Forrester’s report, The State Of Global Business Buyer Trust In 2024, reveals that strong trust in an organization is essential and often determines purchase intent. However, business leaders often struggle to understand how to create trust and how it influences buying decisions.
Forrester identifies seven levers of trust: accountability, competency, consistency, dependability, empathy, integrity, and transparency. Understanding these levers and how buyers rely on them helps companies win and retain customers, receive the accolades of their peers, and enjoy a strong buyer preference.
Report highlights
While consistency is a top trust lever for business buyers in Asia-Pacific, buyers in the region favour secondary trust levers like integrity and accountability more than others.
Regulated industries often value all trust levers evenly. Trust lever utility score differences for industries like financial services, insurance, and healthcare are consistently smaller than other industries, indicating a more evenly distributed spread with less extreme favourites.
Risk-tolerant buyers globally deem competence (53%), consistency (33%), and dependability (28%) critical while giving the lowest ranking to empathy (-55%). As business group size and complexity grow, so does the importance of competence. The more complex a buying scenario, the less empathy matters.
According to Forrester, trust drives several positive business outcomes. For example, nearly two-thirds of global business purchase influencers who trust a company will pay a premium to work with that company. In contrast, 83% would recommend the company to others externally.
