How to Find and Fix the Gaps in Customer Trust

Part 4 of 4

Your website’s getting visits. Your proposals are being opened. Some customers come back, others disappear without a word of explanation. How much does any of that actually tell you about trust?

Honestly, not as much as it looks like it should. Each signal is real, but each one has more than one explanation behind it. Someone might delay because their budget’s changed, not because they doubt you. A repeat customer might stay simply because switching is a hassle, not because they’re impressed. A glowing review tells you that one person had a good experience – it doesn’t tell you what would reassure the next one.

If you actually want to find the gaps in customer trust on your own site, you need both halves: what people do, and what they actually tell you when you ask. Start with one important part of the journey and a handful of clear questions, and you’ll learn more than any dashboard will show you on its own.

Choose a decision you want to understand

Start where a customer makes a real commitment – submitting an enquiry, accepting a proposal, placing an order, renewing a service. Pick one journey you can actually sit down and examine with the people who run it day to day.

Write down what happens right before that decision, and what the customer’s been told will happen next. Include every message, page and conversation they’ll come across. Look for the practical questions a new customer could still reasonably have at that point.

A proposal, for example, might explain the deliverables beautifully while leaving the start date or the client’s own responsibilities vague. You’ll still need to ask customers whether that vagueness actually bothers them – but this kind of customer journey review gives you a specific place to start looking, rather than a vague sense that something’s off.

Ask about confidence in plain language

In the first article in this series, we used ability, benevolence and integrity from Mayer, Davis and Schoorman’s trust model to frame customer questions. The questions below adapt that thinking into something you can actually ask someone over coffee. Think of them as a working exercise rather than a scientifically validated scale.

• What gave you confidence that we could do the job?
• What left you unsure?
• How well did the information help you judge whether the offer suited your needs?
• Was there anything about the price, scope or responsibilities that you found unclear?
• What did you expect to happen after taking the next step?
• What, if anything, nearly stopped you from proceeding?

Ask the same core questions every time, but leave room for an answer you didn’t see coming. Talk to recent customers, people who hesitated, and prospects who didn’t go ahead, wherever they’re willing to give you their time. If you only hear from your biggest fans, you’ll only ever see half the picture.

If a survey suits you better than conversations, ask people to rate a small set of clearly worded statements from strongly disagree to strongly agree, with an “insufficient information” option built in. Keep the wording identical every time you use it. Use what comes back to find where the uncertainty actually sits – not to bundle everything into one tidy trust score that looks impressive and tells you nothing useful.

Pair a concern with something you can observe

Next, connect a recurring concern to a specific part of the journey you can actually look at. The examples below are hypothetical, but they show how a team might frame the question and pick the right evidence to check.

Customer concern	Possible change	What to review
I don’t know what happens after I enquire.	Explain the response process beside the enquiry form.	Enquiry completion and comments about the next step.
I am unsure what the proposal includes.	Clarify scope, responsibilities and likely additional costs.	Clarification questions and reasons for delayed decisions.
I cannot resolve a problem with the automated answer.	Make the available support route easy to understand.	Unresolved issues, repeat contacts and customer feedback.

Give whatever you change an actual owner. Marketing might own the explanation itself, while sales or service owns the process it’s describing. Agree what the business can genuinely deliver before you promise it in the copy.

If what you’re hearing points to a service problem rather than a messaging one, our piece on service under pressure goes into that responsibility. If people simply can’t see why your business fits their needs, our guide to checking whether positioning works is the better place to look.

Pay attention to what happens after a problem

Gartner’s September 2026 release found that only 27% of the customers they surveyed would be willing to try a chatbot again after a bad experience with one – from the same 3,566-customer survey discussed in the previous article. It’s worth being precise here – that measures whether someone would retry the chatbot specifically, not whether they’d leave your business altogether.

So when you’re reviewing your own journey, look closely at what happens when something goes wrong and needs correcting. Can customers explain their issue once, rather than repeating themselves? Do they know who actually owns fixing it? Is the outcome clear to them? A cheerful automated “all sorted!” message tells you nothing if the customer still has a real, unresolved problem sitting underneath it.

Use four weeks to start learning

1. Week one: choose your journey and pull together what you already know.
2. Week two: talk to customers and find one recurring uncertainty.
3. Week three: agree a focused change and make it.
4. Week four: start reviewing the feedback and the behaviour alongside it.

That’s a workable rhythm to get started with, not a promise that trust – or revenue – will visibly shift within a month. A long sales cycle will need a longer review period than that. And a handful of responses is genuinely useful for spotting the right questions to ask, even while it’s too small a sample to hang a confident, numerical conclusion on.

Keep a note of anything else that could have moved the numbers in that time – pricing changes, new lead sources, seasonal demand, a new offer going live. If enquiries go up after you improve a page, that’s a good sign, but it doesn’t on its own prove trust caused the increase. Go back to what customers actually told you to understand what really changed for them.

Make confidence a shared responsibility

The most useful thing to come out of this whole exercise is one specific question your business can now answer better than it could before. It might be about the promise itself, the evidence behind it, the buying process, or what happens after the sale. Keep whatever action follows close to that question, and bring in the team that can actually resolve it.

A simple place to build this in: your next proposal review. Alongside checking the price and the copy, ask outright – what evidence gives this customer confidence to take the next step? Then go and check your answer with the people you’re actually trying to help. That, in the end, is how to assess customer trust properly – not one big audit, but this kind of question, asked consistently, until you’ve found what’s actually missing.

If you need someone to connect the message, the customer journey and the measurement behind it all, explore our fractional CMO support. It brings those decisions into one coordinated marketing strategy.

About STORY22 

STORY22 is a full-service international marketing agency based in the UK. As certified StoryBrand guides, we help organisations clarify their message and apply it consistently across marketing strategy, websites, campaigns, content and customer touchpoints. 

Our approach is straightforward: strategy before tactics and clarity before complexity. 

Schedule your free 30-minute strategy call and make sure your marketing is saying exactly what you think it is.