The Customer’s Trust
A customer buys neither a product nor a service from you. What they actually have is a problem, and they are looking for people who can solve it.
An engineer’s greatest skill is, after all, being able to solve a problem with the most suitable resources. You may be a candidate for solving that problem. But it matters that the candidate is trusted.
A well-known model in organisational psychology divides trust into three parts: ability, integrity and benevolence. Ability is the belief that you can do the job. Integrity is the belief that what you say and what you do will match. Benevolence is the customer’s belief that you genuinely care about their problem and are not doing the work only for your own gain.
At first you can build this trust with your track record. Having done similar work before and kept your word reads like proof of integrity. The technical capability in your work adds further trust; that is the proof of ability. Benevolence usually shows in the first meeting. Are you listening to the person in front of you, or are you describing your own solution while they are still talking?
These may be enough for a start.
But this initial trust has one feature: it rests on signals, not on experience. The customer has not worked with you yet. They decide by looking at your references, the way you explain things, perhaps a recommendation from someone they know. So the trust you are given is really an advance.
At the second step this advance is not enough. Once you are in, there needs to be progress, because at the start you are really making a promise. People generally do not like hearing promises all the time; after a step or two they want action. They want to see a return on the advance they gave.
If you fail here, it can be hard to recover. There is a finding that comes up often in research on trust: trust is built slowly and destroyed quickly. A negative event leaves a much deeper mark than a positive event of the same weight. When you make three deliveries on time and miss the fourth, what the customer remembers is usually the fourth.
I lived through this in one part of my life; once trust is broken, nothing you do seems to work. I learned it through a very expensive experience, with heavy and irreparable consequences. Experience is, after all, the most expensive lesson in the world. Having taken that lesson through heavy and painful losses, I can say I learned it with full marks.
This is where you need to be careful. Promises that are hard or impossible to keep show themselves here.
So why are such promises made? Some are made to win the job; at the start you are selling, and talking big is tempting. Others are a well-meant error. Psychology calls this the planning fallacy: even though we know how much similar jobs overran in the past, we are still optimistic when estimating how long a new one will take. I would rather not think about how many of the jobs I called “a two-week job” actually finished in two weeks.
There is also the well-known advice: “under-promise, over-deliver.” The result of a study on this caught my attention. People value someone who keeps a promise and someone who exceeds it almost equally, but they punish someone who breaks a promise heavily. In other words, exceeding a promise does not gain as much as people think, and failing to keep one loses more than people think.
What I take from this is that whether a promise is kept matters more than how big it is. So I should promise only as much as I can keep.
In practice this means a few things for me. Making an early, small delivery instead of a big promise; a customer seeing with their own eyes that something works builds more trust than the best presentation. Talking in a way that separates what I know from what I guess; “it will be done on this date” and “I expect it to be done on this date, and there is uncertainty about this” are not the same sentence. Giving bad news early; if the customer hears about a delay from me before noticing it, trust is usually preserved. When they notice it themselves, the problem is no longer just the delay.
A customer buys neither a product nor a service from you. They buy confidence that their problem will be solved. You first earn that trust with your track record; after that you have to earn it again with every small promise you keep.