ESWC06: Trust, Tony Edgecombe

Tony Edgecombe's (Frogmore CS) presentation was about improving or establishing trust with your potential customers. If visitors to your site don't trust you, they won't buy. Trust will spread, but so will mis-trust, how do you establish trust:-

• Support. Your support will be tested. If you have a phone number, it won't be unusual for someone to call just to make sure you exist. They might send emails with trivial questions, Make sure you respond in a timely and appropriate way.
• Forums. If you have one, make sure every question has an answer, don't ignore any posts. Empty forums are never a good thing, so try to seed the forum with your announcements, relevant blog posts, and FAQs. [the possibility of seeding a forum with false names did come up, but it was in a more anecdotal sense than a strong recommendation. I wouldn't feel right doing that, especially when we're talking about trust!]
• Refunds. Have a clear policy. Joel's "amazingly happy" refunds policy was used as a good example of establishing trust in this way. Refund policies don't cost as much as you might think.
• Associates. Be careful who you partner with, and who you link to. Sites like Mcafee site advisor are analysing the web and providing vital trust information to web visitors.
• Honesty. Be honest and open about your pricing, don't hide it. Don't automatically add extras to the order. Don't phone home unnecessarily, and don't require an email address to download your trial.
• Authenticode. Sign your code.
• Competence. Become a resource for your customers, learn the domain and write useful articles on relevant issues.
• Listen. Listen to your customers and always act in their best interests.

In the Q&A, there was a comment about Backup CDs. There was some discussion about auto-selecting the backup CD option in the purchase page, the contrary experience from the audience claimed to sell more by auto-checking, and had yet to have a single complaint.

There was also some follow up discussion on refund policies, with some audience members worrying that it would be abused. Tony's opinion was that this was rare, and it was backed up by others. Two useful suggestions: A longer refund period brought fewer refund requests, as the user didn't feel pressured to decide whether to ask for a refund; Also, having a refund form on the website was recommended [I think by Gary Elfring], which made clear the legal position on abuse of the policy, and which had to be completed and signed to apply for a refund.

Tags: micro isv shareware eswc06 tony edgecombe