Building Better Trust Online

from the trust-me dept

For years, people have discussed the importance of better trust metrics in an always-on online world. Now, MIT and Intel think they've come up with a "methodology" to improve trust in e-commerce offerings. They list out eight different things, which basically boil down to: have really good products and trust your customer. The first part is obvious, and the second is basically suggesting that trust begets trust. This is an important lesson to learn, as many companies seem to have gone in the opposite direction, by trusting their customers even less in the online world. This is seen in overly burdensome practices online where users are treated as guilty until they prove their innocence -- and even then, they're not to be trusted to do anything with the products they've purchased other than exactly what the original company thinks they should do. This doesn't build up trust, but anger and resentment.
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  1. identicon
    Viagra, 16 Sep 2004 @ 12:37pm

    Trusting Companies

    I don't think that trust has anything to do with companies trusting their customers. Everyone realizes that there are unscrupulous people out there trying to chisel as much as they can out of everyone else, so when companies don't automatically trust someone, this isn't necessarily a representation of how they treat their customers.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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