“Trust is the first step to love.”
- Munshi Premchand
This is the first of a multi-part series that I'm calling 'Building Trust'.
The series is meant to provide resources and inspiration for operators responsible for high risk innovation or safety and enforcement in a community. An operator is someone involved with the execution of initiatives or ongoing operations. Your function can vary - policy, operations, analytics, marketing, product, engineering, design, or even legal. The goal is singular: earning the trust of your customers and community by ensuring their safety and improving their overall well being.
What we’re going to cover:
Why I’m writing this
What products and services need trust
You can’t have trust without safety
Why you should be building trust
Setting the right goals
The series is inspired by my experiences founding safety technology at Lyft, founding Patronus to modernize 911 (acquired by RapidSOS), leading Snug, and working with local governments to apply technology.
Why am I writing this?
Technology and trust are increasingly intersecting with more and more organizations wrestling with it. But I don’t see many resources for how to approach this. There's a lot of info on growth, design thinking, product management, performance marketing, agile engineering etc. but not trust & safety. It’s clearly important - just look at the challenge of going to space, bringing self driving cars to market, or even moderating a community like Clubhouse (or the president!). With this series, I want to start that conversation.
What products or services need trust?
Every service and relationship can benefit from trust. But that's too broad.
I'll propose a definition. Any service that introduces the possibility of harmful risk to their users needs to build trust. For example, you can be a victim of crime by living in a particular city. Living in that city is the act of "using" it, and the risk is being subject to crime. At a certain level of crime, it's no longer worth living in that city or "using it".
You should be proactively thinking about building trust if any of the following apply to your product or service:
You are in a regulated industry (example: Airlines)
You have a growing community that's interacting in nascent ways that can be harmful to one another (example: Social Media, games, or cities)
Product failure causes significant harm (example: housing)
You can’t have trust without safety
When a safety issue occurs it can affect a few people acutely, but the loss of trust is felt by a much wider pool. Crime in a neighborhood is an example of this. The crime may only physically affect one person, but the entire neighborhood feels a sense of shock. Safety is a key factor in building trust.
Safety has two dimensions: the objective and the psychological. Nothing bad should happen to someone while using the service, and that’s where it all starts. But, true safety is also contingent on feeling safe.
The objective dimension of safety is really part of your service’s reliable performance. If your product fails to be safe, it’s failing. Period. For example, a car that crashes is a car that’s not successfully transporting someone.
The psychological part of safety is about how someone feels. The objective dimension is certainly an input into that, but it’s not the only one. It also includes messaging, the environment around the experience, and someone’s own personal background. There’s a lot of factors.
Safeguards are the features, systems, and processes that both help someone feel safe and also further reliable performance. Instant Pot’s safety features are a great example of safeguards. The safety features keep the pressure cooker within safe operating range. But they also give people comfort to even try using the product. This is important considering the previous stigma with pressure cookers.
The importance of reliability
Trust is impacted by more than safety. Reliability is also a big factor. While someone needs to feel safe to try your service, you also need to consistently deliver. People are using your service because they expect a consistent benefit. The reward needs to be worth the risk.
For example, people use Amazon for compelling pricing, an incredible selection of goods to buy, and quick delivery. That benefit makes their life better. But if delivery times suddenly get way worse, that degrades the experience and disrupts the customer’s life. It burns customer trust because something they were used to, and depended on, is failing them.
Customers will ultimately come to depend on a great, compelling product that upgrades their life. Remember though, like Uncle Ben from Spiderman says, “With great power comes great responsibility.”
Why should you build trust?
Hopefully this is obvious, but it’s worth breaking down why Trust & Safety is an area to proactively invest in.
First and foremost, it’s the ethically right thing to do. If you have safety incidents happening and you’re not proactively trying to improve upon them, it’s wrong. You’re consciously creating risk for people and doing nothing about it.
Trust & Safety will affect your growth and brand. If people feel safe to use your service, they will try it. If they don’t, they won’t. A perfect example of this is Chipotle’s E.Coli crisis of 2015.
When 400 people got sick from E.Coli in 2015, Chipotle’s revenue fell more than 15% and still hadn’t recovered two years later. That painfully negative experience of hundreds caused millions to stop eating there and a loss of billions in revenue. Chipotle ultimately recovered but it involved a big ongoing investment in safety as well as the founder being replaced by a new CEO.
Trust & Safety incidents can be costly. If something goes wrong, such as a car collision, there is often an insurance settlement and legal involvement. These are expensive. Uber’s insurance costs were estimated in 2019 to be 20% of revenue for its North American operations.
Trust & Safety incidents can cause challenging regulatory requirements. The government’s responsibility is to provide life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If there are disproportionate safety incidents occurring, the government has a responsibility to intervene. However, the government doesn’t know your service as well as you do. And accordingly they can put onerous requirements in place that may meet safety needs but are restrictive to your business and compromise the experience. Until recently, self-driving cars still had to have a driver’s steering wheel in the vehicle - even though there isn’t supposed to be a human driver.
Robinhood’s recent difficulties really demonstrate all of these.
Not offering fast access to customer support is certainly unethical when you’re handling the savings of millions of people. Alex Kearns committed suicide because of a bug and he couldn’t reach customer support to understand what happened.
Robinhood’s brand has taken a big step back with recent controversies and many customers have abandoned it for competitors (though active users are still increasing). The story of congressman Casten calling robinhood support and getting a canned 12 second auto response was very widely shared. Of note: it’s shocking that is the support experience even 8 months after Kearns’ suicide.
Robinhood was facing 90 class action lawsuits as of February 17th, 2021.
FINRA has stated they are planning to step up oversight. The senate is exploring new regulation after the Robinhood/Gamestop saga. Additionally, Robinhood got particularly grilled by Congress.
All of this being said, Robinhood’s user counts seem to still be growing and they were able to raise $3 Billion within a week. The company seems to have made it through the crisis, though we don’t know the extent of damage, and they continue to make changes to prepare for the future.
Setting the right goals
You've decided you need to build trust. You want to do better for your community and give them a safer and more reliable experience.
Let's talk about goals. Most people think the goal is zero incidents, but that’s not quite right. It's a great, idealistic goal, but it's incomplete.
The goal is for people to feel safe to enjoy what you're offering. That means the customers know you’re proactively designing for safety. There are processes and tools in place to protect the customer, and also help is available if something goes wrong. With that comfort, they will be free to use what you’re providing.
Let me give you an example from transportation.
Tesla, Lyft, and Uber could ensure a zero percent collision rate… by not offering any transportation services. Idealistic goal, hit! But that has all sorts of other problems. Without transportation, people can't see their loved ones, get to work, get emergency medical treatment, or even get food. They would never have a chance of a collision but many other aspects of their life would be certainly worse. That's why the right goal is for people to trust Tesla, Lyft, and Uber so that they feel safe to enjoy that form of transportation.
For Airbnb, it's feeling safe to enjoy staying in someone else's home.
For Chipotle, it's feeling safe to eat that awesome burrito.
For a city like Oakland, it's feeling safe to enjoy the city.
For Waymo, it’s feeling safe to get into an autonomous vehicle.
For the world, it's feeling safe to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Building trust will be an ongoing effort in your organization. You want to keep earning trust, and improving, as you keep providing your service.
Let’s go deeper
I’m going to dig deeper into Building Trust in upcoming posts. Here’s some of the topics I will be digging into:
What to do if you’re the first hire in a safety area
How to make decisions when each option presents risk
Setting and enforcing standards for community behavior and moderation
Building a team to build trust
Designing Habits for safe behavior
Safety, Trust & Growth
Ping me if there’s other topics you would like me to explore!
Preet