrive without customer/client satisfaction and in order to achieve that, customer support is necessary. Set up a 24 hour customer service helpline and make your business easily accessible with an always available helpline number.
3. Practice Flexibility: When it comes to gaining the trust of your employees, the most important thing is your flexibility and patience. Let go of mistakes. That doesn’t mean you let your employees cause business losses, but what you can do is address mistakes politely and help your employees grow and understand better.
4. Respect Their Time: As much important customer service is, respecting your customer and employee’s time is equally significant. Return phone calls, emails and messages on time and make sure that you are punctual when it comes to meetings with your clients or your employees.
5. Branding Matters: In addition maintaining that trusted culture code, your brand presence plays an important role in building the trust of your employees and customers. Create a professional brand image with a classic website or social media presence and maintain the aura of your business in order to put your company forward as a contemporary, result oriented business.
6. Market Your Trust: Get reviews and testimonials from your clients and market them across digital platforms to build a positive and trusted image of your business. Nothing brings you customers better than a good word of mouth. Put up your customers’ testimonials and advertise them for potential customers to see your customer satisfaction ration.
7. Rewards, Incentives & Tokens: This works for both employees and clients. Reward your employees with bonuses and incentives upon achieving their targets and be vocal about appreciating their hard work. This not only adds to employee motivation but also pushes your team to work harder. Similarly, on achieving certain milestones with your clients, (if you are a service based business), send in small tokens of appreciation to your client for putting their trust in your business.