How To Find And Fix The Gaps In Customer Trust

Your website’s getting traffic. Your proposals are being opened. Some customers return, others disappear without a word of explanation. How much does any of that really tell you about trust? 

Honestly, not as much as it looks like it should. Each signal is real, but each one has several possible explanations behind it. Someone might delay because their budget’s changed, not because they lack confidence in you. A repeat customer might stay simply because switching is a hassle, not because they’re particularly impressed. A glowing review tells you that one person had a good experience – it doesn’t tell you what would reassure the next customer. 

If you actually want to spot the gaps in customer trust on your own site, you need both sides: what people do, and what they actually tell you when you ask. Start with one key part of the journey and a handful of simple questions, and you’ll learn more than any dashboard will show you by itself. 

Choose a decision you want to understand 

Start where a customer makes a real commitment – submitting an enquiry, accepting a proposal, placing an order, renewing a service. Pick one journey you can realistically examine with the people who run it every day. 

Write down what happens immediately before that decision, and what the customer’s been told will happen next. Include every message, page and conversation they’ll encounter. Look for the practical questions a new customer could still quite reasonably have at that point. 

A proposal, for example, might explain the deliverables clearly while leaving the start date or the client’s own responsibilities vague. You’ll still need to ask customers whether that uncertainty actually bothers them – but this kind of customer journey review gives you a clearer place to start looking, rather than a vague sense that something’s not right. 

Ask about confidence in plain language 

In the first article in this series, we used ability, benevolence and integrity from Mayer, Davis and Schoorman’s trust model to frame customer questions. The questions below adapt that thinking into something you can actually ask someone over coffee. Think of them as a practical exercise rather than a scientifically tested scale. 

• What gave you confidence that we could handle the job? 
• What left you unsure? 
• How well did the information help you decide whether the offer met your needs? 
• Was there anything about the price, scope or responsibilities that you found unclear or confusing? 
• What did you expect to happen after taking the next step? 
• What, if anything, nearly stopped you from going ahead? 

Ask the same core questions each time, but leave room for an answer you didn’t expect. Talk to recent customers, people who hesitated, and prospects who didn’t go ahead, wherever they’re willing to share their time. If you only hear from your biggest fans, you’ll only ever see part of the picture. 

If a survey suits you better than conversations, ask people to rate a small set of clearly written statements from strongly disagree to strongly agree, with an “insufficient information” option built in. Keep the wording identical every time you use it. Use what comes back to find where the uncertainty really sits – not to bundle everything into one tidy trust score that looks impressive but tells you nothing useful. 

Pair a concern with something you can observe 

Next, connect a recurring concern to a specific part of the journey you can actually look at. The examples below are hypothetical, but they show how a team might shape the question and pick the right evidence to check. 

• Customer concern: I don’t know what happens after I enquire. 

Possible change: Explain the response process beside the enquiry form. 

What to review: Enquiry completion and comments about the next step. 

• Customer concern: I am unsure what the proposal includes. 

Possible change: Clarify scope, responsibilities and likely additional costs. 

What to review: Clarification questions and reasons for delayed decisions. 

• Customer concern: I cannot resolve a problem with the automated answer. 

Possible change: Make the available support route easy to understand. 

What to review: Unresolved issues, repeat contacts and customer feedback. 

Give whatever you change an identified owner. Marketing might own the explanation itself, while sales or service owns the process it’s explaining. Agree what the business can genuinely deliver before you promise it in the copy. 

If what you’re hearing points to a service issue rather than a messaging one, our piece on service under pressure goes into that responsibility. If people simply can’t see why your business fits their needs, our guide to checking whether positioning works is the better place to look. 

Pay attention to what happens when there’s a problem 

Gartner’s September 2026 release found that only 27% of the customers they surveyed would be willing to use a chatbot again after a bad experience with one – from the same 3,566-customer survey discussed in the previous article. It’s worth being clear here – that measures whether someone would retry the chatbot specifically, not whether they’d leave your business altogether. 

So when you’re reviewing your own journey, look closely at what happens when something goes wrong and needs putting right. Can customers explain their issue once, rather than repeating themselves? Do they know who is responsible for fixing it? Is the outcome clear to them? A friendly automated “all sorted!” message tells you nothing if the customer still has a real, unresolved problem sitting underneath it. 

Use four weeks to start learning 

1. Week one: choose your journey and bring together what you already know. 
2. Week two: talk to customers and find one recurring uncertainty. 
3. Week three: agree a specific change and make it. 
4. Week four: start reviewing the feedback and the behaviour alongside it. 

That’s a practical rhythm to get started with, not a promise that trust – or revenue – will visibly shift within a month. A long sales cycle will need a longer period of review than that. And a handful of responses is genuinely useful for spotting the right questions to ask, even while it’s still too small a sample to hang a confident, numerical conclusion on. 

Keep a note of anything else that could have affected the numbers in that time – pricing changes, new lead sources, seasonal demand, a new offer going live. If enquiries go up after you improve a page, that’s a positive sign, but it doesn’t on its own prove trust caused the increase. Go back to what customers told you directly to understand what really changed for them. 

Make confidence a shared responsibility 

The most useful thing to come out of this whole exercise is one specific question your business can now answer more clearly than it could before. It might be about the promise itself, the evidence behind it, the buying process, or what happens after the sale. Keep whatever action follows close to that question, and bring in the team that can resolve it. 

A simple place to build this in: your next proposal review. Alongside checking the price and the copy, ask directly – what evidence gives this customer confidence to take the next step? Then go and check your answer with the people you’re actually trying to help. That, in the end, is how to assess customer trust – not one big audit, but this kind of question, asked regularly, until you’ve found what’s actually missing. 

If you need someone to connect the message, the customer journey and the measurement behind it, explore our fractional CMO support. It brings those decisions into one coordinated marketing strategy.