The Truth About Trust in Business: How to Enrich the Bottom Line, Improve Retention, and Build Valuable Relationships for Success

Vanessa Hall
Emerald Book Company (2009)
ISBN 9781934572177
Reviewed by Irene Watson for Reader Views (6/09)


Every business owner has one question to answer: Can you be trusted?   And, on the other side, consumers ask: Who can I trust?  With the hardships many people are having during the economic downturn, trust becomes a big issue for many.  But, the truth of the matter is, one must trust themselves first before they can gain trust of others.

Vanessa Hall, in “The Truth About Trust in Business,” explains that from the workshops she presents she tallied the most common answers to her exercise of asking her participants to think of a person in their life they trust the most. The answers were: honest, genuine, has integrity, displays selflessness, and does what they say they will do.  I’m sure we all have the same picture of a trusting business.  However, as business people, do we portray these attributes to our customers?  

Hall’s book, which is more of a workbook than a narrative, helps us understand the promises our customers expect as well as their needs and wants.  She also explains, from the customer’s perspective, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.  As well, Hall talks about the types of trust and how people build trust.  She explains blind trust, skeptical trust, situational trust, and, referred trust. As business owners we certainly want to capture customers that have referred trust - the word-of-mouth trust.  We also want to retain our customers by ensuring trust is not broken.

“The Truth About Trust in Business” is a guidebook that shows us how to become more trustworthy and build the trust through the brand of our businesses.  It also gives us valuable tools to determine for ourselves how trustworthy we are in our own business.  Vanessa Hall gives a realistic model to reinforce our own core principles and doctrines, not only in our business but in our own lives.  I believe this book should be used in the curriculum of all business schools.

Make comment on weblog